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Freddy Krueger, full name Frederick Charles Krueger[1] — is the main fictional character from the Nightmare on Elm Street series of films. Created by Wes Craven and portrayed by actor Robert Englund in every film of the series, he is an undead serial killer[2] who can attack his victims supernaturally from within their own dreams when they are in a state of sleep. Freddy is commonly identified by his burnt disfigured face, red and green striped sweater, brown fedora hat, and trademark metal-clawed leather glove.
Freddy Krueger’s origin has slowly evolved over the course of the film series. Each subsequent film revealed new information that intertwined with the backstory established in the original film A Nightmare on Elm Street.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child provided the origin of Krueger’s birth; which began with a tragic incident involving his mother in the early 1940s. During a Christmas holiday, a young nun named Sister Mary Helena (a.k.a Amanda Krueger) was accidentally trapped inside “the Tower”, a wing containing the worst of the criminally insane at Westin Hills psychiatric hospital. Amanda was raped and tortured numerous times by the one hundred patients confined there. She was found days later, close to death and now pregnant. Frederick Charles Krueger was born months later after a breech birth and was given up for adoption.
The sequel Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare showed that Krueger was placed with an abusive alcoholic named Mr. Underwood (portrayed by Alice Cooper) who abused him physically and emotionally. As a child, Freddy exhibited sociopathic behavior, which included killing small animals. Socially, he was often ridiculed by his peers. In his late teens, Freddy practiced self-mutilation; learning the "secret of pain", he murdered Underwood.
Later in adulthood, Krueger would go on to marry Loretta, with whom he would have his daughter Kathryn Krueger. The Krueger family resided in Freddy's childhood home at 1428 Elm Street.[3] Kathryn was shown to still be a child when children from the neighborhood went missing and were later found dead. Soon after, Loretta learned that in the basement of the house, Freddy had a secret room where he would keep devices of torture, newspaper clippings of his crimes, and different versions of his clawed glove. Promising that "she won't tell" she was strangled by Freddy in front of Kathryn, "for snooping in daddy's special work". Krueger worked at the local power plant, and it was there where he had taken and murdered twenty missing neighborhood children; killing them in the plant's boiler room. The police were unable to solve the cases and newspapers dubbed the mysterious killer the "Springwood Slasher".
In 1966, Freddy was arrested for the murders of the missing children. Young Kathryn was put into foster care and was later adopted. Due to the search warrant not being signed correctly, all evidence was considered inadmissible, and Krueger was released in 1968. Amanda Krueger, who had followed Freddy’s trial, heard of his release and hung herself in the tower where she was raped. The neighborhood parents of the children Freddy had murdered found him in his boiler room later that night and threw Molotov cocktails in the building, trapping Freddy within. Just moments before his death, Freddy was approached by three dream demons. These demons search the mortal world for the most evil soul and, in turn, give that person the power to turn dreams into reality. Freddy accepted their offer to "be forever" as the flames consumed him. Afterward, Freddy's remains were taken to Penny Brothers Auto Salvage and locked in the trunk of an old red Cadillac. Presumably to help erase Krueger's existence, the Thompson family moved into the house on 1428 Elm Street. Adopted by the Burroughs family, young Kathryn was taken away from Springwood and her records were sealed.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street through A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, Krueger was referred to as an urban legend. The Elm Street parents remained tight-lipped about the events of the decade before, especially now that their children were teenagers. In the closing months of 1981, the children of Springwood (specifically those teens whose parents had formed the mob that killed Krueger) began systematically dying again — this time in peculiar ways, as they slept. The parents were shown to often ignore and/or deny the pleas of their terrified children, who regaled tales of a mysterious burned man named Fred, who was terrorizing them in their dreams.
Krueger met three notable adversaries in the period before Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare:
After a decade of systematically slaughtering all of the children of Springwood in their dreams, the town was shown to be under Freddy’s influence in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. By absorbing the souls of his victims, Freddy was now powerful enough to blur the lines between dreams and reality. The remaining adults were kept in a mass psychosis after their children had been murdered. When there was no one left to kill, Freddy sought to leave Springwood — hoping to continue his murder spree in another town full of more children. Only one person could arrange for this to happen - his daughter, Kathryn Krueger.
