Wes Craven jolted the subgenre forward when he unleashed Freddy Krueger on them in 1984. Here was a slasher with an actual personality, a wit of sorts, and a completely original method of destruction. By attacking his victims in their dreams, Freddy allowed Craven and the various filmmakers who took on the various Nightmare on Elm Street sequels to unleash their imaginations, setting their kills in environments a lot more interesting than a suburban neighborhood or summer camp. Freddy's one-liners were always pretty lame, but his glibness somehow made the violence more disturbing and more palatable. All that personality also helped transform Krueger--a serial child killer (though not a pedophile, despite accusations from both critics and fans)--into a truly weird marketable character. Not only were there Freddy films and a Freddy TV series, but there were also Freddy toys, games, and comics. The declaration of September 13 as "Freddy Krueger Day" in L.A. in 1991 may have been taking things a little too far, but the moral outcry against it was even sillier.
Wayne Byrne takes a deep dive into most of this stuff in his immensely fun new book Welcome to Elm Street: Inside the Film and Television Nightmares. Byrne doesn't spend much time with the merch, but he does afford the films and the short-lived TV show Freddy's Nightmares more attention than probably anyone thought these things deserved when they were ubiquitous in the eighties and nineties. He provides some light analysis and critique, but the bulk of the book is devoted to the remembrances of the directors, special effects artists, and actors who made the nightmares. With a little pruning and restructuring, the book could have been a straight-up oral history.
Obviously, the late Craven does not contribute, but most of the directors of the sequels offer their memories. Freddy himself, Robert Englund, is the biggest name, and he clearly fancies himself a bit of a Freddy scholar. Some of his theories overreach a bit, but it's still great to get the perspective of the guy who clearly knows the character better than anyone, and the historical and making-of details from all participants are gold.
