One Two Freddy's Coming For You..

Rip It Up, Issue 213, 1 May 1995, Page 21

One Two Freddy's Coming For You..

There is a scene in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare where original Elm Street ass kicker Heather Langenkamp (who played Nancy) is surprised during a talkshow interview when her co-star, Robert Englund, is introduced. When a set of knives slash through the wall to make way for his entrance, it is clear he has decided to appear in costume, as Freddy Krueger — the face sucking, waterbed burping, mother decaptiating, teenage eating, bastard son of a thousand maniacs.

It was with this in mind that I stood outside the door of Robert Englund’s Regent suite. Surely he wouldn’t spend four hours in makeup just to scare the shit out of the cluster of foreign journos he would meet that day, I reasoned. Indeed, he hadn't, and the door was opened by the dude who occasionally appears as a presenter on the Horror Hall of Fame awards.

It was as the pizza faced Freddy Krueger that Robert Englund first found fame in New Zealand, back in 1984. In the States he was already well known as the equally skin afflicted alien Willie, in the TV mini-series V, which would not screen in this country until several years later. When Robert first donned the Freddy makeup for Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street, he had no idea he would go on to play the character seven times. “No-one is more surprised than me,” he says. “I was quite pre-occupied, at the time, with my first real bout with fame and celebrity,

as a result of starring in V. So, I was really dealing with that, and sort of not watching this little Nightmare phenomenon snowball. “I remember, one day I was in New York, signing autographs at a convention. I was sitting next to William Shatner, and I noticed that my line changed from science fiction, V, Star Trekkie types, to sort of speed metal, punk, heavy metal kids, and they all wanted me to write ‘Freddy’ down as an autograph. That was my first inkling this thing had gone through the roof.”

I refer Robert to the aforementioned talkshow scene in the film. The crowd is full of cheering kids, wearing masks of their child molesting hero. Oxymorons don’t get much nastier than that.

Does it concern you that Freddy, as an entity removed from you, has gained such a large following?

“That sort of peaked maybe 1989 in the States, 1990. For a couple of years there at Halloween, everybody you saw was dressed like Freddy.

“It was kind of enjoyable for me on a couple of levels. First was that I had a relative anonymity regarding Freddy for a while, because no-one noticed it was me. People all knew my face, but they would recognise me from V, or other movies and TV shows. So that was kind of a bonus, until I began really doing the talk shows and things like that. “The other thing with all of that is, when it

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takes on its life of its own, you can sit back and watch it. I mean, I would be able to turn on the late night chat shows and there’d be Freddy Krueger jokes. He'd show up as almost like a guest character in various famous cartoons. Then he began to show up in rap lyrics (the Fat Boys and Doctor Dre), then heavy metal (like Alice Cooper). It was this amusing thing to see him kind of permeate the culture for a while, and there was a detachment that’s kind of fun. It’s actually been a kind of lark. In Wes Craven's New Nightmare, several players in the actual success of the films play themselves in a story which brings the terror off the screen and into their daily lives. Robert works on a painting of screaming souls and Heather Langenkamp gets threatening phone calls of the ‘one, two, Freddy’s coming for you’ variety. Still, despite the clever weaving of the actors’ stories with those of their characters, it remains a far cry from the surprisingly unscary real thing. For starters, movies these days are far too expensive for the actors to get performance ruining willies in the middle of.

“On a horror movie set it's so intricate, and the marks are so exact, and you're so worried about ruining a shot because it costs so much because of the special effects involved,” explains Robert. “It’s also a very jokey set, because it’s very ludicrous. If they’re shooting me from above my hand for instance, down here [indicates waist high] there might be five guys working little levers and hydraulics so my head can expand, or the souls of my children can crawl out the top of my old Freddy sweater, and I can't move. It's pretty silly. These guys are goosing me and joking between the takes, and we're all kidding around and waiting for lunch so we can all go out for Thai food. So, it gets kind of silly on the sets.

“It’s not like you’re preparing constantly in some method way to throw down some teenage girl and really deal with the aspects of father rape, abuse, all the subliminal stuff. It’s pretty exact and it’s pretty jokey and kidding around, because you sort of have to get the jokes out, or you can't be real, and scary and violent.

