A Nightmare on Elm Street: 30 years of Freddy!
According to the films, Freddy Krueger was conceived in a mental hospital when a nurse was accidentally locked in a wing with the asylum’s most violently insane patients. Freddy was the by-product of the multiple rapes the nurse endured, making him literally the bastard son of a thousand maniacs. In truth, Wes Craven conceived Freddy from a number of childhood terrors, most notably an old man who Craven describes as looking “very much like Freddy”. The story goes that a young Wes Craven was watching the old man out of the window when the old man stopped and began to stare back, right into Craven’s eyes. Frightened, Craven moved away from the window and waited for him to pass, only to look out and see the old man coming for his front door. When Craven had his older brother go out to investigate the old man had disappeared.
From that moment Freddy was intrinsically linked to childhood. He was destined to be a menace to children, a perverse cartoon capable of making a mockery of your torment. The playful way he would stalk his victims, and the nursery rhyme that portended his coming. Part of the reason Freddy was so terrifying was that he seemed like an artefact of our childhoods, twisted beyond redemption, different yet retaining enough of those pleasant memories to develop an uncanny reality.
Freddy Krueger was finally born on November 9, 1984, with the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a late creation of the cycle of “Slasher” films of the period. The most famous examples of this (outside of Nightmare) were John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). However, while Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers were hulking man-children, Freddy Kruger was something wholly different. Freddy was a supernatural force of vengeance, the spirit of a child-killer burnt to death by an angry mob. He did not stalk his victims across an isolated summer camp or a suburban setting, but the dynamic landscape of the dream world.
Another inspiration for Freddy’s concept was the deaths of three Cambodian refugees, all of whom experienced nightmares before passing away of natural causes. Or rather what would have been natural causes had the three not been healthy young men before their deaths.
From this, Wes Craven decided to have Freddy stalk his teenage victims in their dreams and it was this novel idea that paved the way for A Nightmare on Elm Street being as memorable as it is today.
In giving him a chance to taunt, tease and toy with the main characters, Craven allowed actor Robert Englund to inject some pitch-black humour into an otherwise straight horror. This is what Freddy had that his contemporaries didn’t; he had charisma, a personality that stayed with audiences long after the credits rolled. It may sound like a small detail but thanks to Craven’s script and Englund’s game performance, Freddy Krueger became an icon of horror that has sustained to this day.
Having spawned seven sequels, a crossover in Freddy vs Jason and a recent reboot starring Jackie Earl Haley, the Nightmare franchise’s position as an iconic work is undeniable. In 2003, the American Film Institute placed Freddy 40th out of the 100 greatest villains list. With his striped Christmas sweater, fedora and trademark claw glove Freddy is now on par with the likes of Darth Vader and Maleficent, a villain whom audiences can recognise from sight alone.
Yet with all great villains there is a depth to Freddy, an aspect lurking beneath the surface, which resonates with audiences. In the films, Freddy often represents the subconscious fears of his victims, most evident in the franchises second film. Freddy’s Revenge takes on a clear subtext about the main character’s repressed homosexual urges and the conflict over coming out. This was confirmed a number of years later by Englund explaining the film’s intention to address the “early 80’s pre-AIDS paranoia.”
More broadly though Freddy is a representation of the fears of children, yet the franchise has always been deviously subtle about how this is demonstrated. Much of the explicit sexual fears have been covered by film theorist Barbara Creed’s "Phallic Panic: Horror and The Primal Uncanny" that is strongly recommended for further study. However the link between Freddy and sex is only one aspect of the fear that he represents: adulthood. Freddy’s contemporaries, Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface, are all characterised as being arrested at a point of childhood. Freddy on the other hand has composure, confidence, wit, in full control of his power however monstrous it might be. He undeniably has the mental capacity of an adult, albeit a deeply twisted one. That perhaps is what children fear more than anything, more than spiders, clowns or things that go bump in the night. Adulthood is inevitable for children and to become as hideous and deranged an adult as Freddy, one who could hurt children just like them, is a frightening thought.
A Nightmare on Elm Street has been an iconic work of horror for years now and the depth that went into the conception of Freddy is a huge part of that. As bad as he may be the worst thing is that we could one day become him. Maybe we won’t have dream powers or fights with Jason Vorhees, but there is no telling what life can turn us into. Fortunately the film has always taught us that these are only fears, and fears have no real power over us as long as we can wake up to that fact.
by Liam Macloed
