Freddy Krueger is one of the most culturally iconic screen villains of all time and in this article we’re going to explore some of the factors that have contributed to his enduring popularity. Especially we’ll be exploring elements that are not so obvious to the casual viewer, but instead play on the viewer’s unconscious. For example, those four red stripes on his sweater are like giant subliminal slash marks from his own finger knives.
Before we start delving deeper though, I want to differentiate between two basic versions of Freddy. The first is the original and scariest version of the character that was present in the very first Nightmare on Elm St film, released in 1984. In this movie Freddy was a more mysterious villain because of our lack of familiarity with him – we slowly became familiar as he was gradually revealed to the main character Nancy. But in a lot of the sequels Freddy took on a more comedic tone, wherein his kills became funnier and he seemed to be winking to the audience about it, sometimes gleefully looking into the camera during or after a kill. The movies became more of a Halloween funhouse ride of amusingly inventive kills with Freddy was inviting us to play along with him. They were very fun movies, especially parts three and four of the series, but they were a lot less scary than the first movie that firmly established the character. So this study will be focused on how Freddy was portrayed in the first and still scariest film of the series.
Shortly, we’re going to get into Freddy’s physical image, but first I want to outline a conceptual element. Because Freddy exists in the realm of dreams, almost everything he does has psychological and logistical credibility. Anything can happen in a dream and so writer / director Wes Craven was free to have Freddy do anything he could think of. He could have Freddy appear one hundred feet tall if he wanted to and not have to worry about audience suspension of disbelief.
This absolute freedom from the limitations of physical and logistical reality benefits the character in two major ways. First, it makes him endlessly fascinating because of the limitless variations in how he appears and behaves – much like the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), except Freddy has an even greater range of physical possibilities. Craven could have him appear as a black widow spider with a Freddy face if he wanted to. And just two seconds later Freddy could switch to something completely different without spoiling audience immersion. To that effect Freddy is always interesting, as long as the film maker is using his imagination. And second, this lack of physical and logistical limitations makes the character continuously unpredictable and therefore continuously scary. He seems to have an endless range of unpredictable powers and abilities, making him a non-stop threat.
This potent anything can happen dream logic framing doesn’t just work within the film. It subliminally works on the audience after the film is ended. If somebody watches the film and then has a dream about the character then Freddy becomes literally real in the mind of the dreamer. The very concept of Freddy existing in dreamland allows the character to infect the mind of the viewer, to step out of the movie itself, and become a tormenter of the viewer in their own dreams. Viewers can tell themselves after they wake up that it was just a dream, but when they’re in the dream Freddy is as real for them as he is to Tina and Nancy in the movie itself. Comparatively, there are a lot of ghost stories and spiritual possession horror movies that can infect the personal reality of the viewer after the film is over, but they are very limited if the viewer doesn’t believe in ghosts, spirits and demons. Freddy Krueger doesn’t have this problem because the realm of dreams is present in the minds of all human beings regardless of their spiritual beliefs. Once the viewer has seen the film the character effectively becomes a reality in their own unconscious and is able to torment them when they are asleep. This is a unique and powerful element of the Freddy character.
In fact one of the film’s very best and most powerful moments is when Nancy, being pursued by Freddy, looks in a mirror and tries to tell herself “it’s just a dream, it isn’t real” only to have Freddy burst out of the mirror with a guttural roar and attack her directly. It’s his way of saying, “Sorry Nancy, I’m real”. But having him burst out from her own reflection is poignant too. He does exist because he exists in her own mind. Her own thoughts about Freddy Krueger make him real in the dream, regardless as to whether the character ever existed as a flash and blood person in the real world.
Lets’ now explore Freddy’s physical image. The red and green striped sweater colour scheme was decided upon by Craven because he had read that green and red are a psychologically jarring clash of colours in the human psyche. I don’t think that quite comes across in the film though because most of the time Freddy is seen in dark environments that make his sweater appear red and black. In the original script though, his sweater was described as red and yellow stripes. Yellow isn’t far off the colour of human flesh. For me that fits more strongly with the idea that the red stripes are giant subliminal slash marks, conveying the threat of four blades slicing across the flesh of a victim.
