How Freddy Krueger Became Horror’s James Bond According to Nightmare on Elm Street 4 Director

Turning a child killer into a wise-cracking hero is not something that often happens in movies, but one exception to the rule is A Nightmare on Elm Street’s dream demon, Freddy Krueger. From his origins as a dark, teenager-tormenting creature of nightmares, the character played by Robert Englund across eight movies, a TV series, and several cameo appearances evolved into a character that fans took to their hearts despite his horrifying history. According to one director of the franchise, Freddy became the “James Bond of the horror genre.”

Wes Craven seemed to end Freddy’s reign of terror for good in Dream Warriors, the third movie in the franchise, which concluded with the Elm Street killer being supposedly exorcised forever. While there was a dark humor emerging by this point in the franchise, it was when Renny Harlin took the helm of 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and, according to him, turned Freddy from a vile villain into an almost heroic leading man. Speaking with Slash Film to promote his new movie The Strangers Chapter 1, Harlin said:

“…I take big responsibility for steering Freddy in that direction on the fourth movie. My thinking was that, what I told the producers, I said, I felt like by now the audience was in on the joke. They got it. To sell the same idea again, that Freddy is just this scary child molester, it wasn’t believable anymore and that we had to introduce something new.”

Dream Warriors Made Freddy a Celebrity, Dream Master Made Him Horror’s James Bond

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise has two very distinct sides to its story – its dark origin and the humorous turn it took later in the series. While some fans consider the franchise to really only consist of the three directorial efforts of Wes Craven, which ended with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1997 following the previous, heavily panned sequel, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, others much prefer their Freddy dishing out smart one-liners before he dispatches his next victim.

Harlin explained further that following Dream Warriors, which saw Freddy really cement his place as a pop culture icon, his job with the fourth movie was all about making the knife-fingered murderer into the hero of his own movies, or, as Harlin says, the horror genre’s James Bond. He said:

“He wasn’t just this scary, violent guy, but he was a bigger-than-life phenomenon. So the term I used when we started working on the movie and the script and the nightmares and everything, I said, ‘I think we have to make Freddy the James Bond of Horror.’ And so then everything we did, starting with his resurrection in the beginning of the movie and the low-angle, Steadicam shot pushing in on him and he puts his hat on and so on, it was really designed to make him the hero of these movies.”

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While the smart-mouthed, jokey tone several of the subsequent movies took on did not sit well with some fans of the 1984 original, the change was responsible for allowing Krueger to transcend his stark origins to become an instantly recognizable figure in pop culture, with even children who are too young to see the movies being aware of his presence. Despite it being over two decades since the franchise effectively came to an end with Freddy vs. Jason in 2003, and attempts to reboot it with a more serious and grounded reboot in 2010 proving to be a failure, Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise have endured to remain a constant point of conversation among genre fans.