Krueger used what was left of his supernatural powers to find his daughter, who was now an adult named "Maggie Burroughs" (Lisa Zane) and was working as a counselor to troubled teenagers in another city. Since her mother's death, Maggie was raised by adoptive parents and had suppressed the disturbing memories of her early childhood. After catching up with Maggie, Krueger attempted to convince her to do his bidding. She proved, though, that a compulsion for murder was not hereditary and instead schemed with Doc (Yaphet Kotto), her coworker (and dream psychiatrist), to help destroy Krueger. After pulling him out of her dream and into reality, Maggie stabbed Krueger with his own glove in the abdomen and then shoved a pipe bomb into Krueger's chest, killing him and releasing the dream demons that had given him his power.
In the hybrid sequel Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy was trapped in Hell, literally. After Maggie defeated Krueger in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Springwood sought to revitalize itself. Within the town’s first year of rebuilding, Freddy managed to return briefly, killing a few victims before Springwood’s parents and officials realized a plan to rid themselves of Krueger indefinitely. Figuring out how Krueger operated, the authorities and town officials covered up any and all traces of his prior existence, which included blacking out obituaries and quarantining anyone who had ever dreamt about, or had any knowledge of Krueger. Other countermeasures included introducing Hypnocil, a drug that prevents people from dreaming, to the public. As a result, Springwood returned to obscurity and subsequently repopulated with no ill effects.
Meanwhile, Krueger was unable to escape the boundaries of Hell, thanks to the complete ignorance of his existence to the people of Springwood, along with Hypnocil keeping people from dreaming. Due to the fact that no one so much as knew of him, much less feared him, Freddy was unable to gain enough power to escape. Thus, Freddy hatched a plan to resurrect the undead, immortal killing machine Jason Voorhees. First, at the conclusion of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, Freddy pulled Jason's abandoned mask into the ground. Then, in the disguise of Voorhees' mother, Pamela, Freddy manipulated Jason into rising up from the dead once more and to go to Elm Street to kill the teenagers in order to fool the residents of Springwood into thinking that he (Krueger) was back. Jason committed a few murders, which (as planned) were then blamed on Krueger. As a result, Krueger began to get his equilibrium back. Enough fear fell over Springwood to make Krueger strong enough to haunt the town again. The problem, which Krueger had not counted on, was that Jason would not stop killing. He became irate when Jason continued to slaughter "his kids". Thus, a bloody fight ensued between the two murderous icons that raged from the dream world to the waking world at Jason's old haunt, Camp Crystal Lake. The writers of Freddy vs. Jason deliberately left the finality of their fight ambiguous. The film ended with Jason walking out of Crystal Lake holding Krueger's decapitated head, which winked to the audience before the credits rolled followed by Freddy's laughter. Thus, seemingly indicating that his reign of terror was not over.
As long as his victim was dreaming, Krueger could inhabit and control their dreams, twisting them to his own ends. Any physical harm done to a person in this dream world would carry over into the real world, allowing him to easily commit multiple murders. Krueger often toyed with his victims by changing his form and surroundings, usually resembling the boiler room where he brought his child victims that had been missing in town. His powers increased as more and more kids believed he existed. At the height of his powers, he could cause severe damage in the real world. This included possession of humans (as shown in the second Nightmare film and Freddy vs Jason) or his corpse (as shown in the third). If one of his victims wakes up while he's fighting them in the dream world, Freddy comes into the real world as well, where he is still superhumanly strong and durable, but can be wounded. This was used for extensive fight scenes in Freddy's Dead and Freddy vs Jason.
In a person's own dream, Krueger could also use their deepest fears and personality against them, which became a trademark in the films. A few victims managed to use their own imagination to consciously manipulate their dreams against him (a technique known as lucid dreaming), but this had little effect on Krueger, who was completely in control of their dreams already. These kids were known as Dream Warriors. Another of Krueger's powers involved absorbing the souls of his victims into his own body after they had been killed, which served to make him more powerful. As he gained a victim, their face would appear on his chest.
