My relationship with Freddy Krueger didn’t begin with the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie and then build from there, Freddy just always existed, like mom and dad, and “Star Wars.”
As a child, the first thing I’d do upon entering the video store was b-line it for the Horror section. I wasn’t allowed to watch most of them, but I could soak up their essence through the gruesome imagery on the VHS boxes. Out of all the monsters on the video boxes, Freddy Krueger was the best. Those other guys were just guys with knives, Freddy was a MONSTER. There was just something more frightening and fun about him. He wasn’t hiding his burned face behind some mask. He was smiling in a lot of the shots. He had a knife glove (that’s three more knives than Jason!). He was unstoppable because he lives in your dreams. The violence all seemed crazier and weirder than the other movies. And the fucking covers for the “Nightmare” series?! Nothing better.
Other times, when waiting at the mall for my mom and sister to finish their interminable shopping excursions, I’d end up in Waldenbooks, scouring the pages of Fangoria or Starlog. Again, still having seen none of the films, the ‘making of’ photos from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies were the ones that captured my imagination:
“Is Freddy feeding that girl to herself?! Incredible!"
"Did that guy somehow melt into his motorcycle?! This I HAVE to see!”
"That giant worm has Freddy’s face! And it’s eating that girl!“
"Look at those faces pushing their way out of Freddy’s scarred body! What’s that about!?"
Whereas, gory kill photos from the Jason or Halloween entries would get a mere shrug from my refined tastes: "Is Jason killing that guy in the woods? With a big knife? Looks like. Big deal.”
In the October 1987 issue of MAD magazine (the second one I’d ever convinced my mom to buy me!), one of my heroes, the greatest (in my opinion) living cartoonist, Sergio Aragones, mercilessly mocked “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3” with his usual aplomb. Example: Freddy comes out of the TV, the girl watching it is horrified, Freddy smashes her head into the TV, the other patients in the ward are horrified, some TV repairmen swap the broken TV our for a new one, the other patients are happy again. This combined two of my favorite things: Freddy and comic books. It’s only two pages of comics, but by the end of those two pages I wanted to either make cartoons or make movies. It also spoiled all the best gags from the movie for me (this was in a pre-Spoiler Alert society), as I still had yet to see more than three minutes of any of the actual movies.
Probably, somewhere, there still exists one of millions of crude Freddy drawings from my childhood. Most are, thankfully, lost to the ages. I was particularly enamored by his knife glove, and would gleefully scrawl it on any piece of paper I could get my claws on, much to the chagrin of many a teacher. I would do a super-team of what I considered the great movie monsters, Stripe from Gremlins, a Krite from Critters, Jason (boring as he is, the hockey mask was fun to draw) and, as their leader, Freddy Krueger. All done in the style of Jim Davis or Gary Larson or Don Martin or whomever I was ripping off that week. (I also did a mean super-team of Santa, the Easter Bunny and some other holiday guys all packed to the teeth with machine-guns, but that’s another story.)
Having never seen a Freddy movie, I went as Freddy for Halloween in the sixth grade. I thought my costume was pretty keen. A friend of mine said it was “lame” or “gay” or even “stupid” and “not as good as some other kid’s Freddy costume.” We had a fight, involving sixth grade punches. He was probably right. Still, what a dick.
Eventually, in my early teens, I saw part of one of the later sequels on the USA network one Friday night, “Dream Child” I think. It was not very good. My imaginary version of what these movies were was astronomically better than reality. In fairness, it was censored for TV, but still, did everything aside from the edited gore also have to be awful? Such are the disappointments of childhood.
The first of the movies I saw all the way through was Part 2, the homoerotic one. It’s a fitfully fun, but mostly boring and stupid movie. I’ve since seen them all. They all have their charms. None of them are masterpieces. The two that come closest are the original, which retains a creepy dream-logic terror and “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” which is right up my meta, 'cleverer-than-thou’ alley. Part 3 started Freddy down the path that would lead to sixth-graders dressing up as him for Halloween, and comes closest to regaining the spooky weirdness of the original, but falls just short (even though it has arguably the best box cover art).
Even though my childhood wonder of the Freddy universe has waned, in the annals of horror franchises, I can’t think of another that prides inventiveness over body-count as much as this one. The filmmakers are constantly trying to one-up what came before, and since it all takes place in dreams, they’re allowed to go nuts. And, to a point, this works, until it’s a 1:1 ratio of real fears/desires to dream kills; This lady is anorexic:She eats herself to death, This guy is into comics:He dies in a comic book. All things turn into self-parody when so mercilessly overexposed, but no other horror franchises could own that self-parody without blowing the premise entirely. Freddy’s world allows a ridiculous take on the material like “Freddy’s Dead,” without seeming too stupid. Stupid, but not as stupid as “Jason Takes Manhattan.” Or “Freddy vs. Jason.”
It all comes back to the VHS boxes that mesmerized me as a child, the image of the knife glove, of the burned man, the striped sweater, all the blood and guts, that helped inform and inspire my imagination. That spark of inspiration is ultimately more important to me than any of them actually being “good movies.”
