One of the first horror movies I watched this October was Friday the 13^th, Part 7: The New Blood. I had watched a few movies following Pamela and Jason Vorhees on their gore-soaked romps around Crystal Lake with my mother when I was younger and hadn’t really enjoyed them. Jason has a fun design, and watching him turn sequel by sequel into his iconic final form was interesting, but his movies weren’t for me. I was at least proud when I first watched Wes Craven’s Scream to already know the correct answer to the final question posed to Casey Becker in the opening scene.

I’d still been interested in watching Friday the 13^th, Part 7 though because the idea of a girl with psychic powers fighting Jason sounded fun, but I struggled to keep interested as Jason hacked through another slate of campers. At one point after pausing, getting a snack, and coming back, I flopped onto the couch and declared, “Sorry, I’m just a Freddy girl!”

It burst from me without forethought, and I’m still laughing over it because it’s true. Scream was my first Wes Craven movie but not my favorite of his franchises—I’m a Freddy girl, through and through.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Forty years ago, Craven introduced the world to Freddy Krueger with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. You probably know the gist of it, whether you’ve seen it or not. Freddy Krueger (played by now-horror legend Robert Englund) murdered children when he was alive. After being burned to death by the vengeful parents of Elm Street, his ghost returns for his own revenge against those living children by a route their parents can’t protect them—killing them in their dreams.

And when you die in the dream, you die in real life.

 I wasn’t born yet upon the movie’s release, so I can’t imagine what that time was like, and can only draw from what I’ve seen of the making-of elements and the release itself (Never Sleep Again is a feast of information like this for the whole franchise). People were shocked and horrified by this scarred phantom in a striped sweater and brown hat. His power to hit you when you’re most vulnerable is terrifying, and his reach into the mind is longer than his signature weapon, that clawed glove.

Perhaps more than Freddy himself, the unreality of the dream sequences twist your sense of certainty. Is this scene a dream? Is it the waking world? Sometimes it’s unclear whether a character has fallen asleep. You can’t count on anything, and the way the adult characters often shrug off the impossible aspects of the deaths, or of final girl Nancy Thompson’s discoveries, only adds to the surreal atmosphere of the film, as if the entire thing could be a nightmare. The scene where Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, herself now a horror legend) looks up from her desk in class and sees her deceased friend Tina speaking to her from a body bag sticks out for a lot of fans, myself included. If you listen to the main theme by Charles Bernstein from the first movie, you can even hear Freddy whisper, “Tina.”

A Nightmare on Elm Street was a big hit for New Line Cinema, an indie studio at the time, and a reliable hit, enough to start a yearly sequel train through the mid to late-’80s. There’s a good reason New Line used to be called “the house that Freddy built.” Some of us still call it that.

Six Nightmare movies graced the screen before ’90s kid me learned who Freddy Krueger was in the first place. We only had thirteen channels on our TV for the longest time, but now and then our regional network would use their movie nights to run a week-long Freddy marathon, and they had no problem advertising that during cartoons and sitcoms earlier in the afternoon/evening.

The titles were alluring. A Nightmare on Elm Street. What could that mean?

And then there were the sequels, so specific—Freddy’s Revenge, Dream Warriors, The Dream Master, The Dream Child, The Final Nightmare.

Clearly there was a lot going on with this series, some deep lore and intricate story playing out as an epic across several R-rated movies. Back then, seeing that menacing R on a movie poster was both unnerving and tantalizing.

When I finally watched the original movie for the first time, I admit I was a little underwhelmed. I’m not entirely sure why? I was twenty and critical of movies in that unpleasant way you get when you’re young and want to feel like you have impressive taste, and while I did think it was a solid movie, there was a part of me that felt The Simpsons parody in “Treehouse of Horror VI: Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace” had accomplished more with the premise.

But that was animation! You could have Groundskeeper Willie turn into a giant bagpipe spider monster for probably the same cost as having him trim the hedges.

