📜 My History with Nightmare on Elm Street

You didn't need to see the movies to know who Freddy was. The cut of his jib was enough to forever imprint itself onto the minds of impressionable youths. My first real memory of Freddy was watching my sister ascend the basement stairs in her cheap plastic Freddy mask and its accompanying plastic bladed glove. I turned myself right around and was forever hesitant of heading into the cellar because I thought Freddy would be there waiting to scare me again.

It was a different era where kids could idolize child murderers and it was fine. My elementary school let people dress up as Freddy and Jason for Halloween and thought nothing of it. Freddy had his own TV show, hotline, music videos, and costumes. He was larger than life, terrorizing kids who had never even seen his movies.

The grocery store would have VHS copies of Freddy's Revenge. I was mesmerized by his ugly mug ripping through the case, and I would read that box and plot description no matter how many times I had looked at it before. I wanted to see it so badly, but it wasn't something I could simply ask my parents to watch. I was too afraid to even ask them about it.

Once my sister discovered Columbia House and their dirt cheap VHS deals, I was finally able to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street in full. It was everything I had hoped it to be, legitimately frightening for 9 year old, but not enough to be one and done. I needed to see all the movies, and like many other film franchises, that became the primary drive of my youth.

The sister also had a copy of Dream Warriors and a recorded copy of New Nightmare, so I dove straight through the Nancy Thompson stories and saw the best that Elm Street had to offer. My mind would fill in the blanks of what the others would be like, turning them into mystical lost entries filled with massive lore dumps that would change the way I view the entire franchise once I watched them. It's always a wonder how a slasher can find his way back from the dead and start a new reign of terror, and Freddy was always creative in that way. It was good for a budding imagination to consider these things.

Somewhere between there, I had seen Freddy's Dead. It was near the end of his original run when there were a lot of loose ends to tie up, so it always seemed rich with backstory to entice my pursuit of prior entries. The tone was goofy, but it surprisingly never wavered my appreciation any. Video games, ear drums, your brain on drugs... it was all a lot of fun. Even if I knew the series was going off the deep end at this point, I had already seen New Nightmare and I knew the movies were capable of bouncing back into serious territory, and I was anxious to see Freddy being a creeper again.

AMC's Friday night lineup would never disappoint. Freddy's Revenge would always reel me in. You don't think about the sexual overtones as a kid. To me, it was just Freddy being a grotesque, sadistic creep. This was Springwood's character development, showcasing the lives of average high schoolers, and it made me grow up revering their emotional complexities. The movie was barely 10 years old by the time I'd seen it, but it already felt like a time capsule to me. They simply don't make movies like that anymore.

I would catch The Dream Master and The Dream Child on TV during the weekends. They were casual viewings that acted more as completionist goals than life-changing events, but I'd still tune in any chance I'd get, hoping to catch some important detail I missed the first time around. While these movies were going on, there was an entirely larger Freddy underworld going on that I was much more interested in: Freddy's Nightmares.

The Freddy TV series had largely evaded me for decades. It was almost considered lost until Tubi came to the rescue. Acting as the host in all episodes, Freddy was only prominent in maybe 7 episodes, but the series fleshed out the entire world of Springwood in ways the movies could never touch. These truly were the forgotten chapters that led to the decline of Springwood in Freddy's Dead.

Before I ever saw the show, I would always wonder about it. I'd seen VHS copies of a handful of episodes in the video store and would always wonder what on earth that could be, but Freddy vs. Jason came to me first.

I rented it shortly after it came out and quickly became obsessed. I was already a fan of Friday the 13th, and I'd heard rumors of the crossover for 10 years. The result was a total Freddy story with Jason stealing all the kills, but Freddy was still pulling all the strings, and it was such a satisfying experience that I would watch over and over again. I was eagerly awaiting a rematch, even hoping Ash would join the fight, but what we ended up getting was far worse.

After the letdown of Platinum Dunes Friday the 13th, I went into the Elm Street remake with low expectations and I was still disappointed. Let a music video director helm perhaps the greatest 80s horror film and you'll get a polished, lifeless retread of the franchise's greatest hits without any soul. This movie killed the franchise indefinitely, but thank God I had to the TV show to fall back on.

Once I caught up on Freddy's Nightmares, I got the real prequel to the Springwood Slasher. “Sister's Keeper” was was one of my favorites for being such a cruel twist of fate. Freddy had his own Halloween specials. This series was a goldmine in Springwood horror history and I'll never understand why it there aren't more people out there eating up every bit of Elm Street anthology tales that this show provides. The TV medium worked surprisingly well for Freddy, but don't get me started on The Goldbergs. That was just embarrassing.

After all these years, Robert Englund has gotten old and Wes Craven is no longer with us. It seems like Freddy may truly be gone at this point, but he certainly cut out his corner of history, dominating the 80s with his colorful, sadistic charm. You can try to emulate him, but there will never be another Fred Krueger.