Back in 2008-09 Bloody Disgusting had learned exclusively that French filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, hot off the release of their slasher Inside, were in talks to remake A Nightmare On Elm Street for Platinum Dunes and New Line Cinema. They unfortunately went with music video director Samuel Bayer who butchered Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer’s phenomenal screenplay (seriously, it was bomb).

We caught up with the duo to talk about their upcoming French slasher, Among the Living, now out in the UK. We were pretty stoked to get a response when we inquired as to what their Elm Street pitch was.

“Our idea of a good remake is to have a new vision on the same thematics,” they told Bloody Disgusting in our exclusive interview. “Here it was to really use the fact that Krueger is a child molester. So the idea was to have a twisted version of the ‘Goonies’ with a bunch of kids being stalked. We thought it would have been great for a remake to switch the teenagers of the original with real kids. Beside childhood is the moment in life when you are truly and deeply frightened by nightmares, when you’re not able to see the difference between reality and dreams…”

I think our genre, in general, has a problem with age. The joke is always that adults are playing teens, which is why movies like The Goonies are so bold. Can you imagine the impact of having Freddy stalk and murder real children? Fuck, man, that’s scary shit. At least the duo got to play with idea in Among the Living, out now in the UK.

Maury and Bustillo eventually went on to director the lucid french horror Livide, with their Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, Leatherface, arriving later this year. We hear it’s absolutely insane!