Nightmare on Elm Street’s Robert Englund Thinks This Sequel Has His Best Freddy Krueger Performance (Exclusive)

Though the franchise has been dormant for fifteen years now, A Nightmare on Elm Street remains one of the most critical horror franchises to come out of the 1980s and a key launching pad for Hollywood talent. Written and directed by Wes Craven, the original movie in 1984 created a new icon of the horror genre with Freddy Krueger and his iconic look, but also marked the feature film debut of Johnny Depp. Even as the series continued, fresh faces and notable filmmakers would put their stamp on the series, including actress Patricia Arquette and director Frank Darabont.

A brand-new 4K box set of the seven original films in the franchise has arrived, offering fans a whole new look at the series. Ahead of that debut, ComicBook had the chance to speak with three key creatives from the franchise, including Rachel Talalay, producer of Nightmares 3 & 4 and director of Freddy’s Dead; Jack Sholder, director of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge; and Freddy himself, series star Robert Englund, all of whom have a lot of thoughts after four decades of nightmares.

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Robert Englund Picks the Nightmare Sequel With His Best Performance

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Speaking with ComicBook about his role in the series, we asked Englund which of the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels he felt had his best performance as the iconic Freddy Krueger. Englund didn’t take long to think about it either, revealing that A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is the follow-up that he thinks has his best take on the character.

“I like my performance in Part 4, the Renny Harlin film,” he said. “Renny left me alone and he understood that Freddy only exists in this dream landscape, this sort of a landscape of the mind, of the dream, of the nightmare. And so, he’s not real. He’s been conjured by the subconscious of whoever is having the nightmare, and so it can be a little stylized.’

Englund went on to talk about the evolution of Freddy’s persona over the franchise. Though sinister jokes are cruely were clearly there from the beginning, the humor continued to evolve as new movies were pumped out. For Englund, he doesn’t see the continued push toward a funnier Freddy as something out of line for the character, but does note there may have been a point where it went a little far.

“Freddy was always cracking wise. He was always a cruel clown,” Englund said. “My image that I use, a lot of actors use animal imagery, was like a cat toying with a mouse before he kills it, and enjoying that. But Wes included a lot of jokes in the in the original one, we kind of I mean, perhaps we, I don’t know, push the envelope too much by the time we got to part six, Freddy’s Dead, but we were just embracing what the fans loved. And the fans loved Freddy’s personality. They loved his cruelty. They loved his political incorrectness, and they loved his jokes. So we just exploited that.”