T w e n t y S i d e d

We have talked about how two of the three major franchise slasher villains started out: Michael Myers was real in a manner-of-speaking, but was more of an idea; while Pamela Voorhees and later her son Jason were very straight-forward human serial killers. Freddy Krueger, from A Nightmare on Elm Street, deserves some deeper analysis. Until you get to the final scene of the first movie, Fred Krueger is a now-dead child murderer (the script, even to the point of shooting as far as I can tell, explicitly called him a child r***ist but real-life events during production prompted the change). His appearance in the dreams of the children (keep in mind all of the major characters in the film ARE WRITTEN as mid-teenage…15 and 16 years old) is *implied* to be a form of psychic emanation caused by the collective trauma of THEIR PARENTS. The people who burned Fred Krueger alive when his murder case was thrown out before conviction on a technicality. This is born out, more-or-less, when Nancy confronts Krueger, telling him he doesn’t scare her anymore (shades of “You have no power over me!”) She turns her back on Freddy and he poofs into nothingness as he lunges toward her.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Horror Slasher Evolution: What Is Freddy Krueger?”

Paige Francis He/him

I’m about halfway through the Freddy Krueger/A Nightmare on Elm Street article, but got overwhelmed by circumstances. As an example, we were gonna have a birthday dinner last night with my father. Since making Thanksgiving (United States) plans last week went so well, my Mother agreed to let my Dad’s surviving siblings have a get-together at their house earlier in the day. There’s a whole history here that makes this challenging and problematic, mostly centered around all of them being in their 80’s and dealing with a variety of physical needs and debilitation. THEN there’s the mental and emotional side, which has a lot more to do with my Dad’s family being extremely opinionated and sharing some kind of religio-social-family-centered narcissism. Basically as long as you can keep the air out of their tires (don’t let them all get together at once, keep the circumstances tightly controlled, distract them constantly, etc.) it can be managed. But right after my Mother decided to let this happen, people started coming out of the woodwork wanting to come as well. My Mom had to explain several times this was a limited, short gathering because THEY HAD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE only a few hours later.

So I ended up driving over and spending several hours distracting people. Once everyone made it past “let’s all go eat lunch together at a restaurant (they can’t because of naps, dietary needs)” and someone brought up that one of the family members had to be back at her assisted living facility pretty quick I took my leave and came home. I was still running behind chores at home because of sudden changes in work schedules, but I didn’t really get to catch up at that point. I had a handful of remnants of a work-related pot-luck Thanksgiving Meal to clean up, but the large portable roaster was involved and that takes multiple steps to clean properly before it can be put away. We also had turkey broth to finish off and put away, so the stock pot was out, etc. You get tired of washing every cooking pot in the house every day, sometimes.

AND I just now remembered that laundry is ready to switch over to the dryer and start another load. So I’m working on a backlog of chores from the last several days and will finish the Freddy Krueger piece ASAP. Central theme: What *IS* Freddy Krueger? Considering Freddy starts out the closest to supernatural (or paranormal, befitting the overall theme), I think you could argue he changes the most of the big three slashers within the series.

Paige Francis He/him