Why is Freddy Krueger scary? And yes, that’s a serious question. There are obvious reasons, like the burned face, the knife fingers, and his hideous fashion sense, but what’s at his core that makes him terrifying? Like some of horror’s best creations, Freddy is a byproduct of secrets. He’s the untold truth that people kept to themselves in the name of the so-called greater good. Using Krueger as a walking, talking metaphor, Wes Craven exposed the horrors of keeping secrets, rewriting history, and picking and choosing which parts of the past feel relevant to our present.
A Nightmare on Elm Street turns 40 this year. While older films sometimes lose their potency over time and get by on reputation alone, Nightmare’s bite remains on par with its bark. The flick endures partly because it grounds its surreal, scary moments in the notion that these kids are out of their depths. Nancy Thompson and her friends are up the creek without a paddle because their moms and dads remain tight-lipped about their past transgressions. The parents in Craven’s flick took matters into their own hands. One’s opinion on frontier justice aside, sympathizing with their plight is easy. Imagining any parent being cool with the justice system, throwing up on itself while watching a child predator skate on a technicality, sounds impossible. Nightmare never condones their actions, but it takes serious umbrage with the cover-up.
Most horror movies do.
Towns featured in horror movies suffer when the past returns to haunt the inhabitants literally. The secrets stay secretive for peace preservation because maintaining the area’s idyllic façade takes precedence over everything. But whether it’s Michael Myers breaking out of a psych ward or the true history behind Sawtooth Jack, those things townspeople whisper about often blow up with cataclysmic fallout. Freddy is the ultimate manifestation of that idea. He not only continues his crimes in ways Springwood’s parents can’t fathom, much less stop, but he drives wedges between them and their kids. Ms. Thompson’s disbelief and fear turn her into a liar prone to gaslighting her daughter. Even with tangible proof, like Freddy’s hat and Nancy’s gash marks, she believes that Nancy’s objective truth is just an operative imagination running wild. That happens not because she’s protecting her daughter but because she wants to feel better about herself.
Acknowledging Nancy’s legitimate fear and helping her through that means wrestling with her guilt. History shows just how bad humans are when it comes to that sort of thing, so it’s obvious why Ms. Thompson loses herself at the bottom of an alcohol bottle. Confronting one’s thorny past isn’t comforting by design. A Nightmare on Elm Street, for all its bombast with Freddy doing Freddy things, handles adults dealing with uncomfortable truths with a surprisingly subtle glove. The movie shows Nancy’s parents sifting through their mixed emotions just enough that it elicits empathy—at least a tad bit. Ms. Thompson only comes clean when she’s almost too drunk for coherence, but even then, she’s still not listening nor facing reality. Her “solution” for Freddy appearing in her daughter’s dreams? Get more sleep and bars on the windows. She says the bars keep the villain out, but her daughter explains countless times that he’s already inside. And with every wink of sleep, Freddy only gets closer. This genre has no time for that brand of willful ignorance or not engaging with one’s checkered past. Spooky movies demand more from their characters.
They put them in unimaginable positions where they must ask themselves tough questions: how far is too far for survival, or is their present predicament deserved? Above all else, they cannot take their actions for granted, no matter how noble they believe their intentions. Nancy’s mom, and to a lesser extent, her dad, feel at home with the city officials in My Bloody Valentine. Those characters put lives at risk because revealing the truth behind canceling the Valentine’s Day dance might incite panic. They also share similarities with the inhabitants who thought changing Camp Crystal Lake’s name, giving it a new coat of paint, and scrubbing all their history concerning Jason Voorhees might do more good than harm rather than the other way around.
It didn’t.
Pretending that killers never infiltrated one’s neck of the woods or that a group of people never made questionable decisions doesn’t change anything. A Nightmare on Elm Street posits that it only makes the next generation ill-prepared when those chickens inevitably come home to roost, sometimes by the dozens.
There’s a chance Craven revolved his creation around adults playing make-believe with reality while asking somebody to “please think of the children” because of his strict religious upbringing. After all, the man didn’t see his first movie until college. He turned his back on organized religion because the adults around him said watching something like To Kill a Mockingbird was sinful. He understood how frightening secrets are and why addressing the past, no matter how painful, is the only way we improve on the other side. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a lot of things, but it remains a cautionary tale with a lesson that some still don’t understand four decades later.
Freddy Krueger is the charred reminder that yesterday never dies. Even if one lights it on fire and tries scooping its ashes into a dustbin.