The Nightmare on Elm Street series is one of horror's most enduring franchises. Throughout the
series, a whole lot has changed about this dream demon. But some things stay the same in the town
of Springwood, Ohio. Here are some things that happen in every Nightmare on Elm Street movie.
Freddy leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, but no matter how many people he slaughters,
he can never seem to kill that Final Girl. The main hero of the Nightmare on Elm Street
movies always gets away. Even when it looked like he killed Nancy in the original film,
she showed up in Dream Warriors very much alive.
Granted, the Final Girl always has a tough time. She barely out-maneuvers
Freddy throughout the story while he hacks and slashes her friends.
And in the end, just when it seems like Freddy is about to add the Final Girl to his score,
she pulls the rug out from under our big burned boy, and Freddy’s the one who ends up dead.
Of course, sometimes, the Final Girl in one movie becomes a "regular girl" in a subsequent movie.
At that point, all bets are off, and Freddy may very well shuffle her off this mortal coil.
And we should also point out that not all Final Girls are actually girls. In Freddy's Revenge,
that role falls to Jesse Walsh, who's technically a Final Boy. Granted,
his fate is left somewhat ambiguous at the end of the film, but we never see him die,
and if Nancy survived her bizarro dream ending, we're sure Jesse is probably fine.
Freddy always attacks his victims in their dreams. His victims occasionally
figure out how to pull him into the real world, but Freddy begins
stalking potential human pincushions in the astral plane before it gets to that point.
That's also one of the main reasons why Freddy makes such an unsettling figure.
Everyone has to sleep, and if Freddy attacks in dreams where he has absolute power,
then Freddy can kill anyone at any time, any way he wants to.
Ergo, every Nightmare on Elm Street film contains scenes of characters drinking coffee,
munching down caffeine pills, blasting loud music directly into their earholes,
and engaging in various other activities designed to avoid or delay sleep.
It's a futile effort — but the cannon fodder kids in Nightmare movies all have to try.
Oddly enough, the Freddy movies depict relationships between teenagers and their
adult guardians reasonably accurately. As anyone who remembers being a teenager knows, whenever
teens find themselves trapped in life-or-death battles against demonic forces, they immediately
learn that parents, teachers, and professional mental health experts are all completely useless.
Making matters worse, grownups typically insist the kids are simply stressed out and need a nap.
These so-called "responsible" people always claim the unholy menace doesn't exist when, in fact,
some of them personally helped burn him alive after the judge let him off on a technicality.
Nancy's dad provides an exception that proves the rule in Nightmare 3:
Dream Warriors when he tries to come through for the gang at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Center.
Even then, he was a major skeptic in the first film, and he only decides to
be useful after he develops alcoholism due to Freddy killing Nancy's mom. In the real world,
if a grownup happens to be chronically depressed and constantly drunk,
that grownup will be about as effective against supernatural malevolence as a bag of potatoes.
For slasher fans, there's a sadistic glee in witnessing homicidal mayhem that would traumatize
us all into a coma if we saw it happen in real life. This is extra true for Nightmare devotees
because Freddy kills any way he feels like killing, even if it defies the laws of physics.
Johnny Depp made his big-screen debut as Nancy's well-meaning boyfriend — in the
original 1984 movie. Freddy pulls Glen into what may be Hell, then shoots his blood back
up through his mattress, soaking the bedroom ceiling in a geyser of crimson Glen juice.
In later films, Freddy's homicidal tendencies take a turn for the goofy and gimmicky.
There's a character who likes comic books in Nightmare 5: The Dream Child, so Freddy
physically sucks him into a comic book and cuts him up while he's two-dimensional.
There's a character who smokes weed in Freddy's Dead, so Freddy turns into a
psychedelic hallucination and kills him that way. Sometimes he takes himself seriously,
but other times, Freddy is basically Willy Wonka, except a troupe of Oompa
Loompas don't appear to sing a judgmental song after he destroys a young human life.
One of the most disturbing things about Freddy is how he can morph and
manipulate his body whenever he feels like it. It's a staple of the series.
For example, Freddy makes his arms grow absurdly long right before he indulges
in his first onscreen taste of slaughter. In the second film, he explodes out of a
young man's midsection, then heads across the room to stab another hapless teen.
But Freddy doesn't get genuinely hyped about shapeshifting until Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors.
He morphs his fingers into syringes to murder a recovering addict, becomes a big ol' worm,
and he turns himself into a television set before electrocuting a mentally ill girl to death.
Even in New Nightmare, Freddy puts Gene Simmons to shame with his ever-growing tongue.
Stabbing and slashing might be Freddy's go-to choice for a quick and easy notch
on his belt. But when it comes time to kill someone in the weirdest manner possible,
this slasher never hesitates to change himself into some of the most ridiculous stuff imaginable.
One of the creepiest things about Freddy Krueger is that he's got his own theme song.
And the frightening tune makes an appearance in every film.
Most of the time, it's a small group of little kids singing it to keep time while they skip rope.
Since Freddy’s methods vary to wild extremes depending on the characteristics of his victim,
Freddy doesn't have a signature catchphrase because no single pun or one-liner would be
effective for the majority of his murdering. But the wholesome image of little kids skipping rope
serves the same purpose, both on a visual and sonic level. As we know from many other films,
little kids in horror movies are the creepiest things ever. All they have
to do is walk into a shot, sing a spooky song, and it'll make you pee your pants on the spot.
There aren't a ton of constants that stick throughout Nightmare movies. But if you're a total
psycho who genuinely wants to see Freddy Krueger come out on top, then the experience of watching
these films must make for a profoundly frustrating experience. Why? Because Freddy always loses.
Freddy walks away with his fair share of consolation prizes, no doubt. After his
inevitable vanquishing, he might jump out of seemingly nowhere and snatch up someone's mom,
he might put his razor hand through a young woman's torso, or he might wink at the camera
as Jason Voorhees carries his severed head off-screen. He wins these sneaky, after-the-fact
victories that mainly serve to leave the door open for a possible sequel. But that's only
after he comes up short in whatever his primary goal happened to be during the particular story.
He can't win because one or more of his prospective victims always manages to outsmart
and outmatch him. But if Freddy Krueger's purpose is to kill a handful of people, face defeat,
then return in a couple of years when studio executives decide it’s time for another movie,
maybe the concepts of winning and losing don't concern him that much.
Perhaps Freddy Krueger is just a guy with a job to do, like the rest of us.
The slasher subgenre frequently finds itself accused of sameness and redundancy — and
rightly so. Plenty of slasher movies are exactly the same. An invincible monster is introduced, and
one by one, it cuts down a roster of attractive 20-something actors playing high schoolers.
A sole-surviving protagonist vanquishes the adversary and escapes, and then the movie ends.
However, filmmakers started taking risks with Freddy as early as the first sequel.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge repurposes Robert Englund's signature villain
into a metaphor for repressed homosexuality. The third movie, Dream Warriors, takes place in a
mental asylum for troubled youths. At one point, Freddy turns into a giant worm version of himself
to eat a young Patricia Arquette. It's not as bold as Freddy's Revenge, but it's definitely shocking.
The first three Nightmare films are all totally distinct from each other. And the following three
movies are all too ridiculous to be predictable. Freddy turns his victims into a supernatural
pizza in Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. That's not even scary. It's just bonkers.
Things get especially wild with New Nightmare, where director Wes Craven turns the metatextual
irony up to 11 by having Krueger be an actual demon that exists outside the Nightmare movies.
"Love ya babe! We’ll do lunch”
In other words, Freddy Krueger doesn't repeat himself. His movies might not all be great,
but at least he's never boring.