Time Capsule Robert Englund
ARE YOU READY FOR A FREDDY SPECIAL?
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
BELIEVE IT OR not, Freddy Krueger has been haunting our dreams for 40 years, ever since Wes Craven tapped into something primal with 1984’s A Nightmare On Elm Street. It turned the razor-fingered Freddy into an iconic movie monster, and Robert Englund, the actor who plays him, into one of horror’s biggest stars. “Who’da thunk it?” laughs Englund, talking with Empire on Zoom. “The little movie that could. We were just hanging on by our fingernails — my extended fingernails —but we got it done.” Englund has played the character in eight movies, and here he takes a little walk down Memory Elm Street.
FIGHTING NANCY A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
“This is Heather [Langenkamp, who plays hero Nancy] and I in her bedroom, which has been violated by the presence of Freddy Krueger. I do remember not enjoying the pillow fight we had, which might also have been in this sequence, because all those terrible feathers were sticking to me, because I’m basted with Vaseline and KY Jelly. They get in your eyes and up your nose and in your mouth and everything. We did take after take of that, because [the filmmakers] loved the way it looked with the feathers floating. I do regret the feathers to this day. I hate feathers.”