Regarding the unique finger knives Freddy uses, they’re like the claws of a wild animal – perhaps a bear or a cat. We humans have an inbuilt fear of being scratched by wild predators. Tied in with this we have the burnt brown skin of Freddy’s face. In the logistical plot of the film the reason for his flesh appearance is that he was burnt alive by neighbourhood parents, but I think that’s a cover for the psychological implications of his flesh. There’s nothing stopping Freddy from appearing to his dreamland victims the way he was before he was burned alive. It’s his choice to manifest with burnt skin because it’s more terrifying for his victims. The burnt skin makes him appear more like an animal. And, like with a wild animal approaching for the kill, it makes the whites or yellows of his eyes and teeth standout. Actor Robert Englund plays on this in by specifically baring his eyes and teeth in multiple scenes. This wide eyed, wide mouth gritting of teeth is powerful in horror imagery because it conveys both sadistic glee and the threat of an animal about to bite.
The subliminal predatory animal framing extends to Freddy’s voice, which sounds so guttural it’s like the hisses and growls of an animal. Even the name Krueger I’ve always thought sounds suspiciously like the word Cougar. That might be incidental, but something not incidental is an image of a cat human hybrid in a red shirt seen in the hospital scenes (the image appears a a background poster prop). Freddy is like a humanoid cat prowling for the kill.
The burnt skin factor also makes Freddy appear sweaty and dirty, like he’s diseased and infectious. And it makes him look old, like he’s the “dirty old man” down the street who parents have told their kids to stay away from. Incidentally the disease factor is strongly present in two scenes. Slicing his own fingers off, he has yellow-green blood. And when he has Nancy cornered in the school basement he slices open his own nipple and yellow-green puss and worms are seen underneath. Aside from his sweater, the rest of Freddy’s image appears to continue the theme of dirtiness. His hat is brown. His bladed glove is brown. And his trousers and boots are black. And another animal that Freddy reminds me of, on account of his pointy face and small slim stature, is a rat. A dirty rat like one might find in a basement boiler room. And, culturally, we often refer to untrustworthy back stabbers as rats.
Given Freddy’s powers of physical transformation in the dream realm he doesn’t have to appear to his victims the way he does, but he chooses to because this particular appearance plays on multiple unconscious fears of his victims and the film’s audience.
Now let’s get more into Freddy’s behaviour. The first thing is that he has unlimited abilities, making him a villain who cannot be defeated and cannot be escaped from. There’s nowhere to run because he can teleport to any place he wants and assume any form he wishes. There’s nowhere to hide because he can alter the environment at will, such as making a wall magically appear behind Nancy after she enters the dream version of the school basement. Hide in cupboard and he can just teleport into the cupboard with you. Anything his victim fears or imagines he can do.
This basically means he can kill his prey any time he wishes, but he likes to slowly increase the emotional torment over a period of time before the kill. Let them have a handful of dreams where he nearly gets them right before he lets them wake up … then do the actual kill after this tormenting phase. In fact it seems that he wants to totally kill his target’s entire sense of hope before the physical attack. Kill their mind then their body.
Freddy is very intelligent in how he goes about this gradual torment task. In Nancy’s case he kills her friends and her boyfriend first to mentally wear her down, letting her know she’s next in line and removing the people from her life who she would typically turn to for help and support. He’s isolating her.
He also fatigues his victims by confusing their waking reality with dream reality. If they fall asleep he’ll initially create a dream environment that matches the place where they fell asleep so that they don’t even realize they’re dreaming. As a result they lose trust of their actual waking state because they can never tell whether they’re awake or asleep. So the fear of a sudden Krueger attack is constant. There’s not a moment of respite from it.
An even sneakier tactic is Freddy posing as his previous victims to torment his current prey. In the school scene we see what looks like Nancy’s dead friend Tina, stood in the hall in a blood-soaked body bag, but it’s actually Krueger himself. He makes a claw gesture against the inside of the bag, subliminally indicating he is going to slice Nancy as well … and when the body is dragged off in the hall that’s just Freddy again impersonating Nancy and magically moving himself about. In the same instance, Freddy implies himself to have the power of invisibility, being that we can’t see whoever is dragging Tina’s body. how can one escape a villain who can turn invisible? Then he pretends to be a girl walking the halls who happens to be a wearing a red and green striped sweater. There’s nobody else in the scene, it’s just Freddy playing multiple roles.
