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Freddy Krueger

Frederick Charles "Freddy" Krueger is a fictional character from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of films. Created by Wes Craven and portrayed by actor Robert Englund in every film of the series, he is an undead serial killer, who can attack his victims from within their own dreams. In the original script, Freddy Krueger was a child molester, as to Wes Craven, this was the worst thing possible. The decision was made to turn make Krueger into a child murderer in order to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestations which occurred in California around the time A Nightmare on Elm Street went into production, however Dream Child suggests this might still be the case in a headline Alice looks at when researching Freddy. Freddy is commonly identified by his burned, disfigured face, red and green striped sweater, brown fedora hat, and trademark metal-clawed leather glove. Wizard magazine rated him the 14th greatest villain of all time, and he came in 8th on British television channel Sky Two's Greatest Villains of All Time and ranked 40th on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains list.

Wes Craven claims his inspiration for the basis of Krueger's power stemmed from several stories in the Los Angeles Times about a series of mysterious deaths: all the victims had reported recurring nightmares beforehand, and died in their sleep. Physically, Craven's inspirations for Freddy included a homeless man who had frightened Craven as a youth and a bully at his school. The 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright sealed the story for Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to "jump off" from, but the synthesizer riff from the Elm Street soundtrack.

Robert Englund has expressed many times that he feels that the deeper meaning behind the character is that he represents neglect, particularly the neglect that children and teens are sometimes subject to when growing up.