Film Theory: What If Freddy Krueger Was INNOCENT All Along?!

3. Coach Schneider... The Real Evil?

As you may recall, the first victim in the film is Coach Schneider, the hard-ass and creepy gym teacher who has a thing for young boys.

Jesse: “How much longer do you think he’s going to keep us out here?”

Ron Grady: “It could be all night. The guy gets his rocks off like this. Hangs around queer S&M joints downtown... He likes pretty boys like you.” (That’s a lot to know about one’s gym teacher...especially considering this is 1985).

Freddy uses Jesse’s sleepwalking body to go to an S&M bar where he finds none other than his gym teacher, Coach Schneider, dressed in full leather daddy getup. Coach Schneider then takes Jesse back to the high school gymnasium, presumably to string him up with jump ropes in the shower room and have BDSM sex with him, and it’s questionable how consensual this would be on Jesse’s part. Before the coach can carry out whatever he had planned for Jesse, he gets viciously killed by Freddy.

Here’s what sticks out about this kill: in ALL THE OTHER FILMS IN THE NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET CANON, Freddy does not target adults. He does have to kill an adult every once in a while, but it's not really his jam. Anyway, it’s important to bear in mind that Freddy’s modus operandi up to this point had been stalking and killing the children of he parents who killed him.

So, why all of a sudden is he targeting an adult in the second film, and why is Coach Schneider the first victim of this film? Following his established pattern, it would make more sense for Freddy to use Jesse’s body go on a rampage against the other remaining neighborhood children.

What if Coach Schneider played some role in Freddy’s backstory?

Coach Schneider is shot at with balls, then lassoed by jump ropes and dragged into the shower room and strung up. Freddy then snaps towels at the coach so many times it leaves bruises on his backside. This is Freddy performing role reversal on the coach, essentially switching the coach’s role from sadist to victim. Freddy must have known this was what the coach did to so many boys before.

Then, as his final touch, Freddy reveals himself to the coach out of the steam and treads slowly toward him as the coach screams in acknowledgement of his eminent slaughter. Does it not look and sound like Coach Schneider recognizes Freddy and his screams evoke that he knows exactly what’s coming to him and why?

Part 2 is cast off by many fans of the series. The screenwriter obviously took it in a direction far different from the original; Freddy doesn’t do Freddy-like things; there are only loose connections to the first film, and overall it feels like a cash-grab by the studio to put out a sequel as fast as possible. It’s a low point for the series, pretty much considered non-canon the same way that Halloween 3: Season of the Witch deviates from the main story of that series. But as uneven tonally and frankly unscary it is, an argument could be made for Freddy’s Revenge being a logical continuation of Freddy’s story.

[Cont]