Josh Boone Says New Mutants Was Inspired By Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors

Josh Boone has named his filmic influences for the upcoming New Mutants film, and they include a horror classic in Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors. Boone spoke with Collider way back in 2017 when the film was in production, and the site has released the report just this week. Some highlights are below:

On the film’s influences: “I’d say biggest influences for this movie were [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, and Dream Warriors. I do love Dream Warriors, I loved the first [Nightmare on Elm Street] as well, but this is very much a rubber reality horror movie for the first about 75% of the movie and then it becomes something else.”

On avoiding the tropes of superhero films: “I still feel like when you watch most comic book movies, your eyes glaze over in the last 40 minutes where you’re like, ‘Okay they’re going to fight for 40 minutes or whatever.’ We’ve tried to limit that stuff, but make that stuff be really important and impactful where there’s not a lot of redundancies with all the visual effects and all the action stuff, just to keep it moving quick and have time for as much character stuff as we can.”

On the film’s tone and rating: “It’s a supernatural horror movie. I’d say this is pushed as far as you could push a PG-13, as far as Dark Knight was pushed or whatever with Joker putting somebody’s head in a pencil and all that, or Two-Face’s face, we’ve pushed stuff as far as we could push it.”

The long-delayed movie is finally set to see release on April 3rd.