After decades of Freddy Krueger movies, it's easy to forget where this killer came from
and why he became so iconic.
So we're taking a deep dive into the man behind the third-degree burns.
From his monstrous conception to his showdown with Jason, here's Freddy Krueger's backstory
explained.
Things were never going to be easy for Frederick Charles Krueger.
As chronicled in A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, his mother, Amanda Krueger,
was better known by her chosen name, Sister Mary Helena.
"It is an abomination to God and to man."
As a nun, she worked at the Hathaway House, an asylum for the criminally deranged.
A few days before Christmas 1941, Amanda found herself the victim of a mix-up.
She was locked inside the building when the guards went home for the long weekend, leaving
the high-security hospital unattended.
By the time she was found, she'd suffered a series of horrendous attacks at the hands
of the inmates and was pregnant with:
"The bastard son of a hundred maniacs."
Nine months later, a bouncing baby Freddy was born.
Never one to catch a break, he was adopted by an abusive alcoholic named Mr. Underwood.
What followed was, predictably, sort of a huge nightmare.
Understandably, Freddy was a troubled child.
His adopted dad was drunk all the time and seemed to take a great deal of joy in beating
his young ward with a belt.
At school, Freddy was taunted mercilessly for his heritage.
"Son of a hundred maniacs!
Son of a hundred maniacs!
Son of a hundred maniacs!"
He started to exhibit the telltale signs of a fictional serial killer, killing the class
hamster and getting a kick out of cutting himself with a straight razor.
Sadly, young Frederick never experienced a personal metamorphosis, and on one particularly
unfortunate day, unable to stomach the constant tirade of abuse from his adoptive dad, Freddy
jammed his razor blade deep into the eye socket of his father figure.
It could be argued that this was where any hopes of a happy life died, and the Springwood
Slasher was born.
The events of Freddy's young adult life are murky, and it's not clear whether or not he
ever faced any legal consequences for killing Mr. Underwood.
What is known is that by his mid-20s, Fred Krueger was in the family way.
He'd married a woman named Loretta who gave birth to a daughter, Katherine.
Together, they lived what was, to the casual observer, a simple, happy, family life.
Lying just beneath the surface, however, was a dark secret.
Freddy, unable to stem his unquenchable bloodlust, had constructed a secret room in the family's
suburban home.
Inside, he kept a series of homemade weapons, newspaper clippings, and memorabilia from
his off-hours hobby, which was slaughtering the children of Springwood, Ohio, as the mysterious
killer known as the Springwood Slasher.
"But I made 'em pay.
I took all their children away from them."
Marriage is, if nothing else, based on trust, and the Kruegers' home life hit a speed bump
when Loretta discovered Freddy's macabre man cave.
Freddy killed his wife in front of their young daughter, was later arrested for the deaths
of numerous local children, and Katherine was put into foster care under a new name.
The arrest and subsequent trial of Fred Krueger sparked high tempers in the good folks of
Springwood.
The evidence condemning the Springwood Slasher was damning, and justice for the roughly two
dozen children who died by his beknifed hand lay on the line.
Unfortunately, thanks to a misplaced signature and a drunken judge, Krueger was set free
despite clearly being guilty.
"Oh, the lawyers got fat and the judge got famous, but somebody forgot to sign the search
warrant in the right place, and Krueger was free, just like that."
The parents of Springwood, however, were less than inclined to follow suit.
The good folks of Springwood formed an old-fashioned vigilante mob, trapping Fred and soaking him
in gasoline before lighting him on fire.
Little did they know that as they watched the building burn to the ground, Krueger was
being approached by Dream Demons.
These supernatural entities offered Krueger the opportunity to carry on his sadistic ways
indefinitely as their otherworldly, antagonistic agent.
"We know what you want."
"I want it all!"
"Of course you do."
"Then open up."
"And you shall be forever!"
Krueger became a denizen of the Dream Realm, a plane of existence where human subconscious
thought takes place.
While there, he had the ability to manipulate reality and affect unconscious humans, as
long as he was still remembered and feared in the real world.
His control over the dream world seemed just about unlimited.
He could change his shape, move objects telepathically, and warp the physical manifestations of dreamers.
Additionally, any damage that Freddy caused in a dream also happened in the real world.
Blended into a geyser of blood and viscera in your nightmare?
Your parents are in for a double dose of tragedy as your death goes unexplained, and they never
to resell your otherwise lightly used mattress.
Being on the Dream Demon payroll has plenty of pluses, but it's not without some downsides.
For one, you're pretty well stuck in the Dream Realm, a supernatural blend of the collective
unconscious.
Re-entering the physical plane leads to nothing but trouble for Mr. Krueger, who becomes susceptible
to pain and even death.
"Kids."
In the meantime, life in the Dream Realm can be every bit as frustrating.
Generally speaking, Freddy can only consume the souls of the residents of Springwood,
barring outside intervention.
Even then, the powers only work when the good folks of Springwood harbor a healthy level
of active fear regarding Elm Street's favorite burn victim.
If nobody remembers Freddy, he's nothing more than a bad dream.
"Being dead wasn't a problem.
But being forgotten?
Now that's a b----."
Thirteen years after his unholy baptism by fire, Freddy made his first known appearance
in the form we've all come to know and lose sleep over in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
With his sick new menagerie of superpowers, he began to haunt the dreams of the children
of Springwood.
With vengeance for his death and skullduggery in his heart, he got down to the business
of gruesome child killing.
The first to go was Tina, who started off the story proper with a bad dream about a
disfigured, claw-handed man pursuing her through a boiler room.
Tina made the age-old mistake of being a romantically active teenager in a horror film, and she
paid for it in the form of a dream world glove-slashing.
