Robert Englund Calls on Freddy vs. Jason Director to Make Horror Comeback

Bride of Chucky director Ronny Yu hasn’t helmed a full feature film since Saving General Yang back in 2013, but A Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund would love to see him make a horror comeback.

Englund, who reprised the role of iconic boogeyman Freddy Krueger in Yu’s 2003 horror crossover hit Freddy vs. Jason, thinks it’s about time the beloved director returned to bless the genre with his gifts.

“I’d really love to see something new from Ronny Yu,” Englund told Dread Central. “Not only did he make Freddy vs. Jason work, but I remember being at a film festival in France years ago, sitting with John Landis at nine in the morning, sipping those big bowl cups of French coffee, watching Bride of Chucky. Ronny has such a gift for that edgy, graphic-novel-style horror.”

75-year-old Yu is often thought to have retired from filmmaking, a misconception he’s quashed before. In 2022, he said he’d be interested in returning to work on another Chucky project, and a year later in an interview with That Phat Samurai, Yu revealed he was working on a new sci-fi movie and confirmed he’d “never retire,” adding, “I’m lazy.”

“Lazy” certainly isn’t the first word that comes to mind when looking at Yu’s long career. Born in Hong Kong in 1950, Yu battled childhood polio, which he said was a key influence on his imagination and why he eventually turned to cinema, although it was a while before he got there. He initially pursued business studies in the U.S. before he moved into filmmaking in Hong Kong during the late 1970s.

Over the next decade or so, Yu went on to establish himself in the Hong Kong film scene, directing films like The Servant and The Occupant, but in 1993, he grabbed international recognition with films like The Bride with White Hair and made the move to bigger Hollywood budgets with his Chucky and Friday the 13th franchise installments.

Yu may have dabbled in horror, but his work has covered many genres, including martial arts. 2006 Jet Li vehicle Fearless was the highest-grossing Hong Kong film of that year, and having already worked with Samuel L. Jackson on The 51st State, he was set to team up with him again for Snakes on a Plane. Yu was replaced before filming began and has spoken about how different the movie would have been, claiming that he even planned to kill off Jackson’s character in a Jaws-esque shock. Perhaps he never saw Deep Blue Sea.

While Yu may or may not return to the horror genre in the future, we’re with Englund here – we’d love to see it.