The summary above corresponds to what New Line Cinema considers the canonical account, based on the films [7]. But other elements of the franchise, such as comics, novels, and other licensed materials, present variant accounts, and the films themselves are sometimes inconsistent in what they present or imply about Freddy's past. A Nightmare prequel is rumored which might offer a new view of the storyline.[5]
The 1988 Freddy's Nightmares episode No More Mr. Nice Guy presented a less gruesome interpretation of Krueger’s death. Due to budget constraints, many of the series' original actors did not appear. Most episodes of Freddy's Nightmares do not interfere with the established timeline [8], though a few episodes do present dates that conflict with the film series' timeline of events.
A Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven returned to the Nightmare franchise in 1994 with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare; giving audiences a new version of Freddy Krueger. New Nightmare, which celebrates the first film’s tenth anniversary, showed a darker and more sinister Freddy than what was presented in the previous films. The story (which takes place outside the film continuity and in the fictional “real world”) has Freddy haunting and killing the cast/crew members of the original film. Wes Craven described this “new” Freddy as an abstract ancient evil that had been captured in the Nightmare story. Now that the films had ended with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, the evil (in the guise of Freddy) had escaped to begin its reign of terror in the real world.
As the film plays out, Freddy targets Heather Langenkamp (the star of the first film) and her (fictional) son Dylan; killing Lagankamp is its only means of being fully released from fiction. While Freddy is preoccupied with killing Langenkamp and her son, Craven writes a new script titled “New Nightmare” in order to trap the evil again. By film’s end, Langenkamp manages to defeat the Krueger entity, and saves her son in the process. Craven, in closing, completed his script (which paralleled the film’s events) stating, “Freddy is back where he belongs.”
The “look” of Freddy in this film is more in line with what Craven had imagined for the character, allowing the jokester, clowning Freddy portrayed in the earlier films to be cast away. [9]
Craven's inspiration for Krueger included a series of stories in the LA Times about a series of mysterious deaths: all the victims had reported recurring nightmares beforehand, and died in their sleep. Other inspirations included a homeless man who had frightened Craven as a youth, and a bully at his school. The 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright sealed the story for Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to "jump off" from, but the synthesizer riff from the Elm Street soundtrack.[6]
As the Nightmare on Elm Street series progressed, director Wes Craven's original vision of Krueger as a true personification of evil was altered several times. Due to the enormous popularity of the films, the succeeding writers/directors chose to develop Freddy into more of a sardonic, wisecracking and flamboyant anti-hero of the 1980s horror genre.
Initially, Craven did not intend any sequels and wanted the first film to be a stand-alone movie. When the original Nightmare became a mega hit, however, New Line insisted on following it up — in spite of both Craven, and original Nightmare heroine Heather Langenkamp ("Nancy") declining involvement. The second entry, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was released to box office success — topping the profits of the original.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors gave the series a new lease on life. Craven wanted Dream Warriors to be the end of the series, but the studio refused. Craven and New Line's relationship ended for a number of years as a result of their conflicting visions for the Nightmare enterprise. Later, in Craven's Scream a character would say that "the first movie was great but the rest sucked" — a jab at the other films.[7]
As the series progressed, Craven revisited his creation a second time with Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a non-canon spinoff. This film departs from the other entries by taking place in the real world and removing Krueger's previous comedic undertones. It was the least profitable of the series, however. Once again, Craven and New Line parted ways. It is stated at the Internet Movie Database that Craven watched all of the previous movies before he filmed New Nightmare, and that he could not understand the plot line at all.
The Nightmare on Elm Street series spawned a huge merchandising collecting cult. Even 20 years after the first film was released, the merchandising is still ongoing, with sites like eBay listing hundreds of pieces of A Nightmare on Elm Street memorabilia every day and new products rolling off the assembly line and in to toy stores around the world.
A private collector from New Zealand has established an online collection of Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy Krueger memorabilia spanning more than 20 years and featuring items from all round the world.[12].
On 4 April 2007, a British man named Jason Moore was jailed after attacking a friend with a homemade Freddy Krueger-style glove.[8] Thirty-seven year old Moore was described in court as being obsessed with the character and had watched A Nightmare on Elm Street over twenty times, including just before the attack. One of the detectives who led the investigation into what happened said the glove Moore had crafted was probably the "most horrific weapon he had ever seen".