Freddy Krueger Was a Fun Horror Icon Until This Moment Ruined Him

The Big Picture

• A Nightmare on Elm Street
  creator Wes Craven originally conceived Freddy Krueger as a child molester and murderer, but reimagined him out of respect for real-world abuse victims.
• Despite his dark origins and gruesome kills, Freddy Krueger became a pop culture icon thanks to his dry humor and Robert Englund’s charismatic performance.
• An abrupt, needless, and distasteful rape joke in
  Freddy vs. Jason
  taints an otherwise entertaining movie, especially for femme fans who value the franchise.

No one expects slasher villains to be upstanding citizens. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Sawyer family? Cannibals. Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees? Violent proponents for the idea that “bad behavior” (sex, drugs, and alcohol) warrants punishment. Along similar lines, Wes Craven originally envisioned A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) as a child molester as well as a child murderer. According to the book Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven by Brian J. Robb, that was “the most evil, corrupt thing [Craven] could think of.” Fitting enough for the fictional manifestation of our worst nightmares, and too heinously realistic for a box office-courting popcorn flick — Craven removed the angle following the 1983 abuse accusations at California’s McMartin preschool.

Without that vile baggage, audience reception and franchise fervor turned Krueger, initially a menacing figure, into a pop culture icon. He’s the slasher with a personality, you know? He’s funny, even cool, at one point literally sliding on sunglasses while hanging out at the beach. (Talk about on-the-nose humor.) A Nightmare on Elm Street is the only classic slasher that operates according to the sheer charisma of its star, and Robert Englund growl-croons even the worst one-liners with enough disarming charm to blaze down a skyscraper. That is until Freddy vs. Jason, the movie fans spent years craving. For 95% of its runtime, Freddy vs. Jason is a rip-roaring, outrageously silly concept that embraces its goofiness. Then the unstoppable force of Englund’s wit meets the immovable object that is egregious writing, personified by one 60-second scene, tainting all the fun we’ve been having up until this point.

What Is the Worst ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ Scene?

Personally speaking, A Nightmareon Elm Street is my favorite horror series. It’s a franchise I cling to and therefore feel oddly protective about. When friends and family wanted to watch it, I rattled off disclaimers: “Yes, this can be a hot mess, but it’s my hot mess.” It’s the “I can critique this, but I won’t hear any slander from you!” situation. Part of it boils down to formative nostalgia. A lifelong horror maven, a cardboard cut-out of Freddy Krueger gave me childhood nightmares. Then I spent my teen years obsessed with the ingenious concept, the amusingly contradictory lore, the dynamic heroines, and, of course, Robert Englund’s visceral wiles. I met Englund and Heather Langenkamp at fan conventions. Reading the former’s autobiography is why I attended film school (and from that logic, why you’re reading these words). The joy I took from Nightmare‘s thrills made me a self-aware apologist for its silliest cinematic errors.

Freddy vs. Jason entered this daydream like a jumpscare stinger. I missed the theatrical run, but that’s why Blockbuster (and very indulgent parents) existed. At first, my man Freddy is at the top of his game, once again evidencing the frightening edge he lost without Wes Craven’s supervision. Freddy slinks his way through Jason’s dreamscape like a master manipulator. He’s gloating, cackling, and enabling the massacres of this poor neighborhood’s teenage demographic. It’s a suitable victory lap for Englund’s final feature-length bow in his career-defining role.

With roughly 30 minutes to go, Freddy then corners final girl Lori Campbell (Monica Keena). He pins her body to the floor and makes graphic rape jokes. 21 years ago, it felt like a betrayal. Today, it’s a foul taste in my mouth at best and an infuriating trigger at worst. A minute-long sequence tarnishes what was otherwise a safe space for femme-identifying fans. Now, you may ask, how can I argue such a stance about the guy whose most famous quips include calling women “bitches”?

‘Freddy vs. Jason’ Misses the Franchise’s Nuance

No one can deem Freddy Krueger a feminist icon after The Bathtub Scene in the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. Or when he taunts “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy,” and turns Nancy’s landline phone into a licking tongue. Combine this canonical moment with Wes Craven’s original intent, and it’s murky ground. Nevertheless, this is where the behavior of a serial killer troll diverges from active, concentrated misogyny. Freddy Krueger is a buffet line of gleefully malicious sadism. He might not deploy gendered slurs against his male victims, but he annihilates everyone equally.

For instance, let’s not forget the complicated legacy behind A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, which developed a cult following for, and a documentary about, its homoerotic themes (connotations that were intentional on screenwriter David Chaskin‘s part, confirmed by Chaskin via the Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy special). In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy kills Joey Crusel (Rodney Eastman) by tempting him with a naked woman and then drowning him in a water bed — a wet dream joke, in other words.

What Freddy Krueger doesn’t do is habitually drop rape-related wisecracks, corner women into sexually charged kill scenes, or exhibit targeted behavior. “Bitch,” while a favored word in his otherwise erudite vocabulary, is just one insult in his arsenal. “I’m your boyfriend now” foreshadows the death of Nancy’s boyfriend and her inability to save him. Not even A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, where Freddy tries to possess Alice Johnson’s (Lisa Wilcox) unborn child, approaches the topic of assault. When the Nightmare franchise incorporates sex, it’s because sex is a teenage experience and anxiety. It turns threatening when Freddy weaponizes the scenario, and because of the real-world horrors associated with such vulnerability. Call that splitting hairs, but sometimes a single strand makes all the difference.

‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Isn’t Perfect, but It’s Progressive

The Freddy and Lori scenario in Freddy vs. Jason isn’t even a mildly creative dream. Pull the dialogue, and just from the setting and cinematography angles, it’s staged to evoke rape. He keeps her pinned to a wooden floor while he slices her skin. As she’s crying and bleeding, the camera framing emphasizes her half-covered breasts while Freddy leers above them. “I should warn you,” he sneers, “the first time tends to get a little messy.” He drags up the hem of her nightgown with one finger blade while Lori keeps helplessly weeping.

Femme individuals adore horror because it pushes boundaries. It provides catharsis by exploring dark themes, which usually involve threats to our bodily safety and autonomy. When told by femme creators, subgenres like rape and revenge exist for reasons beyond exploitation. For all that Freddy Krueger embodies our bleakest nightmares, there’s no equivalent between his world and discombobulated writing that reeks of edgelord tendencies. Not only does the moment between Freddy and Lori weaponize rape as a cheap scare tactic (it doesn’t address the subject in depth, nor does it dive into the emotional fallout for Lori), it reduces sexual assault to a punchline. When other horror films address rape, it’s not because a longstanding villain abruptly jokes about anatomy. Scream, for example, never minimizes or glamorizes the rape of Maureen Prescott. For her daughter, Sydney Prescott, losing her mother to such violence contextualizes Sydney’s trauma. Freddy threatening Lori with symbolic or legitimate rape contributes nothing to her character arc or the wider film.

To add insult to injury, making Lori a victim during her quest to pull Freddy into the real world, a technique developed by Nancy Thompson, fundamentally misunderstands Nightmare’s purpose. Before Nancy, no slasher heroine brought the fight to her tormenter. She reappropriates victimhood into active survival. She schemes, she defies, and if New Line Cinema hadn’t wanted a franchise, Wes Craven would’ve let her permanently vanquish her enemy. Heather Langenkamp told Vulture for their 2014 retrospective: “Nowadays in films, there’s a lot of care about presenting the lead female in a way that will turn guys on. With Nancy, it was the opposite. That’s why people love Nancy so much — she looks like an average teenager. She has ugly hair. She’s wearing a pair of boy’s jeans. All of her clothes are kind of pink.”

Even when other women replace Nancy as the protagonist, her spirit lives on. Young girls are almost unanimously responsible for defeating Freddy, and with flair — whether that’s martial arts or mental ingenuity. Out of A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s many virtues, this was my clarion call. It’s cathartic for Lori to behead Freddy at the end of Freddy vs. Jason, but we didn’t need to be here in the first place. Freddy Krueger spent two decades tormenting women, and making us root for their triumphs — we absolutely did not need to add rape subtext into the equation. Frankly, the “joke” is so grossly mishandled and promptly dismissed that it hardly qualifies as subtext — just crass laziness. I was 14 years old when I saw Freddy vs. Jason. With one deplorably unnecessary moment, the film I had spent months fervently anticipating left me feeling slapped across the face. Nancy Thompson’s legacy was violated, and so was the safe niche I’d carved out for myself within the A Nightmare on Elm Street series.

This Scene Wasn’t Worth Ruining Fans’ Experiences

A creator’s original intent matters. It informs the product, and there’s an argument for fleshing out subtext. The A Nightmare on Elm Street remake makes the molestation layer explicit, even if the reason for resurrecting that angle demonstrates a baffling lack of imagination for a supernatural horror. Before the 2010 reboot dropped, producer Brad Fuller told Bloody Disgusting:

“The fact is, if it were someone who had killed a bunch of children, there’s no way to keep that a secret, there’s no story to tell because the kids have to figure out what’s happening to them. […] that would be on the Internet, and people would be able to find it. So we had to figure out some other ways to tell the story. […] We thought if we’re going back to tell the first one, let’s do it in a way that maybe they couldn’t or chose not to originally.”

As issue 227 of Fangoria reveals in its deep dive about the many years Freddy vs. Jason languished in development hell, “everything from Jason Voorhees on trial for his crimes to Freddy Krueger turning out to be a Jason-molesting camp counselor at Crystal Lake found their way into the myriad disparate plotlines.” Even though the script went through many drafts, Lori’s torture scene shows how Wes Craven’s abandoned conceit wormed its way in with more tenacity than the giant Freddy-headed worm in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

For all that Death of the Author exists, intention and canon still diverge (and critique thrives inside the hairs we split). Out of respect to the real-world molestation accusations occurring synonymous with A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s production, Wes Craven reduced that idea to “blink and you’ll miss it” minutia. However, just because a concept was discarded doesn’t mean it should be retroactively incorporated after seven movies. An already divisive remake is one thing. Freddy vs. Jason is another. This moment with Lori is tasteless, baseless, and low-hanging fruit. Worst of all, it reads aggressively hostile toward femme viewers. Wiggle room to debate specificities is room enough for us to transform a horror hellscape into a safe avenue to explore our fears, have our imaginations invigorated, and facepalm-laugh over Freddy Krueger’s god-awful puns and braggadocious swagger. Freddy vs. Jason violated that unspoken contract when it decided to alienate so many viewers with a lazy, nasty joke.

Freddy vs. Jason is available to stream on Max.

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