Nightmare’s nice guy
A strange thing happens when you become a horror icon: People don’t approach you to say how much you scared them, but to share how much you mean to them.
Yes, even if you played a disfigured child killer.
For Robert Englund, who played supernatural slasher Freddy Krueger in eight Nightmare on Elm Street films over 19 years, every fan convention reveals surprisingly personal stories. How the Nightmare series was bonding time with the family. A video rental with a loved one. Memories of departed friends.
It’s not the character they love. It’s what he represents in their lives.
“I have so many people that told me the Nightmare on Elm Street series became this shared home experience with the family,” says England, who appears for all three days of this year’s Niagara Falls Comic Con, June 2 to 4. “It was almost like Thanksgiving dinner … it’s this really strong memory of the American broken home.
“I get this story over and over again. And people tell it to me with a tear in their eye and a choke in their voice. It’s strange, this little dark fairy tale from (director) Wes Craven’s brain became that for several generations, and is now part of the popular culture vernacular.”
Englund has heard it all. Nearly 33 years since the original A Nightmare on Elm Street premiered, Freddy Krueger – a sweater-clad monster stalking teens in their dreams – is part of the American horror fabric. And like every pop culture figure, he has gone through different stages.
The original film’s Freddy is pure horror, a mythical figure Craven devised from Eastern religions, bizarre newspaper clippings and his own troubled childhood.
There was the wise-cracking Freddy of the sequels, snapping off one-liners as he dispatched teens in elaborately gruesome ways.
There was the cerebral Freddy of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, returning the series to its dark roots by examining the character’s lingering effect on the first film’s cast, and by extent, us.
Then there was iconic Freddy in Englund’s series finale, Freddy vs. Jason — a brawl between two of horror’s most recognizable titans and a throwback to classic battles of bygone eras (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, King Kong vs. Godzilla).
He now sees three generations of Nightmare fans at conventions. Grandfathers and their grandkids, each loving the series for different reasons. It never fails to impress Englund. He’s even seeing Anime cosplayers from Japan dressing up as “sexy Freddy” at some conventions.
“There’s Freddy Elmos, there’s Freddy Hello Kittys, there’s Freddy My Little Ponys,” he says. “There’s co-opting by the ‘cute’ culture, which began with the Japanese back with Nightmare 4 (1988). Nightmare 4 beat Rambo and Top Gun at the box office in Japan.
“So it’s strange how that all happens and how it all gets blended in the culture,how phrases‘ Fr eddy Krueger’ or ‘Elm Street’ or ‘Nightmare’ are now in the culture, and they’re shorthand for that experience.”
ENGLUND STARTED acting a decade before Freddy came calling, bouncing around low budget movies and TV shows before landing a plum gig as resistance fighter Willie in NBC’s 1983 miniseries V as well as the short-lived TV series which followed.
But years before that, Englund played a surprising role in another pop culture juggernaut: Star Wars. He wasn’t in it, but he nudged someone who was.
While living in Los Angeles in 1976, Englund auditioned for a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (which wouldn’t come out for another three years). Afterwards, he was told about a George Lucas sci-fi movie with offices set up across the hall. They were looking for someone to play Han Solo, and Englund laughs “they looked at me for all of five seconds” for the part.
As he left, Englund caught wind of the Luke Skywalker character they had yet to cast as well. He drove back to his apartment to see his close friend sleeping on the coach: Mark Hamill.
“I took out the crumpled audition script from my pocket and said ‘Look at this! George Lucas is doing a new movie!’ Mark and I literally idolized George Lucas. We’d seen THX 1138, we’d seen American Graffiti half a dozen times. Mark looked at it and his eyes lit up.
“He got on the phone, called his agent, and the rest is history.”
His own legendary franchise would soon follow, which is still paying dividends for Englund, now 69. The series finds new fans in every format, and Englund is only too happy to talk at length with fans at conventions. Not just about Freddy, but horror in general — Englund is like a scholar on the genre, and is quick to praise recent efforts like Get Out, The Witch and the FX series Legion for raising the bar.
New characters will resonate. Some may even equal Freddy’s impact. But like the classic Universal monsters of nearly a century ago, Englund says Freddy Krueger – in Robert Englund Niagara Falls Comic Con June 2 to 4 Scotiabank Convention Centre; 6815 Stanley Avenue; Niagara Falls www. niagara falls comic con. com
some variation — is forever part of the horror landscape.
“I think it will be referenced,” he says, sharing a story about meeting the grandson of Lon Chaney (1925’s The Phantom of the Opera) who had a huge line of fans with stuff to get signed at a convention.
Chaney is long gone. The Phantom lives on.
“Nightmare on Elm Street … I don’t know if people will be watching it as much, I don’t know if 13-yearolds will be watching it at slumber parties like they do now, but this is 33 years after it came out and it’s still a DVD rite of passage.
“I think if you say ‘Freddy Krueger’ (years from now), it’ll be like Frankenstein. I don’t know if they’ll have seen it, like I don’t think a lot of millennials have seen the Karloff Frankenstein … which is unfortunate. But try to get a millennial to see a black and white movie is like pulling a tooth. They’re too busy watching cats get their genitals cleaned on their phone.”