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

1. The Imagery Of The Girls

So, those little girls. You know, the ones dressed all in white with the white jump rope who sing the nursery rhyme, “One-two, Freddy’s coming for you...”? Often these little girls are interpreted to be heralds who trumpet the coming of Freddy. When you see them jumping rope and hear that nursery rhyme, you know Freddy isn’t far behind. But as these movies are about dreams, these images should be interpreted as one would interpret a dream. The girls are dressed in white—all white; even the jump rope is white.

They clearly represent innocence. Are they the little girls Freddy murdered while he was still alive? Or could they instead be the girls whose innocence was taken from them, and whose souls Freddy has been tasked with avenging? Seriously, the girls are never explained, except for later in the series (without Craven’s involvement) when it is clarified that they are souls trapped by Freddy. But the original has nothing to do with any of that garbage.

If you don’t want to believe Freddy is out to avenge these little girls, then just take a bite of this freaky little detail: What did Coach Schneider get tied up with? White jump ropes. White jump ropes which he took out of the storage cabinet while Jesse was in the shower room, that he clearly was planning to use to tie his underage victim up with. How’s that for a coincidence? Maybe if that stupid mob of parents had been a little more patient, that would have been some skipping rope stuffed up inside the furnace in the Thompson’s basement.

And finally, going further with the dream symbolism, there is Freddy’s red and green sweater. Craven explained many times over the years his reason for the red and green striped sweater was because he read that those two colors when juxtaposed are stressful for the eye to process. Symbolically, this reads as a visual cue for ambiguity.

Or cognitive dissonance, a mental condition coined in the 1950s to describe the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves.

In other words, Freddy Krueger represents those hard truths that go against what people want to believe. We will deny them, we will try to drown them with alcohol, we will put bars on our windows to try and keep them out, even though they are already inside our homes.

Oh, Wes Craven, you bad, bad, bad, badass artist. Is it possible you embedded this many layers into your creation? That is horror writing at its finest.