My Life With Freddy Kruger - A Retrospective

By Nick Peron

When I was growing up as a kid, there were two kinds of kids in the playground pissing ground: Freddy kids, and Jason kids. I was a Freddy Kid.

I first met Fred Kruger in the fall of 1987, I was only five years old. Every weekend my mother would take my brother and I to the local mom and pop video store to rent videos. It was a small place, no bigger than a one storey home, and it was wall-to-wall VHS tapes. My mother at the time was working as a care giver at the local retirement home, and she would frequently work nights, which usually meant that my brother, sister and I would be left under the care of a babysitter. The typical babysitting fodder included renting videos. The ritual became pretty routine: My mother would bring myself and my siblings to the video store and we would pick movies. Most of the time we would pick them from the children's section. If memory serves me correctly, I would usually decide between Transformers: The Movie and G.I. Joe: The Movie, unless they were already rented and I'd have to settle with something less cool.. Like Visionaries (Yeah, if you caught that reference you're not getting laid tonight either, so keep on laughing petunia.)

Now, I wonder if this was product of poor planning or if the owners of the video store had a twisted sense of humor, but whatever the reason they had decided to put the horror movies right across the isle from the children's movies. '87 was also the year that Topps Trading Cards came out with their classic Fright Flicks trading cards, which pretty much sold itself with the Freddy Kruger image.The box the cards came in featured Freddy, with trading cards impaled on each of his razor fingeres, boldly asking kids if they wanted to see something gross. I knew who Freddy was, but I didn't know what he was about.

I don't recall the circumstances in which I first noticed the horror films, but I can tell you that my mother was pretty much hoping that I was going to pick something other than my two favorites -- littled did she know that she was going to get her wish, only not in a way that she expected. My mother hates horror movies with a passion. The only one she can admit to liking is Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, so I can just imagine what was going in her head when my brother and I first saw him adorning a video box.

The box was blue, with half of the plain graphics slashed off, and Fred Kruger -- with an angry hateful sneer on his face -- looking around the slash. His horribly scared face the center focus of the box. I doubt I was able to read the title of the movie, but it was the box to Nightmare on Elm St Part 2: Freddy's Revenge. Once my brother and I noticed who was on the video box, we pleaded to our dear mom to let us rent not only the part 2, but Dream Warriors as well. Surprisingly, she allowed us to rent them. I know my mother pretty well, and I think by her logic, she thought she was in the clear. She had to work that night and she would not have to sit through these dreadful movies -- and moreso she probably figured that we were going to get frightened out of our minds and never want to see another horror movie again. Great plan mom, but you backfired. Instead of scaring your kids out of horror films, you created a monster.

I still recall the night the babysitter put on these movies for us, I was immediately entranced, and it was during the ____ nude scene in Part 3, as my babysitter was pulling me out of the room so that I don't see any bare breasts that I realized that Freddy Kruger was fucking awesome.

At the time Freddy was a unique character, unlike his other contemporaries, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, et al. He was a class act all his own. From his trade mark flashfried face, to his red and green Christmas sweater, fedora, and of course that glove. It wasn't just his appearance either that made him unique, he talked -- forget just that, he joked around, he had fun doing what he was doing