On the one hand posing as Tina lures Nancy out of class and down to the basement, but it’s also a way for Krueger to remind his target what is in store for her. Even worse, psychologically, is the suggestion that being killed by Freddy isn’t an escape in itself. Once he kills you you’re trapped with him where he can chase you forever through his basement boiler lair. Even death by his finger blades can’t release you from his torment.
His apparent ability to imprison the souls of his victims basically makes Freddy equivalent to the devil himself, as if he is Satan. Maybe even the rim of his hat can be taken as subliminal horns. When he presents himself to Tina in the alley on the night he kills her, she sees him and says “Please God”, to which Freddy raises his bladed glove and replies, “This is God”. It’s like he’s calling himself God, but not in the positive sense. And, to that effect, his basement boiler labyrinth where he takes his victims is basically Hell itself. He is also effectively the Grim Reaper, his presence a warning of impending death. Right before he kills Tina he lets her pull the flesh from his face, revealing a deathly laughing skull beneath.
Yet another psychological fear tactic used by Freddy is his tendency to inflict wounds upon himself in front of his prey. He tells Tina to watch while he slices two of his own fingers off. He slices his own nipple open in front of Nancy. Even the act of presenting himself with a burnt face could be taken as an intention to burn his own victims, be it in one of his basement ovens or in the fires of hell itself. These self-wounds are his emotionally cruel way of showing the girls what kinds of agony he intends to subject them to. And it establishes, without a shred of doubt, his total lack of empathy. If he can inflict these acts on himself he can certainly inflict them upon others. He’s not just indifferent to the pain of his victims. He intensely enjoys it just as he enjoys inflicting these wounds on himself. He takes sadistic glee in the infliction of wounds. And adding to all that we have his tendency to humiliate. He smirks, grins and outright laughs at the total terror and agony expressed by his victims.
The psychological attack doesn’t even stop there. Freddy shows many signs of sexual motivation, just like real world serial killers do. He attacks Tina as she runs about in her night gown and kills her in her own bed after she has had sex with her boyfriend. It’s like Freddy wants a piece of the pie. He flicks his tongue at Nancy in the school basement scene, licks her lips in a surrealist phone call and raises his gloved hand between her legs as she’s naked in the bath tub. His heavy breathing, heard echoing through his basement lair, is like the lustful breathing of a perverted old man. These are all sexual implications. Like a typical serial killer he has his sexual and violent urges cross wired.
Given that when he was a flesh and blood man his victims were children, his sexual behaviour effectively makes him a paedophile. If there’s one real life serial killer I’d compare him to it would be the child cannibal Albert Fish, who didn’t just eat his victims. He did plenty of others things to them of a reproductive urge nature – horrific things that even the most daring horror films don’t show.
The censors, film critics and audiences likely wouldn’t have accepted the Freddy Krueger character if he was shown doing to kids what he does to the teens characters in the movie, but the implication is there anyway. These teen characters basically symbolize children to the slaughter. So when a bunch of them are driven off at the end of the film in a locked car, presumably to be killed by Freddy, the shot stops on a group of kids in the foreground singing their Freddy song – the same children’s song heard many times throughout the film. At the plot level, Freddy targets the teen victims of the parents who had killed him in life, but at the more important unconscious and symbolic level, these teenagers ARE kids to the slaughter.
There’s one last concept I’d like to finish with. Freddy, with his unlimited dream realm powers, is the equivalent of a film maker. At will, he controls set design, lighting and sound effects, along with everything else. He effectively writes and directs almost every aspect of the dream reality scenes. And he does so, not just to torment the characters, but to torment the audience who are watching the film.
So there you go folks, there’s lots going on with classic screen villain Freddy Krueger.. He is one of the most psychologically tactful movie villains of all time. There’s lots more going on in the movie so if you’re interested go check out the two hour plus study A Nightmare on Elm Street, which is available on the Film Analysis page of my website www.collativelearning.com.
Until next time folks, this is Rob Ager signing off. Sweet dreams.