The director of Lights Out tackling the ominous presence of Freddy Krueger? That’s certainly something that would grab our attention!

David F. Sandberg is rapidly making a name for himself in the horror genre and beyond, having helmed the brilliant Lights Out and the in-cinemas-now Annabelle: Creation, not to mention being signed up to direct Warner Brothers’ Shazam! movie as part of the DC Extended Universe. While obviously nothing concrete, Sandberg has now been talking about some franchises that’d be interested in tackling.

Speaking on a Reddit thread about Annabelle: Creation, the director was asked about existing properties he’d like to work on. Sandberg replied, “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about what fun franchises New Line has like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Critters. Might be fun if you took something like that in a different direction from previous installments. Like instead of remaking Nightmare you do some continuation of it in the same world kind of things.”

New Line Cinema, of course, is behind Annabelle and the entire shared Conjuring-verse as a whole. And interestingly, not only is New Line famously ‘the house that Freddy built’, but they’ve actually got a new Nightmare movie in the early stages of development right now.

Following the awful Jacke Earle Haley-starring A Nightmare on Elm Street remake, earlier this year saw it revealed that New Line had begun to work on another remake/reboot/reimagining for the franchise. Not only that, but David Leslie Johnson is currently penning the screenplay for the studio. For those not aware, Johnson wrote The Conjuring 2 and is also writing The Conjuring 3 – two movies that obviously exist in the same cinematic realm as Sandberg’s Annabelle: Creation. So, one of the key writing figures of this shared world writing a new A Nightmare on Elm Street? It would seem like a natural fit to drop in the director of Annabelle: Creation to the project – even more-so given how the eerie Diana from Sandberg’s Lights Out reminded many of Freddy Krueger at times.

Of course, take all of this with a pinch of salt for now until anything more official comes along. If you ask us, though, while we’re maybe not all that excited about the prospect of rehashing Freddy yet again, bringing in somebody like David F. Sandberg is certainly one way to raise out interest levels, particularly with the intriguing prospect of doing some sort of continuation from the Robert Englund-headlined movies but with a different spin.

As ever, expect more on all of this if and when it develops.