Robert Englund plays him with such a delightful deviousness and self-aware nature (especially in the ensuing sequels) that he can feel almost like a Looney Tunes character at times, but still retain that horrifying presence. You can laugh at Freddy while still acknowledging him as a truly terrifying force of evil. What other slasher gets one-liners? The comedy lightens the mood a bit but never at the expense of the fear that’s necessary to this kind of production. Almost all the Freddy-centric movies have a few standout one-liners from him. Rather than just being scary, Freddy is also funny, or as funny as a man like him can be. He was made to be different, to stand out in the relatively small world of slasher movies. ![]() Other killers use big blunt weapons that require strength, while Freddy is a skinny guy using a glove with small knives attached to it. While Micheal, Jason and Leatherface all donned masks, Freddy’s face was on full display. ![]() Wes Craven strove to make Freddy as unique as possible among other slashers of the time. Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street hold up remarkably well both as good popcorn-eating fun but also as watchable movies in their own right. However, the slasher films of the 80s and 90s still had two iconic series that have stood the test of time - and it's not without coincidence that they’re both Wes Craven joints. Similarly, while Friday the 13th is a household name, it’s long been considered a derivative series, and none of the movies are really that “good” beyond the visuals of their scares (the first is the highest rated in the series and doesn’t even star Jason as the titular killer). Despite doing everything a slasher film should do well, it now feels somewhat stale by modern standards as every element it introduces - its cast of sexually promiscuous teenagers, the asylum-escapee villain, the drawn-out pleasure the camera takes in the kills - has by now been done in much more interesting ways in other movies of the type. While the Halloween series debatably sparked the genre (four years after Black Christmas, which potentially inspired it, but doesn’t utilize as many common genre tropes as its later siblings would) the original Halloween has definitely aged over the years. ![]() The butt of endless parody and derision, it’s rare to find one that is more than just simple popcorn fun. Despite not appearing in a new movie in over 13 years (capped off with a critically panned flop of a reboot), the knife-gloved dream invader has remained a pop-cultural icon, and the best that the slasher genre has ever produced.Ī Nightmare on Elm Street is unique amongst its contemporaries in that, unlike some other horror genres, slashers have always had a perception of being cheap, cheesy, and exploitative. However, amongst a pantheon of slasher greats, one stands above all others: this of course being Freddy Krueger ( Robert Englund), debuting in Wes Craven’s 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Hockey masks aren’t the same ever since Jason Voorhees came around in Friday the 13th (technically, its sequel - that knowledge could save your life), chainsaws have had an undeniably sinister edge to them since the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Scream is still a thriving franchise, with Scream VI having just premiered 27 years after the first film. Since rising to dominance in the early 1980s, slasher flicks have been one of the best known and most enduring genres of horror, making universally well known stars of the blood-soaked slashers that propagate them.
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