Film Theory: What If Freddy Krueger Was INNOCENT All Along?!
4. Freddy's Revenge
Why, if he was guilty to begin with, would he come back for retribution? Classically in folklore, you don’t read about many damned souls coming back from the dead just because due process of law wasn’t adhered to. Freddy’s role as a dream demon seeking revenge against those who falsely murdered him makes much more sense than him coming back just because he was victim to mob justice. Imagine you are hanging out in your favorite boiler room, minding your own business, then suddenly a group of angry parents shows up and burns you to a crisp for a crime you were just acquitted of. You’d be pretty pissed off too!
Everyone in these movies jumps to the conclusion that Freddy was a child murderer when he was alive. At no point do any of the meddling teens in any of the original films bother to reopen the investigation. The original Elm St. film, however, leaves this unanswered.
Wes Craven was no dummy: he earned degrees in psychology, philosophy, and writing, and even taught on the college level before he moved to Hollywood to become a filmmaker. Although a surface level reading of Freddy paints him as pure unadulterated evil, Craven himself did not believe that people were completely good or evil; instead, Craven’s films contained much more nuance, and it’s possible that had he gone on to write and direct the sequels, he would have further developed the moral quandaries between Freddy Krueger and the parents who murdered him.
The parents of Elm Street and its fictional city of Springwood, Ohio were the real villains of Craven’s script. The evil that Freddy became was a result of their mob action. Freddy’s motive to seek revenge on the parents of Elm Street is carried out again in Part 2 and Part 3. The later sequels, Parts 4–6 and Freddy Vs. Jason, then turn Freddy into an insatiable demon who literally feeds off the souls of the children he kills.
This theory is strengthened when you look at the first sequel, which is actually subtitled Freddy’s Revenge. Part 2 takes place 5 years after the events of the original and is a continuation of Freddy’s primary objective, which is to get back at the people who did him wrong in life. A quick rundown of the plot is that the house Nancy lived in in the first film has been on the market for 5 years but no one would buy it because of the horrors associated with it.
Then a family moves into it and the teenaged son, Jesse, begins having nightmares and sleepwalking. In this film, instead of going into the nightmares of the people he dispatches, Freddy instead visits Jesse in his dreams and uses his body as an avatar to commit his murders.
Ultimately, Freddy uses Jesse’s body to come out into the real world and wreaks havoc on a pool party. The first time Freddy proposes his plan to Jesse, he says, “I need you, Jesse. We got special work to do here, you and me.” Which then brings us to the most peculiar murder in the entire series, which might be its most important...
[Cont]