A to Z Challenge Day 6: Freddy Krueger (the Nightmare Demon)

I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was a kid I was a right awful wuss. I watched shows like, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, but I did so through my fingers as I cowered from the corner of the couch. I read books like Goosebumps, but I’d have the light of a thousand suns burning in my room while I was doing so. I loved scary stuff and yet hated it at the same time. It was the silliest thing, really. I wanted ghosts and creepy ruins and all manner of monsters, but the second I had them it was like my heart said, “Okay, that’s enough, bye!”

It wasn’t until I started dating the man who would become my husband that I really started getting into horror movies, because he was a connoisseur of them, particularly the older ones, and the ones of the B-movie variety. It wasn’t until we were firmly seated within our relationship that I saw my  very first Nightmare on Elm Street movie. That’s right, in the year 2006 or so, I had never seen a movie starring Freddy Krueger. What the hell, right?

As it turns out, the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks were some of my hubby’s all-time favorites, and within the span of a few months I wound up watching every single one of them. Now, I’m not going to say that they were all cinematic masterpieces or anything. In fact, some of them are downright god-awful. However, since my hubby first began the slow process of completely desensitizing me to all things that go bump in the night, Freddy became quite possibly my favorite of all the horror movie icons. Why? Well for one thing, he’s creative. Being a nightmare demon has it’s perks, and a big one is that he gets to do or become effectively anything he wants. How totally cool is that? For another thing, Freddy is evil as hell, and I like that in a demon. I mean, come on…he’s all about killing kids. That is messed up. And finally, one of my favorite things about the Freddy character is that he was created because of the evil that exists even in innocent people. Spoiler alert, if you somehow have never heard of the story of Freddy Krueger before, but he became an immortal nightmare demon because he was burned alive by angry parents after he escaped child molestation charges on a technicality. There are other aspects to the story that are revealed in further films in the story, but the main plot point is that the parents of Elm Street, in their rage, took a child molester and turned him into a mass murderer who kills kids in their dreams. How screwed up is that for the adult characters, knowing that their vigilante justice ultimately got their kids killed?

Call me a psycho, but I’m a sucker for a good, creepy, outrageously uncomfortable-feeling-making back-story, and that Freddy Krueger has in spades.