Greatest Villains: Freddy Krueger

This is the first in a little series of articles, if you will. I love villains. I find them to be more interesting and engaging than heroes. Villains are the guys with the more interesting abilities and motivations. They have better backgrounds, more mystery and can excite us in a number of different ways. They can scare us, they can earn our respect, we can sometimes even feel sympathy for them and end up wanting them to triumph in some cases.

This series is going to feature some of the best villains of all time, from movies, video games, TV and books. I hope you'll enjoy it.

1, 2... Freddy's coming for you...

Freddy Krueger began as the most despicable thing many people can think of, a paedophile. Wes Craven's orignal backstory for Krueger was that of a child molester who was murdered by the parents of his victims and then came back to haunt their childrens' dreams, killing them when they were most vulnerable. This was changed in the orignal series to a child murderer because of a series of molestation cases in California at the time, but it came back in the 2010 reboot.

The inspiration for Freddy was a series of newspaper articles Wes Craven saw about young men in south east Asia dying during nightmares. One of these men in particular went to great lengths to try to stay awake, knowing he would die if he fell asleep. For me, that's one of the scariest things about Freddy. He gets you when you sleep, so no matter how hard you try, he will eventually get you and there's nothing you can do about that.

Freddy never rushes to get his kill either, he loves to toy around with his victims. In the original A Nightmare On Elm Street , Freddy stalks the character of Tina for a while before brutally murdering her. As the series progressed, he started using more inventive and ludicrous methods of killing people. For example, in A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child , Freddy kills Greta by force feeding her to death (deleted scenes showed him cutting her open and feeding her her own body).

What gets me about Freddy is that one way people want to die is to pass peacefully in their sleep. Everyone has the image of lying in a bed, surrounded by loved ones and just quietly falling asleep, passing on with no violence and no drama, totally at peace. Freddy completely perverts that, turning dying in your sleep into a terrifying and brutally violent thing. He takes innocence from everything, corrupting it with his evil and that just makes him a great villain.

He's totally driven by revenge which is such a base emotion, everyone has experienced it at one time or another and as the series went on it was Freddy's thirst for souls that motivated him to kill. He's totally without remorse and doesn't care about anything but his own desire to kill, which makes him more dangerous than anything else.

Welcome to Prime Time, b**ch!!

Freddy captures our imagination in ways other slasher villains simply can't. Jason Voorhes will chase you with a machete, Mike Myers will stab and slash but Freddy loves to get creative. He exists only in the dream world and he can bend that reality as he wants. He's turned water taps into claws, appeared as a giant worm-like creature, he can extend his arms and cut bits of his own body off, possess people and do many, many things with his tongue.

The very nature of Freddy as a nightmare means he can torment his victims in the way that will have the most damaging effect on them psychologically, and no other villain violates his vitims quite like Freddy. He literally gets inside your head, he knows everything about you as a result. He's in your bed, in your dreams, you cannot get away, you cannot hide.

Never Sleep Again

Freddy Krueger will live on in infamy as Wes Craven's greatest creation. There's something so simple and yet so deep about the way he scares us. He is fear itself. He personifies that primal emotion so perfectly. He will kill you just for the heck of it, but he'll play with you first, getting inside your mind and haunting you with exactly the things that frighten you most before finishing you off. And you can do nothing to stop him. Eventually, you will fall asleep.