I’ve since watched the sequels, and I’ve rewatched the original multiple times. It’s a much stronger movie than I gave it credit for, as everyone else already knew, and one I now adore. The aim isn’t the fantasticality of the dream sequences so much as the intimacy. Freddy worms his way into his victims’ subconsciouses, and by proxy, the audience’s—your bath, your school, the bed where you have sex with your boyfriend, your childhood bedroom, your home, your anything. You have little control. Often victims and audience can’t even tell whether or not they’re dreaming.

And no matter how much coffee they drink, or how loud they play their music, they cannot stay awake forever.

It’s a genius premise that I’d taken for granted at first, probably from growing up with it looming there, already known, but I appreciate it more and more each time I rewatch this classic film. Also, if you get a chance to see it on Blu-ray, the remastered version is glorious, brimming with moody color and a character that reaches out of the screen to rake claws down your spine.

 That Simpsons parody also had the full weight of the entire franchise to draw from. I wouldn’t discover what lay beneath those alluring titles directly for some time, and entirely out of order. But we’re going to stick to their release order here.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

The actual genesis of the sequels was a little more chaotic than I assumed as a kid. There hadn’t been some grand Freddy Krueger epic planned from the start. I didn’t know how movies worked back then, or how the piling up of box office cash meant someone in charge (maybe Robert Shaye) going, “Sequel! Now! While it’s hot!”

But the first Freddy sequel has its own distinct reputation from the rest of the franchise, largely for its homosexual undertones, and maybe overtones. Jesse Walsh (played by our Freddy franchise scream king Mark Patton) moves to Elm Street, specifically into Nancy Thompson’s house from the first movie years after she’s left, and begins having gruesome nightmares of a scarred man. Strange experiences begin to distort Jesse’s waking life, too, building across a tale of body horror as the line between Jesse and Freddy Krueger blurs, thins, and soon disappears.

For the longest time, it was considered by many to be the low point of the series for its bizarre story and the admittedly head-scratching motivation of Freddy wanting to come back from the world of the dead/dreams to the living/real world (though the muddying of those concepts is part of why I love this series).

And on a baser level, there are the people who disliked it as “the gay one.” To this day, beneath posts, articles, etc. about Freddy’s Revenge, you can still find homophobic remarks haunting the underside of the comment section as if anything said in that regard were an original or worthwhile thought.

It was the second-to-last I watched of the series, not because of it being “the gay one”—that made it more intriguing when some ’80s movies are often somehow both very homosexual and homophobic at the same time—but from the claims of it being nonsensical.

But this is a franchise that deals in dreams! It doesn’t have to wholly make sense. For all we know, each entire movie is a dream. You can’t look at the messy ending to the first film, in which everything in the movie happened, none of it happened, Freddy is alive, dead, a car, in the house, all of it happening at once, and then get on the second film’s case for maintaining that same level of logical fluidity.

I ended up loving it. Having seen most of the other sequels by this point, I was well-acquainted with two different Freddy Kruegers—the terrifying presence of the original film and New Nightmare, and the quippy one-liner Freddy of the later films. What a treat to find that one of the most-maligned films of the series features scary Freddy. He’s shadowy, sadistic, and enjoying every second of it. The scene in which he pulls off his scalp to reveal his brain to Jesse is unsettling in its intimacy, and Robert Englund breathes menace in every frame.

The rest of the movie is solid as well. There’s a vulnerability throughout that I think a lot of us can relate to, especially us queer viewers.

Thankfully, Freddy’s Revenge has had a bit of a renaissance since the ’80s. Between an earnest reassessment both by series fans and by those behind the scenes, and the beautiful documentary Scream, Queen!: My Nightmare on Elm Street that follows Mark Patton’s career and involvement with the franchise (another must-watch alongside Never Sleep Again), of late Freddy’s Revenge has been getting the credit it deserves.

And despite its earlier response, it was still a success for New Line. There would be more Freddy Krueger to come.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

I adore the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise as a whole, but even among us fans, there are different groups. All of us love Freddy.

However, some of us also love the Elm Street kids. They’re messy, and imperfect, and some of them are more underwritten than others.

But every single movie, I’m rooting for them. Their deaths affect me, and I’m eager to see them beat Freddy—whose presence I enjoy—by the end of each movie. I personally think you get more out of the movies by letting yourself get invested in the Elm Street kids.

