With the ingenious premise of a monster that can invade your dreams and chase you, original Nightmare in Elm Street creator Wes Craven came up with a character with no real limitations. With the medium of film (and the ever-improving practical effects of the sloppy but enchanting eighties), Freddy Krueger would quickly become the favorite of many horror fans for his mischievous charisma coupled with increasingly outrageous kills.
Played by an electrician Robert Englund, in full make-up to resemble a man burned alive, Freddy’s default mode was impressive and horrifying to watch, but it was the sinister scenarios the series devised for him that made it so. we kept coming back for more . So whip up a fresh pot of coffee as we highlight some of the Springwood Slasher’s more outlandish guises.
11/11 Long Arms Freddy (A Nightmare on Elm Street)
The one who introduced the dream machine Freddy Krueger to the world. While chasing Tina (Amanda Wyss) in her dreams, an elastic Freddy Krueger stretches his gloved hand to an impossible length. His clawed fingers scrape the sheet metal and sparks fly as Freddy approaches. Laughably stupid and definitely shows the age of the original, but a sign of things to come for the bad guy. There would be another nod to this shape in Freddy’s intro scene in Nightmare on Elm Street 5: Dream Child.
10/11 Camp counselor who drowns Jason Voorhees (Freddy Vs Jason)
In the vastly underrated Freddy vs. Jason, two of the film’s greatest monsters went head to head in a battle to end them all. In a dream/flashback to his own parentage, we see firsthand how the young and disfigured Jason would be bullied by the other children in Crystal Lake, then drowned by the ignorance of the councilors. Lori (Monica Keena), now in the dream world, urges them to help the boy.
Too busy having sex to notice, a councilor turns and reveals it’s actually Krueger. Clownish, playful and menacing, this one is so simple and really pushes the point that Krueger hates Jason’s guts here enough to go back and enjoy his most traumatic moment.
9/11 The Wicked Witch of the West (Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare)
In this great opening to Freddy is dead, a series of sultry dreams follow one after the other as John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) struggles to sleep. When John jumps out of bed and opens his window, he realizes the whole house is falling to the ground and Freddy, dressed as a witch, is briefly seen on a broomstick in a nod to The Wizard of Oz.
8/11 Krueger Kar (A nightmare on Elm Street)
Relief. It’s finally over. In the closing scene of the original Wes Craven film, Nancy and her mother leave the house dressed all in white. With Krueger sent to hell, all is bliss. All the characters we thought were dead are fine as they meet, laugh and get ready to ride.
Nancy’s mother, who was an outright alcoholic in the previous scenes, is now blindly sober again. An eerie mist fills the air and an unreliable inertia holds the characters as they move. It’s almost… dreamy. When Nancy joins her friends in the convertible, the roof pops over them – decorated with red and green stripes. The car doors lock and the teens are locked in as the Krueger-themed car drives away, suggesting the nightmare isn’t over yet.
7/11 Video game boss (Freddy’s Dead)
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Spencer (played by Breckin Meyer) is brought into a video game world and moves along this 2D side-scroller, pitting against video game versions of his own father and a boss-level depiction of Krueger. As he controls young Spencer in the real world, this is one of Freddy’s funniest kills.
Add cartoon sound effects as the boy bounces impossibly up and down and through walls, and this is Krueger really playing with his victims. To start this journey, Johnny Depp would appear two minutes earlier in a great cameo where he is hit by a frying pan. Don!
6/11 Gross Baby Freddy (The Dream Child)
The son of 100 maniacs, the disgusting baby Freddy Krueger shows up in the fifth installment of the franchise. We shed light on Freddy’s own background and see a trippy birth scene in a mental asylum as a nun gives birth to a monster. In a scene more reminiscent of a scene from Alien than your more conventional birth, at the sight of the child the doctor can only muster: “Holy sh*t… what’s up?Despite a relatively weak storyline, the hands-on effects, puppetry, and makeup make this Part V a gross treat to watch.
5/11 Robert Englund (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare)
To promote the tenth anniversary of the release of the Nightmare in Elm Street film, actress Heather Langenkamp (who played the last girl Nancy Thompson in the original) sits and answers questions on a talk show. Before she knows it, she is ambushed by the same actor who played her villain.
From backstage, fully in makeup and costume, he jumps up to the set and performs for the audience. Englund appears as the actor who played Freddy dressed as his character, while the fictionalized version of Freddy (also played by Englund) attempts to kill the real-life actress who played the fictional heroine off-screen. It’s all very trippy, but would be older than Wes Craven’s like-minded scream series, where the meta-horror formula would be perfected.
In such a long and varied series, the silhouette of Englund/Krueger against the crowd of screaming Freddy fans in this scene is one of the best shots of the entire output.
4/11 The Puppet/Puppet Master (Dream Warriors)
Freddy appears at night as a stop-motion puppet, cutting open Phillip’s (Bradley Gregg)’s limbs and exposing the arteries, using them as puppet cords. Now in full control, Freddy forces the boy to walk to the top of the school, balancing on a ledge. Finally Phillip’s friends can pull the strings below and can’t help but watch as the boy plummets to his death.
Possibly one of the craziest and most nerve-racking kills of Krueger in the entire series, all started by a hugely creepy doll. Freddy’s huge statue plastered across the night sky as he cuts the strings is iconic.
3/11 The Freddy Krueger Serpent (Dream Warriors)
Kristen (Patricia Arquette) wanders alone. The walls and floor bulge as something inside circles the young blonde. Inside, a ten-foot-long, blackened snake emerges, swallowing Kristen and beginning to swallow her whole. The protagonist of the first film, Nancy, comes to her aid and the stage is set for a showdown between our hero and villain. Met again for the first time since she beat him in the original movie, Krueger’s straightforward “YOU!” is an excellent good versus evil moment in the series that respects its roots.
In an article about how the snake monster came to be Yahoo writes:
To include all the effects in the two-minute scene, [Kevin] Yagher created four separate dolls: a six-foot hollow snake to swallow Arquette on the floor; an even longer version designed for an overhead shot; a snake designed to spit out the actress from a height of a few meters; and a lifelike doll with a radio-controlled face for the final close-up of the snake.
2/11 Stop Motion Skeleton (Dream Warriors)
To end Freddy Krueger for good, the Dream Warriors must rest Freddy’s bones in the real world. In the spookiest of setups, they happen to be in an old car dump. Threatened with his own finale, Krueger embodies his own skeleton and attacks Nancy’s father (John Saxon), killing him with a shard through the chest. In a throwback to stop-motion grandfather Ray Harryhausen’s own skeletal creations, it just looks so damn good.
1/11 Prime Time Freddy (Dream Warriors)
With an expansive cast and some absolutely mega kills, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors kicks ass from start to finish.
In this beautiful scene, young Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow) struggles to stay awake. Freddy re-imagines the series’ 80s roots with a blocky TV, appears on a late night talk show, and kills the guest. Static.
Arms pop out of the sides of the set and a Freddy head with bunny ears pops out of the box. Before Freddy became the clownish pantomime villain of the later episodes, his episode was on “Welcome to prime time, bitch!really sticks. Possibly the best kill of the entire series to boot.