Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
In the pantheon of horror movie villains, few hold a higher position than Freddy Krueger, the malevolent melted-face child molester who stalks teenagers in their dreams.
With his razor-fingered glove, red-and-black sweater and ratty fedora, Krueger is a fiend of demonic deviance, his viciousness only matched by his dark, demented sense of humor. First introduced in Wes Craven’s seminal 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then cutting a swath through a bevy of Hollywood’s youngest and brightest in seven additional films (as well as TV’s Freddy’s Nightmares), he ranks alongside Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees as one of modern cinema’s undisputed lethal legends, a monster so unforgettable that he quickly became one of his era’s most recognizable pop-culture icons.
And he’d be nothing without Robert Englund.