A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 director Jack Sholder tweaked the 4K version to be “the same, except it’s better”

Earlier this year, we heard that A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge director Jack Sholder was working on a 4K remaster of his movie. Now that Warner Bros. / New Line Cinema have confirmed that a Nightmare on Elm Street franchise box set will be released on September 30th, Sholder has talked to our friends at Bloody Disgusting about his endeavor to make sure the 4K version of Freddy’s Revenge would be “basically the same” as the original version of the film, “except it’s better.”

Sholder said the 4K remaster “looks gorgeous. It’s beautifully photographed, and all of that comes out. I was able to do a bunch of little tweaks and corrections that were impossible to do when you were just on film. It’s basically the same, except it’s better. There are little, minor tweaks. For instance, in the opening scene with the bus ride, one of the concepts we had was that the front of the bus would have a kind of a demonic face to it, a little bit like The Cars That Ate Paris. So they put some tusks on it, and there was supposed to be smoke coming out of the front of this thing — but it never really worked right. It was really lame. Now I was able to just enhance the smoke a little bit. There were little things like that where I could just go in and tweak, and probably no one will even notice it. But it’s an accumulation of tiny little details that I think make it better.” He admitted that there were moments when he almost got carried away, wanting to make changes. “There was one point where I wanted to make this whole scene look a little different, and the Warner Bros. executive who was sitting there said, ‘Jack, don’t do that. Keep it the way it was originally.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I completely accept that. This is the film we made in 1984.’ It was one of the sequences in the house that I wanted to make a little bit darker, a little bit spookier. You know, films made in 2025 look different from films made in the ’80s. There’s a different kind of aesthetic. You could go through and redo some of the special effects — they’re a little hokey — and digitally fix them up. But that’s part of the charm. It’s a handmade product. It means a human being worked on it, and human beings are not perfect.” I’m glad the executive was there to talk him out of trying to make a scene look more modern, because in my opinion, ’80s horror tended to look a lot better than most modern horror does. I’m not into today’s “super dark” aesthetic at all.

As for how the 4K UHD sounds, Sholder said, “Putting the original mono mix into Dolby Atmos blew my mind. I was able to hear things that I’d never heard. It made me look like a much better filmmaker. We were able to go in and raise certain balances. We were originally mixing to a mono track, and optical tracks are pretty good but they had certain limitations. I was always told, ‘No, you can’t make that any louder or you have to make something else softer.’ But in Atmos you could hear everything. I was watching the sequence with the demonic parakeet. How do you make a scene with a demonic parakeet any good? We did the best we could. And now I’m watching it like, ‘Wow, this is like The Birds! This is really good.’ Then I played it with the original track and it was, you know, so-so. That’s how much difference good sound makes.“

Directed by Sholder from a screenplay by David Chaskin, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge has the following synopsis: Jesse Walsh moves with his family into the home of the lone survivor from a series of attacks by dream-stalking monster Freddy Krueger. There, Jesse is bedeviled by nightmares and inexplicably violent impulses. It turns out Freddy needs a host body to carry out his gruesome vendetta against the youth of Springwood, Ohio. While Freddy gains influence, Jesse and his girlfriend, Lisa, race against the clock trying to figure out what’s going on. The film stars Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Clu Gulager, Hope Lange, Christie Clark, Marshall Bell, and Sydney Walsh, with Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger.

Are you looking forward to watching Jack Sholder’s A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge on 4K UHD? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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