“Nightmare on Elm Street” Star Says Jamie Lee Curtis, Neve Campbell Returning to Horror 'Is Such Good News' (Exclusive)

Heather Langenkamp also tells PEOPLE she's open to reprising her role as Nancy Thompson in a legacy sequel

When A Nightmare on Elm Street, written and directed by the late Wes Craven and starring Heather Langenkamp, was first released in theaters in 1984, a "slasher" was still a new concept in the horror genre — and the word "franchise" to describe the series of sequels was still a burgeoning concept.

Now, 40 years later, legacy sequels — series installments that pay homage to the first film with continued storylines and returning characters — are a huge hit, with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode in a trilogy of modern Halloween sequels, Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox continuing their respective runs as Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers in Scream (2000) and the upcoming Scream 7 and Ellen Burstyn returning as Chris MacNeil in 2023's The Exorcist: Believer.

For Langenkamp, who has become one of horror's most iconic scream queens with roles in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, American Horror Story: Freak Show as well as director Mike Flanagan's The Midnight Club, Curtis and Campbell's return to their franchises is a good thing. "I think it's such good news," she exclusively tells PEOPLE.

Related: Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘Halloween’ Through the Years

"It's really good news that we all can look forward to careers where we can still be in the horror genre and have lots of success and even play the character that people love us," adds Langenkamp, who was 20 when Nightmare first introduced audiences her final girl Nancy Thompson and killer Freddy Krueger (first originated by Robert Englund), who terrorizes high school teens in their dreams.

"It's even better because there's always, as we grow, we think of new ideas of how that character would be or how they would face challenges in their lives."

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"Once you've played such a strong character, such as Sidney or Laurie, that character really never leaves you," the actress, now 60, continues, explaining that "young actors often put most of what they already are into their parts," and then as one gets older, "you still feel a lot like them."

Langenkamp adds, "I don't know about those other ladies, but I certainly look to Nancy Thompson for personal inspiration at times."

Langenkamp says that she's open to returning to the Nightmare franchise in a legacy sequel picking up on Nancy's continued encounters with Krueger decades after the first installment. "I think anybody who's involved in that project would know that I, of course, would be very interested in it," she says, noting that she played the role "when I was 18. I played her when I was 25, and I played her again when I was about 30."

"I'm 60 this summer, so I think it would be really cool to see Nancy as a grown woman who's been through a lot in life," the OG Nightmare star says. "I don't know what kind of scenario they would plan, but I know that it's possible."

While she clarifies there haven't been any official conversations with anyone about a new installment, the actress says, "I would hope that there would be conversations taking place in Hollywood that involved Nancy Thompson." (Flanagan recently gave fans some hope in that department when wistfully replying to a tweet about Freddy.)

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Until a return to Nightmare happens, Langenkamp will next be seen on-screen in The Life of Chuck, which reunites her with Flanagan, who, much like Craven, has built a career helming a number horror projects. The cast is led by Tom Hiddleston and features a number of genre stars, like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Harvey Guillén, ​Matthew Lillard, Mark Hamill, Rahul Kohli and Kate Siegel.

The upcoming film is an adaptation of a 2020 Stephen King novella that "tries to solve the universal mystery of just kind of what happens in our lives when maybe we're getting to the end of it," Langenkamp says, describing the project as a quickly shot "low-budget movie."

Related: Neve Campbell 'Excited to Get Back in' Her Scream Role, 'Grateful' Studio Listened to Her Pay Concerns (Exclusive)

"I had one scene," she says of her undisclosed part, revealing that she plays "a woman that I hope people think is very different from anything that I've ever done."

The actress also says, "There are so many scenes I wish I could have been in because they are the kind of things that every actor dreams of being in, and everyone will know what they are when the movie comes out." She adds, "I was very jealous of some of my costars for having these really crazy scenes to be in."

When asked if the ensemble's roots in the horror genre was intentional, Langenkamp says, "I do believe that because that's what [Flanagan] loves. Those are the actors that he really responds to because he has just admired some of the work from forever ago." She adds that Flanagan "is such a well-versed human being in all things horror. Those are people he's grown up with."

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