This especially hits home in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. A group of Springwood kids have been institutionalized for erratic behavior and self-harm, which they blame on the man in their dreams who’s trying to kill them. None of their parents or doctors believe them, and they’re dying one by one. Only the return of first-movie final girl Nancy Thompson reveals the truth—Freddy Krueger is back again, and these recent victims are the last of the Elm Street kids.

The fact that I got a chill writing the end of that sentence probably says a lot about my relationship with this movie. I have a weird reverence for it. This is what being a kid felt like to me. Haunted, harried, scared, and the adults around you either can’t help or refuse to acknowledge there’s even a real problem.

But beyond that, everything in this movie feels almost mythic. “Last of the Elm Street kids.” Calling Freddy “the Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs” after a nun with a secret of her own divulges more of Freddy’s backstory.

These kids also have personal abilities they can manifest within their dreams, from magic to strength to creating a conjoined nightmare that draws in multiple dreamers. Freddy has always hunted his victims alone, but this time, they can face him together.

The dream sequences are not only elaborate but personal, drawing on the characters’ relationships, interests, and trauma. It’s the beginning of quippy Freddy, but only slightly—this is still scary Freddy by and large, and he revels in taunting the characters by slashing messages across sleeping stomachs or revealing that he’s never let go of his old victims when he pulls up his iconic sweater to reveal their faces screaming from within his flesh.

Scene by scene, the movie sucks you in and delivers one incredible set piece or conversation after another. Wes Craven returned to pen a screenplay draft, but Dream Warriors credits numerous writers, including Frank Darabont, a relative unknown then, now celebrated for adapting The Walking Dead as well as Stephen King adaptations like The Mist and, perhaps most notably, The Shawshank Redemption.

The talent is on display at every turn, between wonderful characters and a sense of larger-than-life threat that the franchise never really matches again (although The Final Nightmare hints at it without following through). It’s also more personal in some ways, from the moment a snakish Freddy sees Nancy and snarls, “You,” to the split climax of the showdown, kids versus Freddy, to the attempted junkyard burial of human Freddy’s skeleton.

I could go on. It's not only my absolute favorite of the franchise, or one of my favorite horror movies, but one of my favorite movies, period. Five stars, Letterboxd Top 4, all the flowers.

And the Dokken song “Dream Warriors” still kicks ass, as does the music video you can find on the movie’s Blu-ray.

With all that said, I should probably dislike where things go next more than I do.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

I think a valid question is, “What the hell is a Dream Master?” Before I saw the movie, I assumed this was in reference to Freddy himself. That’s what he’s been throughout the series. But no, true to form, the answer is not only unclear but baffling, with the fourth film in the franchise introducing a twist on “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” replacing the Lord with the esoteric Dream Master, a bizarre choice in a franchise that just introduced Christian elements as important to its supernatural elements in the previous movie.

Also introduced in the previous movie are Freddy’s first victims in this one. Following a dream in which dream warrior Kincaid falls asleep and his dog hell-urinates Freddy back to life, one by one, we lose the dream warriors, and new final girl Alice becomes Freddy’s doorway to non-Elm Street kids, using her to pull in victims outside his purview and grow even stronger.

I almost look at the latter half of the original films as having their own what-if continuity set apart from the third movie. Like there are multiple Freddy franchises, one of which goes from 1 to 3 to New Nightmare, and the other that contains the entire franchise.

But 4 is also too good for me to ignore it solely because I don’t like some of the choices it makes. Art isn’t about giving us what we want all the time.

There’s more silliness thanks to Freddy’s quipping and a few of the death scenarios, but there’s also a lot of creepy dream stuff too, like a scene that keeps repeating and Alice has to realize she’s already done this part of the dream, or falling asleep in a theater only to get sucked into the screen, where Freddy is waiting and hungry for souls. Moments like the victims’ faces appearing as meatballs on a dream pizza could be goofy but end up genuinely disturbing as Freddy pops one in his mouth. These kids aren’t just dying and that’s the end. They keep being digested and tormented by him, on and on.

Where do dreams end and death begin? The franchise brings up this question more than once in its Lynchian logic but doesn’t answer it, leaving us to dangle like a chunk of flesh from Freddy’s claw.

