Forgotten Television: Freddy’s Nightmares

The infamous child murderer, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), has haunted our nightmares since the first film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, premiered on November 9^th, 1984. Wes Craven’s creation became an instant hit and went on to spawn Seven sequels and a 2010 reboot with Jackie Earl Haley taking over the titular character. In addition to the film franchise, there was also a syndicated television anthology series which lasted two full seasons with a total of 44 episodes. When production company New Line Cinema was developing the series, they opted to not have a regular cast where the characters would eventually get killed off, instead they created an anthology with a different cast each week.  Each episode takes place in or around Elm Street in the town of Springwood, Ohio, where the movies also took place and focused on. Although Freddy does appear in several of the storylines, for the most part he acts as host, introducing the stories, commenting throughout, and wrapping it up with an epilogue.  Most episodes consisted of two separate storylines, with the second one often involving a minor character from the first.  The pilot episode also acted as a kind of origin story, showing us Freddy’s inevitable death and subsequent hauntings.

Freddy Krueger with his one liners and grim humor and yet horrifying image, with his blade embellished glove is one of my favorite horror icons.  The original Nightmare on Elm Street is still one of my favorite movies, with its great visual aesthetics and creepy dream sequences.  The series attempts to capture that essence, but on a far lower budget and it shows.  Where the stories are often good, I wasn’t impressed with much of the writing with some of the dialogue feeling more forced than natural.  The production value is low, they tried to recapture the extremely well-done atmospheric elements from the movies, but instead the sets looked like something from a high school theatre production and the lighting was either flat or in some cases just plain weird and not in a good way.

Even with the low production value and not so great writing, the structure of the series was unique and interesting.  I liked how each episode was composed of two separate stories, but how they interrelated to each other.  I have always liked anthology stories that do that.  In addition, several of the storylines in the second season had multi episode arcs, with a sequel happening later in the season. Overall, if you are a Freddy Krueger fan, you will like his opening and closing and many of the stories were entertaining, but the series suffers from low production value and bad writing.