“There’s some guy basting me constantly with KY jelly, which is a favourite lubricant of the queens of the desert, shall we say, in America. So, you can guess what they call me on the set, the big manly crew guys, as I'm standing there bald and veined, and getting basted with that every 10 minutes or so, before somebody says ‘action’. I’m sort of like a walking erection. I’m constantly getting teased, and people are bringing their babies for me to hold and kiss so they can get polaroids.to stick on their refrigerator with some cheap tourist magnet. I. have this sort of strange reality on-the sets of these movies and it’s' not disconcerting at all.” , ‘ " •

All joking aside, the long hours in makeup, and their hideous results, gave Robert the impetus to play Freddy for the very first time. “If I’m really honest with you, back during the making of the first one, I needed something to trigger me. 1 was in my mid 30s, so I used this sort of envy I had then of Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp. They were beginning their careers, they were young, they were gor-

geous, they were being pampered and blown dry, powdered and quaffed — and I’m sitting there again, four hours of medical adhesive colostomy bag glue on me, and little pieces of jigsaw puzzled prosthetics, then highlighting and -shadowing, and basting me like a turkey. So I could use that kind of envy I had at them • — which I could turn into anger very easily after four hours in the makeup chair — I could turn it against their beauty and their youth, which is real close to what Freddy’s going through. That was the trick for me back then. Now it’s relatively. automatic pilot. ’’■ - .• , With no ‘guarantee of Wes Craven's New Nightmare being the last in the series, the question must be asked: why do movie goers keep going back to Elm Street? “I think it’s real simple: a nightmare, a bad dream, is. universal. I’m surprised no-one’s .really exploited it in horror before. Wes just ran with it. • - *. • ■ ' '■

“It’s wonderful because you’re not in control. We’re never in control in our dreams. We're haunted by our nightmares. They’re very sexual, dreams are. They also begin very realistically — there's that moment where they mutate into surrealism — but for a while they’re quite normal. You’re riding the bus to work, and then something strange begins to happen, or you’re doing something very banal and random. I think people know they’re not in control in a nightmare. That lack of control, when they see it in a film, is very frightening to people. Freddy's also a bit of a mind game, and that’s sort of an original concept. Freddy really knows what’s going on in your subconscious, and he knows how to exploit that.” Robert makes no secret of his pride in the Nightmare films, despite the inevitable negative criticism of violence levelled at them.

“I really believe they're several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from a lot of the crap that’s perpetrated on people in the name of the horror genre. I certainly don’t consider us a slasher film. Unfortunately, I wear a glove, as this monster with these knife fingers, and if I were to reach for you right now [which he does, in characteristic Freddy-style], about the only verb you could use to describe that would be I slashed at you. So I’m sort of stuck with that moniker, even though that.word was always verboten on our sets. I really find our films are incredibly more imaginative, and less pruriently violent.

“If you look back on our films, they became more and more and more involved with humour and with special effects, and Freddy’s taunting and teasing and diabolical revenge became much more of a creative mind game than just wanton hatcheting and decapitations you see in so many other things. Nightmare will be opening here in June, and I would wager it’ll be one of the least violent films playing, comparatively speaking, yet I [have] sort of been anointed and appointed the defacto apologist for violence in the horror industry, because kids became obsessed with this character. I think it has'very little to do with violence and gore, and much more to do with an imaginative movie that the teenagers discovered for themselves and celebrated. It’s about them and it’s about their loss of innocence. I think they celebrate Freddy as a kind of logo for this great cheap thrill they found that they could enjoy in the dark, much like The Rocky Horror Show, and far less anything more macabre that parents wanna make it.”

Will the sequels continue? “God, I hope not. I’d. sort of put it all to bed after part six. That was supposed to be the last one.”

Nightmare on Elm Street sequels aside, a script for Freddy versus Jason was recently green lighted. “I hear Freddy versus Jason and I have visions of me in a rubber suit, wrestling around with Godzilla on a train set somewhere," says Robert. “It just sounds tacky, like Abbot and Costello meet Freddy Krueger. I have not been asked to do it, nor have I been sent the script yet, so I will reserve my judgement, or my choice to do or not do this film, depending upon what I think of that script and if I’m asked.”

Would you care to place your bid for who’s going to win that battle? “Well, you know, I think it has to be Freddy,” says Robert, opting for the popular choice. “All Freddy has to do is tunnell his way into one of Jason’s dreams, and destroy him that way. I mean mano a mano, I’m not really certain who would win, although I would think maybe it would be Freddy, but that could be debatable. Jason has to sleep at some point, and that's when Freddy'll get him. That would be scary because we’d see what Jason’s nightmares were. That would really be awful."

BRONWYN TRUDGEON