It also has a beautiful finale, bringing closure to that moment in the previous movie when he reveals the spirits trapped in his skin.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

In a change of pace, our previous movie’s final girl is back in the next movie. Alice has new friends, kind of a new life, and all should be well after the seeming defeat of Freddy Krueger. Except Alice is pregnant, and something’s wrong with the baby. She can tell from what’s happening in her dreams. Freddy has a new scheme, and it involves Alice’s unborn child.

Personally, this is where the series starts to lose steam. But I also know a bunch of people love this movie, and I can see why. There are fewer dream-kills, but they’re each memorable and two of them are particularly gruesome. The effects work and imagery fire on all bloody cylinders. There are also surprises—characters you’re certain are about to die find ways out, Alice getting to continue her story (a bright spot after what happens to the dream warriors in the previous movie), and the return of Freddy’s mother, Amanda Krueger, who further fleshes out the franchise’s mythos.

But with the ’80s winding down, and the ideas and box office sales not hitting as hard, New Line was looking to wrap it up on Freddy Krueger.

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

This was the final movie I watched out of the entire franchise. It also has a less-mysterious title than the other sequels. New Line made it inescapably clear when the sixth Freddy film released in 1991 that they were saying goodbye to the Springwood Slasher.

An unnamed teenager with amnesia is drawn into a Freddy Krueger dream—a fun Wizard of Oz-inspired sequence with Freddy on a broomstick, a wonderful image—with the goal of drawing in more kids for him to hunt. He’s looking to get free of Elm Street, and Springwood, and John Doe is going to help him do it. In the process, John meets other kids in a shelter and a doctor who’s helping them, Maggie Burroughs. What follows is a strange road trip to Springwood and revelations not only about Freddy’s past, but Maggie’s too, and her ties to him.

This is arguably the silliest of the Freddy films (some might say Freddy vs. Jason takes that title). Some of this might have been due to the influence of Freddy’s Nightmares, an anthology TV show running from 1988 to 1990 in which Freddy was an occasional antagonist but usually a host for unrelated horror stories which varied in tone. If you’re at all familiar with the pun-loving Crypt Keeper of Tales from the Crypt fame, apply that kind of tone. It’s not impossible for the show to have influenced where the final movie went, in the same way some film fans speculate the recent Ghostbusters movies have lifted their tone from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, or that Jurassic World: Dominion was affected by the Camp Cretaceous show. Freddy’s Dead opens with a text prologue explaining that there are no more kids in Springwood, Ohio. The field trip to Springwood shows the adults there have lost their minds and treat the visiting teens as kindergartners. The dream sequences lean toward goofy rather than sinister or cruel.

Maybe it’s my love of Freddy Krueger, or a sickly amount of optimism, but though this is among my least favorites of the franchise, I still find things I like about it. There’s the aforementioned Wicked Witch Freddy. The premise of a childless town that’s starving Freddy is a neat idea, and his desire to break free could be a tremendous threat. I also like the flashbacks showing that he presented himself as an ordinary family man, and that no one knew the murderous truth lying beneath his suburban façade, in the same way the suburb’s presentation of “This is Normal, This is Good, This is the Ideal” makes a convenient mask for monstrous secrets in real life.

I don’t even mind how campy it is in the first half because I think that can help build toward a more menacing second half. We almost get it. Right when our characters think it’s all over, the shadow of Freddy Krueger looms over all of them, and there’s a delicious line that suggests just how bad it can all get. “Every town has an Elm Street.”

The follow-through, involving dream demons and references to Freddy’s vengeful murders as just a job he’s been hired to do, are less stellar. But I won’t dwell on the negative. Especially when Wes Craven himself had something special coming just three years later.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

This is the Freddy movie I remember seeing posters of as a kid. I love the colorful art for previous Nightmare movies, they’re brilliant, but those yellow demon eyes haunted my childhood movie theater in late 1994. That did not look like the Freddy Krueger I’d seen as costumes or in commercials for the older movies.

