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

2. Why Freddy Kills His Victims

Let’s step back to the original film, but keep in mind everything I’ve just said about the sequel. Nancy’s mom, Marge, tells her about the court case, the lynching, and the understanding is that Freddy is now killing off the remaining children from the neighborhood. First he kills off Tina, but it’s made to look like Rod killed her.

Then he hangs Rod in his jail cell, making it look like a suicide. For those first two murders Freddy was buying himself time as to not arouse suspicion that he was back. Then when it comes to the murder of Glen, this is a blatant display of power—the fountain of blood coming out of Glen’s bed that draws all of the town’s police force to Glen’s house. Now Freddy is just waving it in their faces that he’s back and they are powerless against him now.

Then there is the face-off between Nancy and Freddy, which ends with his failure to kill Nancy, but he does successfully kill Marge. While this is easily read as Freddy taking a consolation prize for not being able to kill Nancy, let us not forget that Marge was one of the parents responsible for Freddy’s death in the first place.

And we kind of have to take her statement to Nancy with a grain of salt. We don’t know for sure Marge’s level of involvement, but the fact that she was the one who took his glove and she says this chilling line of dialogue: “He can’t get you now. He’s dead, honey, because Mommy killed him,”; these two factors heavily imply that Marge was the one who spearheaded the mob action against Freddy. So in the killing of Marge, Freddy does pick off one of the people who killed him. At the end of the day, that’s a win for Freddy.

Now, people pooh-pooh the sequel all the time because Freddy comes out into the real world, and that takes away what is scary about Freddy—that he attacks when you are most vulnerable: in your sleep. However, if you look at Parts 1 and 2 from Freddy’s perspective, it makes more sense that Freddy would want to get out of the dream world and enter the real world. At the end of Part 1, Nancy pulls Freddy out of her dream. By doing this, she has unwittingly shown him a new aspect of his power that he may not have known about before.

So, in Part 2, he takes the next evolutionary step to using his full power by manipulating Jesse into bringing him out of his dreams. And who does Freddy choose to kill the first time he gets back into the real world? Coach Schneider, a man Freddy knows has a thing for young boys, and given Ron Grady’s statement early in the film, is common knowledge in this messed up little town. The killings of Marge Thompson and Coach Schneider have personal vendetta written all over them.

Okay, now we need to talk about the little girls...

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