1428 Elm Street

Freddy Krueger is a fictional character from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of films. Created by Wes Craven and portrayed by actor Robert Englund in every film of the series, he is an undead comedic serial killer, who can attack his victims from within their own dreams. In the original script, Freddy Krueger was a child molester, as to Wes Craven this was the worst thing possible. The decision was made to instead make Krueger a child murderer in order to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestations which occurred in California around the time A Nightmare on Elm Street went into production. However, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child suggests this might still be the case in a headline Alice looks at when researching Freddy. Freddy is commonly identified by his burned, disfigured face, red and green striped sweater, brown fedora hat, and trademark metal-clawed brown colored leather glove. Wizard magazine rated him the 14th greatest villain of all time, and he came in 8th on British television channel Sky2's Greatest Villains of All Time and ranked 40th on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list.
Wes Craven claims his inspiration for the basis of Krueger's power stemmed from several stories in the Los Angeles Times about a series of mysterious deaths: all the victims had reported recurring nightmares beforehand, and died in their sleep. Physically, Craven's inspirations for Freddy included a homeless man who had frightened Craven as a youth and a bully at his school. The 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright sealed the story for Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to "jump off" from, but the synthesizer riff from the Elm Street soundtrack.

• Wes came up with the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street while sitting at a restaurant in 1978. He had recently read three separate articles about people who had nightmares and then later died in their sleep.
• Robert Englund was not the first choice to play Freddy Krueger. Actually, they wanted a stunt man to play the part.
• The scene where Freddy appears over a sleeping Nancy was done with spandex.
• Over 500 gallons of fake "blood" was used in the scene of Glen's demise.
• The bathroom scene was not included in the original script, but was rather the brainchild of Jim Doyle (special fx). The tub was build over a swimming pool and Jim Doyle in scuba gear performed as Freddy's glove.
• There is an episode of The Simpsons which parodies A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Groundskeeper Willie burns to death at a PTO meeting and comes back in the children's dreams. Another parody took place on the short-lived Disney show Raw Toonage, where a boy who eats too much ice cream dreams that "Freddy Scooper" is after him.