I’m not sure how long-time Freddy fans could’ve anticipated what came next. Set not in the world of the Springwood Slasher, but in our world, Heather Langenkamp stars as herself, an actress with a family, getting calls from stalkers, raising her son, engaging in franchise-related work-like interviews, and entertaining the prospect of a new Freddy Krueger movie. It’s almost a film about itself, but it also isn’t. As we learn from Wes Craven within the movie (also playing himself), A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels were a means of containing a demonic entity. The series may be over, but the demon isn’t ready to go to sleep.

This meta story unfolds in surreal and wonderful layers between mixing in facts, such as Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon being players in the first and third movies, along with Langenkamp’s real-life situation with a stalker prior, plus lore from the films, such as her house turning into Nancy’s house and a return to something that’s almost scary Freddy, except it isn’t really Freddy. This thing has its own personality, its own face, still played by Robert Englund, and yet is menacing in an entirely distinct way.

New Nightmare is bold, interesting, twisty, and a breath of fresh air. While it’s the lowest-grossing film of the series, it remains an artistic highlight and a testament to taking chances. There probably wouldn’t be a Scream without New Nightmare having laid some of the meta groundwork.

Freddy vs. Jason

Between the releases of Freddy’s Dead and New Nightmare, another slasher franchise, Friday the 13th, closed up shop with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, its answer to Freddy’s Dead. This is not a movie I’ve seen, but one particular shot kept coming up in the years to follow: Jason’s hockey mask, lying upon blasted earth, before Freddy’s glove emerges to drag it underground.

Jason Voorhees wasn’t the only one to go to a type of hell. Freddy vs. Jason wandered development hell for years. When Bride of Chucky director Ronny Yu came aboard, the promise of a dark comedy seemed the right formula for bringing their clash to the big screen.

But why would Freddy, a killer in dreams who largely sticks to Springwood, Ohio, fight Jason, who kills people in the world of flesh and blood and pretty much sticks to Camp Crystal Lake and its surrounding woods (when he isn’t being dragged to Manhattan or outer space)?

Obviously their meeting is the entire reason for the movie, which means if you have to fudge the rules a little, you do so. The already-complex Freddy mythos steals some ideas about belief and power from Candyman here, with Freddy manipulating Jason’s dreams to send him killing people, summoning up memories of Freddy Krueger and opening a doorway for his return. The two seem to make a good pair until Jason begins killing Freddy’s victims before Freddy can take their souls, pitting the two slasher icons against each other.

It's a silly movie, and it’s on purpose. Notice how my summaries for the previous movies focus on the protagonists, whereas this one’s all Freddy and Jason? That’s what the movie really cares about, and that’s going to affect whether or not you have a good time with it.

Regardless of expectations and tone, Freddy vs. Jason is a significant movie. It’s the last of each slasher icon’s original series, and it’s also the last time Robert Englund portrayed Freddy Krueger. Jason actors come and go, but Englund was always Freddy. His performance helped shape Freddy’s personality, what we think of as Freddy Krueger not only per movie, but as a character in general. Englund even depicted Freddy for the TV show. They’re almost impossible to separate.

And yet. . .

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

In 2010, New Line Cinema released a remake of the by-then classic 1984 original. Robert Englund would not reprise his role as Freddy Krueger, and instead Jackie Earle Haley would take over. Which meant we were getting quite a different Freddy.

Much of the original premise is the same. Kids start having dreams of a scarred man. The ones who die in their dreams die in real life. Over the course of the movie, Nancy Holbrook and friends discover the culprit to be Freddy Krueger, a man killed by their parents, but not for being a child murderer this time. He only begins killing after he’s dead.

The remake recreates Freddy Krueger as a sexual predator, with the Elm Street kids having repressed their memories of their experiences with him. While the movie suggests the kids’ parents may have killed an innocent man and that’s why he’s taking revenge on them in death, it’s hard to believe the red herring when we’ve known Freddy as a monster for decades.

But then, we’ve also had Freddy as a giant snake, and the Wicked Witch of the West, and a Crypt Keeper-style host, and it’s difficult to then insert sexual predator into what is ostensibly a fun horror-fantasy franchise.

