It wasn’t all that long ago it felt like legendary slashers were having a huge revival on the big screen. “Halloween” (2018) was a smash hit that kicked off a whole new trilogy for Michael Myers. “Child’s Play” got a remake in 2019. Netflix even gave “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” an extremely bloody legacy sequel in 2022. Now, though? Leatherface, as well as several other slasher icons, are making the jump to the small screen.
Last summer, it was revealed that several parties were in the mix for the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” rights. The dust has firmly settled, and A24 has emerged as the winner. It’s wasting no time getting to work bringing Leatherface back, either. According to Deadline, JT Mollner (“Strange Darling”) is heading up a “Texas Chainsaw” TV show for A24, with Glen Powell (“The Running Man”) also producing. Plot details are under wraps and no network or streamer is attached yet but, interestingly enough, the studio is also said to have a movie in the works in addition to the series.
In any case, it means yet another famed slasher is headed to TV. Not only is this happening as we speak, but A24 is also bringing “Crystal Lake” to Peacock based on the “Friday the 13th” franchise. But decades before Leatherface and Jason Voorhees made their mark on the world of television, another legendary slasher had a TV show. The killer in question was none other than Freddy Krueger, and the show was “Freddy’s Nightmares.”
Freddy’s Nightmares brought Freddy Krueger to the small screen
Lasting for two seasons released from 1988-1990, “Freddy’s Nightmares,” aka “A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series,” came at the height of Freddy Krueger’s popularity. Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” became a huge hit in 1984 and took off like a rocket from there.
The show wasn’t Freddy-centric, but Robert Englund did reprise his role to host it, not unlike the Crypt Keeper from “Tales from the Crypt.” The pilot episode was actually directed by Tobe Hooper, of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” fame, which served as an origin story for Krueger. Meanwhile, the series itself was an anthology focusing on different spooky tales in the town of Springwood, Ohio (more specifically, on Elm Street). A young Brad Pitt even starred in an episode of “Freddy’s Nightmares.”
“I did that show because they gave me my directing guild card. I directed several episodes, so that’s how they lured me onto it,” Englund explained in a 2014 interview with Daily Dread. The actor also revealed that they also got into some trouble because the show was intended to air late at night, but that’s not how it shook out:
“We were told we were going to be a late night TV series, but in fact we were syndicated early evening in many markets. We got in a lot of trouble because our show is really nasty and violent, so that hurt us a little bit, and we only made it to 44 shows.”
The whole thing was, overall, a bit strange, as it had next to nothing to do with the “Nightmare” movies, save for the pilot, but was clearly capitalizing on Freddy’s popularity at the time. It didn’t need Freddy, yet it only existed because of him, really.
Slashers on TV are all the rage lately
The notion of bringing a big slasher movie franchise to TV was, at the time, a novel idea. Even though it didn’t last long, and even though “Freddy’s Nightmares” isn’t ranked up there with the likes of “The Twilight Zone” in terms of all-time great horror anthologies, it was something Freddy Krueger had that his other contemporaries in his chosen horror sub-genre didn’t have for a long time.
That has very much changed in recent years, though. Syfy and USA Network brought “Chucky” to TV for three seasons, with the show saying farewell after season 3 wrapped up in 2024. The difference, in this case, was that the series was directly connected to the canon of the “Chucky” movies, which still remains unique amongst this new film-to-TV slasher icon pipeline. Miramax also landed the TV rights to the “Halloween” franchise in 2023, but updates on that project have since been few and far between.
Even MTV aired three seasons of a “Scream” TV show starring Willa Fitzgerald from 2015-2019, although that was also largely disconnected from the movies. Now, Leatherface will soon be joining the growing list of slashers who are making the jump from full-length features to episodic adventures.
What shape that takes still remains to be seen, but “Chucky” proved this can be done while also satisfying fans along the way. “Freddy’s Nightmares,” if nothing else, took a rather unique path in bringing that franchise to a new medium. It’s admittedly hard to imagine Leatherface hosting a horror anthology series set in Texas, so we can safely assume A24 will take a different approach.
