Some 32 years ago, the teens of Springwood first fell prey to a shadow stalking through their dreams.
The bloodthirsty maniac with clawed hands hunted them through their nightmares, able at whim to transform into any one of their deepest fears. His name? Freddy Krueger.
Robert Englund, the man behind that famous burnt visage, has long since hung up the bladed glove, but nevertheless remained endlessly busy with film, television and voiceover work. Returning to our shores for Oz Comic-Con in September, he relishes the opportunity to touch base with fans young and old.
“It’s great for me, because when you’re an actor, you work in a vacuum a lot,” Englund says. “Obviously I’ve experienced the success of my horror movies and earlier projects, but Comic-Cons are a great opportunity to get a lot of feedback on my recent work.”
Krueger is one of the most documented figures in cinema history, but to hear Englund talk of his origins is to hear the story as if for the first time, channelled directly from the recently departed horror auteur Wes Craven.
He explains that Freddy was amalgamated from “a school bully with a German name, Frederik Krüger, who had picked on Wes” and an anecdote in which Craven and his brother had been watched in their bedroom by a homeless man on their street – a man with “soot or sores on his face and an old hat”.
“He looked up and made eye contact with them in their room and they shut the curtains and hid under the blankets for a while,” says Englund, “and when they went back to the window, he was still there! Looking up at their window. Wes always remembered that.”
The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of a disturbing news article chronicling the phenomenon of Cambodian refugees to America’s Midwest dying in their sleep. “They were so alienated from their beautiful, lush green jungle – they were in the flat dry prairie of America,” says Englund. “And they were unable to wake up from their nightmares and write them down as songs or poems or stories, or paint them, and so they were literally dying in their sleep.”
For Craven to fuse all these elements together into one timeless character was testament to his skill, and Englund cannot speak highly enough of his former mentor.
“Wes changed horror three times,” he says. “With the original Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, which are almost like David Lynch meets Bergman meets… I dunno, some incredible hardcore Italian director. Then later on he did the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, which is a complete American dark fairytale myth. And thenhe did the Scream franchise, which of course was his wiseacre valentine to the fans, a kind of deconstructed horror acknowledging all the stuff that the fans know and understand; all of the tropes and the gimmicks that the fans are wise to, and yet still pulling the rug out from underneath them and scaring them at the same time.”
The eight films in which Englund terrorised Elm Street are merely a drop of blood in the lake of his filmography. In the last year alone, the 69-year-old has been involved on three major international features and a video game for Warner Brothers, about which he is “sworn to secrecy, but it’s safe to say that it may be one of the biggest games and one of the most popular games of all time”.
While he appears excited about the recently completed Midnight Man, a starring vehicle for him alongside Elm Street alumni Lin Shaye, he’s got the most to say about an obscure picture in development for 2018 called Abruptio.
“It’s about a strange young man who works in an office situation, and he lives with his mother, and he’s very troubled and lives in a kind of fantasy world,” Englund says. “But the gimmick of the movie is that it’s all being made with lifesize puppets, and yeah, it’s strange! And they fornicate and swear and curse. It’s funny and it’s nasty and it’s sexy, so I’m really anxious to go back and do some more work on it, see how they’re doing.”
Despite the glut of work, Englund quietly carries Krueger’s gargantuan horror legacy on his shoulders, especially in the wake of Craven’s passing. He has signalled he will not be returning to the dreamscape of Elm Street, though he did have ideas for what could next befall the denizens of Springwood.
“My idea was that I wanted to bring back the memory of the character Tina [Amanda Wyss] from the original, and my idea was that she had an older sister, a college-age sister, who came back and researched the death of her sister and became another sort of card-carrying survivor girl in the pursuit of Freddy Krueger,” he says.
For now, that tale is just a dream from which Englund’s waking life keeps him. But the edges of the nightmare peek past his affable front, and Krueger’s nasty irreverence slips out when the actor is pressed on his favourite kill in the series.
“My favourite kill is the young lad from Part 6 [Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare] with the hearing aid, that Freddy goes after. I love that he’s a special needs kid and Freddy is an equal opportunity killer.”
Oz Comic-Con 2016, with appearances from Robert Englund, Daniel Portman, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Aaron Ashmore and many more, takes placeSaturday September 10 – Sunday September 11 at Sydney Exhibition Centre, Glebe Island.