The negative reaction from Nightmare fans is not surprising. I’m not wild about the change myself. Although it was part of Wes Craven’s original concept for the first movie, some things might be best left on the cutting room floor.

That said, if you’re going to remake a movie, especially a good one, it’s probably best to change things up, so I can’t say the filmmakers failed in that. The remake is somber, its atmosphere often gray and miserable. This is not a movie that wants you to enjoy yourself; it’s a movie looking to bum you out, and it accomplishes this readily. I have to at least give it credit for that.

It also introduces an interesting wrinkle for the insomniac protagonists. If you fall asleep, of course Freddy can get you. But if you go too long without sleep, you can wind up in a coma from which you’ll never wake up.

This puts the characters between a rock and a hard place in trying to get to the bottom of the Krueger mystery and not get killed in the process. There are also some interesting set pieces, like a pharmacy confrontation where one of the characters is blinking in and out of sleep, giving Freddy these brief windows of opportunity to lash out, and his actions bleed into the waking world.

We would probably have multiple sequels to the remake by now if not for the critical blowback—to date, it’s the highest-grossing film in the franchise.

Though that isn’t so surprising. By 2010, the franchise had been around for over twenty-five years. Plenty of us weren’t even around for the initial theatrical run of films, and yet we grew up with Freddy Krueger looming over us. I remember being excited to check it out. A lot of us were.

But that longevity meant familiarity and expectations. I can’t blame my fellow fans for the pushback. Despite its strengths, I don’t really care for the remake either. Jackie Earle Haley does a fantastic job at what’s asked of him, but while he voiced support for the movie at its release, Robert Englund put it best when asked about the remake’s negative reception in an interview years later: “It wasn’t Freddy.”

I agree with him. And like I said at the beginning, I’m a Freddy girl.

Legacy

One of my favorite elements of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, and what distinguishes it in my eyes from other slashers besides Freddy’s uniquely sadistic personality, is the imagination.

These are dreams. Nightmares. Anything can happen. The laws of reality do not hold sway over Freddy Krueger, and as the series goes on, it doesn’t entirely hold sway over his victims, either. It makes for a fantastical tapestry, and running through the series, I’ve loved seeing what scenarios the Elm Street kids dream up, and how Freddy twists those desires, aspirations, and safe places into his hunting grounds. I’ve likewise loved seeing the Elm Street kids turn that confident predation against him.

There is so much left unsaid here. You could talk about any one of these films for longer than this essay. You could probably write an essay about Bernstein’s theme for the series, or even just that jump rope song, “One, Two, Freddy’s Coming for You.”

Despite being a monster of the ’80s, Freddy remained a big deal through the ’90s. And then the ’00s. And the 2010s. And now.

You could perhaps credit each decade’s resurgence of Freddy love to New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason, and the remake for bringing the Springwood Slasher back to immediate public consciousness each decade, the horror genre’s recurring nightmare.

But we’re forty years on, and Freddy’s not only still popular among us horror lovers, but his presence has gone beyond popularity. He persists among the ranks of forever monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, Godzilla, and so on. And there are still fans eager for a new Nightmare movie.

But I’m not sure where we go from here.

Maybe nowhere? Possible new reboots and remakes have been tossed around between Blumhouse, Mike Flanagan, and probably every other horror production company, director, and screenwriter with varying pitches and possibilities for the future of Freddy Krueger.

Meanwhile, Robert Englund has made clear that he’s too old to reprise the Springwood Slasher outside of voicing him for an animated feature. Much as I would love to see that, American distributors and investors often struggle with the idea that animation can be aimed at adults. Barring an Elm Street anime, in live action someone else would need to take on the sweater and claw. But we’ve tried that.

The fact is, Freddy Krueger is part of pop culture now. You don’t have to have watched one of his movies or seen a convenient parody to know his deal. People dress up as him for TikTok skits, they cosplay as him at conventions, his merch appears all over the place, especially at Halloween. I have a green street sign for Elm Street hanging up in my apartment and a glove sitting atop one bookshelf. As with his characters, there’s no escaping Freddy Krueger.

So as much as I would love for another movie, there doesn’t have to be a new one for Freddy to keep on haunting our dreams for many years to come.