The Fan-Written Freddy Krueger Origin Scene Robert Englund Wishes Were Canon

Horror fans can easily tell you the origin of Freddy Krueger, the demonic dream-dwelling serial killer from the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" film series. The story goes that Freddy (Robert Englund), sometime in the late '70s or early '80s, was a vicious child-murderer, operating in the small town of Springwood, Ohio. His preferred method of murder was a bladed glove his constructed himself, and he was typically seen in a thick red-and-green-striped sweater. Freddy was eventually apprehended by the police, but, thanks to an unspecified legal technicality, was never jailed for his crimes. The parents of Springwood, consequently, decided to take justice into their own hands, and cornered Freddy at his lair to burn him alive. 

Freddy's ghost, however, survived the ordeal, and mysteriously accrued the ability to appear in people's dreams. Freddy, now all burned up, stalked the dreams of a new generation of teens in the first "Nightmare on Elm Street." When he killed kids in their dreams, they died in real life. In dreams, he still wore his glove and sweater. 

In the 1989 sequel, "A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child," Freddy's parentage was also explained. His mother, Amanda Krueger, was a nun who worked in a poorly-constructed asylum for violent criminals. One night, Amanda was accidentally locked inside and repeatedly sexually assaulted by the inmates. As a child, Freddy was called the Son of a Hundred Maniacs. A dark origin for an evil killer.

Englund appeared on the video interview show "Jake's Takes" recently, and he revealed another small detail of fan-invented Freddy-origin lore that he was fond of and that he woshed would be accepted as canon. A fan posited that Freddy wore his signature sweater because it was personally knitted for him by his mother. 

In the grand lore of "A Nightmare on Elm Street," of course, the sweater hardly matters. It could very well have been the sweater Freddy died in, and his ghost was merely cursed to wear it. Of course, of the span of multiple "Nightmare" movies, it was revealed that Freddy could look like whatever he wanted. He could change shape, manipulate reality, and only operate by the non-physics of dreams. But he always chose to appear burned up, and presumably chose to appear in his signature red-and-green sweater. The sweater, one might posit, then, is something he is fond of. Also, one might wonder why it's red and green. Those are Christmas colors.

Englund talked about reading a fan script for an unmade "Nightmare on Elm Street" prequel that, he said, wasn't great, but contained the sweater details he liked. He narrated: 

"It's Christmas season, and it's a lone camera in the walls of a convent that's obviously the last place you go when you're an old nun. The camera winds around the corridors of this drafty, cold convent. And it's the point of view of a nurse. And you walk to this room, and there in the corner is an old, old withered nun. And she's in a rocking chair. She's knitting. She's knitting a sweater for her son. And it's for Christmas, and it's in red and green stripes. And now we know the source of the sweater." 

Again, the actual origin of the sweater doesn't matter to Freddy's lore, but Englund thinks it would be a fun detail. This was, Englund noted, for whenever the "Nightmare" series is inevitably rebooted. And there are certainly many ways that can happen.