Freddy would go on to drop Rod, Tina's boyfriend, with a swift strangulation, as well as Glen,
our hero Nancy's beau.
Nancy, meanwhile, managed to beat back the nefarious killer, using nothing but her wit
and her will.
"I take back every bit of energy I gave you.
You're nothing."
Or did she?
At the end of the film, she certainly seemed to lose out while Krueger played evil Knight
Rider.
If the ending of A Nightmare On Elm Street was strange, the entirety of A Nightmare On
Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was on a whole different level.
The rules that had held sway in the first film disappeared, and Freddy became a little
less dream monster and, for one brief entry in the franchise, a little more of a metaphor
for repressed romantic feelings between teenage boys.
"Something is trying to get inside my body."
"Yeah, and she's female and she's waiting for you in the cabana.
And you want to sleep with me."
The main character, Jesse, was an adolescent boy who moved into Nancy's old house on Elm
Street.
Rather than haunting the kid's dreams, Krueger would straight-up possess the lad, eventually
taking over his body and physically manifesting in his burned-up form.
The forces of something eventually won the day, and Freddy was sent back to the unconscious
realm.
It's certainly a cult classic, but not necessarily a classic classic.
Krueger was back to his old shenanigans in A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
All of the children of Elm Street had either been killed or driven mad, with the survivors
living together in an asylum.
Only, there was a twist!
The residents of the asylum were brought together by none other than Nancy Thompson from the
first movie, now working in the hospital while researching dreams for graduate school.
One of the patients, young Kristen Parker, had the ability to pull other people into
her dreams, where the folks inside were granted superpowers.
"Nancy!"
Freddy, it turned out, could be defeated if his bones were buried and sanctified, which
was something the good guys learned from the ghost of his dead mother.
Freddy wound up down for the count thanks to a hasty burial, and nobody ever heard from
him again.
Only they did.
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master saw Freddy's return, as Nightmare On Elm Street
sequels usually do.
Here, he bounced back in a big way and put down all of those pesky kids from Dream Warriors
like he was living some Scooby Doo villain's power fantasy.
He was taken down by Alice Johnson, a teenage sleep messiah and, quote, "Dream Master" capable
of manipulating good dreams the way Freddy controlled the bad.
"How do you handle your nightmares?"
"My mom taught me, when I was little.
Did you ever hear of the Dream Master?"
But you can't keep a good son of a hundred maniacs down, and Freddy, confusingly, birthed
himself from the spirit of his dead mother in the fifth film, The Dream Child.
He then tried possessing Alice's unborn baby, but he wound up reverting back to infancy
and was re-absorbed by his ghost mom.
All of which brings us to Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.
Set years after the previous films in a Biff Tannen-esque future where Freddy finally achieved
his goals, the movie takes place in a Springwood devoid of youth thanks to the knife-handed
maniac.
By the time the credits rolled, Freddy was reunited with his long-lost daughter, who
pulled him into the physical world and gave him a thorough stabbing, sending Krueger to
Hell once and for all.
Ish.
These days, any brand-friendly fictional character worth their salt has been revamped, rebooted,
and re-imagined at least half a dozen times.
Freddy Krueger managed to get a head start on the trend with the decidedly bananas Wes
Craven's New Nightmare.
Released in 1994, back when fourth walls were still considered to be generally load bearing,
New Nightmare posited that an embodiment of evil could be contained within the essence
of a fictional character, and that the concept of Freddy Krueger had become the home of one
such entity.
Within the film, this supernatural force broke free of the confines of the fictional world,
wreaking havoc on the production of a proposed new Nightmare on Elm Street entry and attacking
the real-world people involved in creating the series.
"He's been held captive pretty much as Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but
now that the films have ended, the genie's out of the bottle."
Bonkers?
Totally, and maybe a little less relatable than the relatively straightforward agent
of ancient nightmare demons that audiences had become accustomed to.
A monster is only as good as its over-the-top smackdowns, and Freddy Krueger has a decent
history of playing king of the hill with other fictional freak shows.
The most famous of these came in the form of 2003's Freddy vs. Jason, the critically
panned but long-awaited cross promotional extravaganza.
If things went just a little bit differently, Freddy would've had a whole new fight on his
unwieldy knife hands.
According to the screenwriters on Freddy vs. Jason, one potential ending that was scrapped
over rights issues involved Krueger and Jason in Hell together being taunted by Pinhead
of the Hellraiser series.
Luckily enough for fans who felt like there was beef left unsquashed by the crossover,
a sequel comic was released a few years later, and it added the one thing that can, mathematically,
only improve on as a product sprinkled in liberally: Bruce Campbell.
The 2007 mini series Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash is difficult not to love.
Out from the self-aware '90s and the kind-of-a-drag early 2000s came the dark age of gritty, ill-received
reboots.
And lo, there was 2010's A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Jumping in at the tail end of that couple of years when superheroes weren't quite 100
percent viable money printing machines and nostalgia still seemed like the Hollywood
team to beat, the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot had all of the hallmarks of its time.
Heavily color filtered, devoid of comic relief, and starring a lead actor who was probably
too good for the material, it spoke its truth.
"Hey," it seemed to say to the world, "what if Freddy Krueger, generally the only person
in these movies who seems to be having a good time, was just gross and creepy and looked
like a ghoul from Fallout 3?"
"How's this for a wet dream?"
And audiences responded with a mighty "who cares?"
The movie was a box office disappointment, and it somehow managed to nab a lower Rotten
Tomatoes score than the great American cash grab that was Freddy vs. Jason.
Positive aspects included some genuinely unsettling nightmare sequences.
Less defensible points in the film were...pretty much everything else.
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