The Total Bastard Database

The greatest killers, madmen, monsters and maniacs in horror movie history.

SPOILER WARNING!!

All entries in the TBDB are likely to carry spoliers so if you ain't seen the movie they relate to don't read 'em!

FREDDY KRUEGER

AKA:

Robert Englund

Was a bastard in:

 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 – 6, Wes
Craven’s New Nightmare(1994), Freddy Vs Jason (2004)

So who the Hell is he?

In life Fred Kruger was a very bad man, the sort of bad man who kills all the
children in his leafy suburban neighbourhood. Maybe this somewhat anti-social
 behaviour is due to the fact that he is the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs”
 (his mother was trapped in a mental asylum and raped by the inmates) or
maybe he is just a bastard, who knows?

The parents of Fred’s victims on Elm street took an unsurprisingly dim view of Freddy’s little hobby and burnt him to death. Freddy wasn’t the kind of guy to take this sort of treatment lying down however and hotfooted it (ho ho) into the dreams and fears of the Elm street children where he found a way to cheat death.

As a dream demon Fred has the power to do pretty much anything he wants and manipulate the entire world of the dream as long as the victim remains asleep. This is how Freddy is able to perform his elaborate trademark kills like turning a girl with a phobia of bugs into a giant cockroach and trapping her in a roach motel or slicing the veins from another unfortunate victim and using them as puppet strings to control him. He also has the power to affect the real world through the dreams. If he kills someone in a dream they die in real life, an idea Wes Craven reputedly took from the true story of a spate of teenagers dying unexpectedly in their sleep.

There is also the alternate Freddy who appeared in Wes Craven’ New Nightmare who is actually some ancient primal demon thing who takes the form of the Freddy Kruger character and is trying to enter the real world through Wes Craven’s head or something. A clever idea which brought new life to a tired character. To most though, Freddy will always be the wise-cracking stripy jumper-wearing psycho last seen squaring off against Jason Voorhees in Freddy Vs Jason.

That's not a knife...

Freddy often likes to go for the personal touch and fashion a completely personalized individual kill scenario but his trademark and old standard is of course the razor glove that has become an integral part of every kid’s Halloween outfit.

It's a million to one chance but it might just work...

Fred’s a resourceful chap so it’s hard to keep him down but your best bet for Kruger disposal seems to be to pull him out of the dream world into reality where he loses his powers so you can just bash him on the head or something. Among the other methods employed against him have been blowing him up, chopping off his head and showing him a reflection of himself in a mirror. None of these ever work for long though so it’s yet to be seen what will really keep him down.

 Words of wisdom:

“Welcome to my world, bitch. I should warn you, princess... the first time tends to get a little... messy.”

By Matt Compton