Freddy`s Revenge Author(s): Fred Krueger

Freddy's Revenge
Author(s): Fred Krueger-Pelka
Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 41 (Spring, 1990), pp. 17-18
Published by: Threepenny Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383865
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MEMOIR
Freddy'sRevenge
Fred Krueger-Pelka
MAGINE WAKING one morning to
discover you have been renamed
Count Dracula. Think of the effect this
might have on your social and professional life.
For four years I lived with just this
sort of bizarre double identity, sharing
my name with a famous fictional
character. To my friends I was a mildmannered freelance writer, plying my
words, staying one step ahead of my
creditors and the IRS. But to millions
more I was a psychotic misogynist, a
vicious child molester who had risen
from the grave to mutilate and murder,
targeting teenaged girls as my victims
of choice.
My name was Fred Krueger, though
most who knew me as a psychopath
preferredto call me Freddy.
For those of you who don't follow
the slice-'em dice-'em scene, Freddy
Krueger is the leading character in a
series of popular slasher flicks, the first
of which was A Nightmare on Elm
Street. It is an astonishingly successful
batch of movies, the original 1985 production and its three sequels (Freddy's
Revenge, 1986; The Dream Warriors,
1987; and The Dream Master, 1988)
grossing more than fifty million dollars
in VCR sales and rentals alone. Freddy
Krueger is the mutilated, undead spirit
of a child-murdering pervert, burned to
death by angry homeowners on suburban Elm Street, lo so many years ago.
But, as the movie ads gloat, Freddy's
back! stalking the nightmares of nubile
teenagers, carving them up with the
razors he keeps strapped to the fingers
of his right hand.
It's difficult to account for Freddy's
popularity, given his line of work. There
are Freddy KruegerT shirts and Freddy
Krueger posters, his face leering
through layers of polyurethane scar tissue, the glinting razors on his hand
curling like a mandarin's fingernails.
Disc jockeys and comedians do impersonations of the mad slasher, and I've
seen small children pretending to flail
Freddy's razors at each other's faces
and throats. Freddy has been featured
on the cover of The National Enquirer,
and now there is even a television series,
Freddy's Nightmares, out in syndication. Freddy Kruegerhas become, in the
words of Boston Globe movie critic
Betsy Sherman, "the definitive villain of
the '80s."
What does it mean, I wonder, that a
child molester has been elevated to the
status of pop hero? And isn't it strange,
the power of names, those puffs of air
we use to identify ourselves?
'D HAD problems with my name
before. For one thing, editors always
seemed to have trouble remembering to
insert the first "e" after the "u" in
Krueger. Several of my articles have
appeared under this mistaken by-line.
But even when spelled correctly, the
name seemed to me harsh, abrasive.
And then there were Krugerrands, the
South African gold coins. I can recall
marching in an anti-apartheid rally,
chanting, "Freedom yes, apartheid no,
Krugerrand has got to go," half wondering who it was they wanted me to
leave with. But none of this compared
with the grief I ran into after the advent
of Freddy Krueger, bad dresser, child
molester.
I remember taking one of my articles
to the editor of a now defunct Boston
publication. "Fred Krueger," he said,
flipping through the piece. "Hey, aren't
you the guy who runs around mutilating little girls?"
Then there were the people who
assumed I was joking. Nobody could
really be named Fred Krueger.Silly as it
sounds, this became a problem, since as
a reporter I might make a dozen phone
calls on any given day. On several occasions people I needed to interview simply hung up, assuming I was playing
some sort of obscene joke. Hi, I'm Fred
Krueger.Yeah.Sure.
If I responded to any of this with anything but a polite denial ("No, I'm
really not a child molester"), or a good
natured chuckle, I was told that I was
thin-skinned, over-reacting. After all, it
was nothing personal. Just a joke about
my name, is all.
The decision to actually change my
name came during a visit to see my doctor. He had scheduled me for a biopsy,
because there was a suspicion I might
have cancer. Arriving at his office, I was
understandably preoccupied with what
might happen if the test results turned
out, to use his turn of phrase, "positive." I hardly noticed the expression
on the receptionist's face when I
handed her my clinic card. "Oooh," she
crooned, as if I were a cross between
Michael Jackson and Charlie Manson.
"Hey, everybody,it's Freddy Krueger!"
Poetry Workshopswith
Carolyn Forche, Charles Simic, Linda Gregg
Guest Poets: Derek Walcott, Michael Pettit, Dara Wier
FictionWorkshopswith
James Welch, Kate Braverman, Al Young
Guest Author:Alice Adams
Non-FictionWorkshopswith
Geoffrey Wolff, memoir& biography
Cyra McFadden, creative journalism
Guest: Bruce Berger, TheTellingDistance
Mark Medoff, Playwriting
(Childrenof a LesserGod)
Tracy Wynn, Screenwriting
(TheDeep, TheLongestYard)
Guest: Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (ThreeDaysof the Condor)
Suddenly,a whole waiting room full of
people was staring at me, some in amusement, some in curiosity or incomprehension, and one or two in what
seemed like genuine fear.When I told the
receptionist I didn't appreciate this sort
of attention at a time like this, she
replied, "Oh, I'm just having a little fun.
My last name is Hubbard. Everybody
always calls me 'Mother Hubbard."'
T
some consolation in
I
wasn't alone in my
knowing
isonymic situation, that this sort of coincidence must happen all the time. There
are, after all, only so many names to go
around, and fictitious characters, even
the monsters, have to be named something.The Beatles,for example, chose the
title for their song "Eleanor Rigby" by
flipping through the London phonebook
until they found a euphonious name with
the right number of syllables. My tenth
grade math teacher was named Charlie
Brown, while a friend of mine in college
had the moniker John Thomas, used by
D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's
Lover as a euphemism for the male
organ.
Another friend of mine endured a
similar, though less benign, experience.
Barbara was ten years old, and living in
California, when her family became
suddenly, incredibly famous. That day,
and for weeks afterward, dozens of
strangers telephoned their home,
screaming obscenities. Barbara's classmates took to following her around the
schoolyard, pretending to shoot her in
the head. This harassment, which continued until she was well into high
school, began November 22, 1963, but
even today Barbara suffers jokes or
comments about her "peculiar" last
HERE
WAS
ASPEN
WRITERS'
CONFEREN
JULY 15-28, 1990
Join us for a celebration of writing
in the heart of the Rockies
For more informationand brochure,please contact:
Kurt Brown, Director
ASPEN WRITERS' CONFERENCE
P.O. Drawer 7726
Colorado
81612? 303/923-4144
Aspen,
A programof the Aspen Writers' Foundation
Sponsoredby The Aspen Foundation
Aspen/SnowmassArts Council
City of Aspen
Colorado Councilon the Arts and Humanities
Plus
InternationalGuests
Publisher:Scott Walker (Graywolf)
Poet Herman de Coninck, Belgium
Novelist Catherine Lim, Singapore
Editor: Gordon Lish (Knopf)
Agent: Margaret Ruley (JaneRotrosenAgency)
SPRING 1990
17
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name, which is Oswald, absolutely no
relation to Lee Harvey.
And because Freddy Krueger is arguably better known today, especially
among ten- to twenty-year-olds, than
Lee Harvey Oswald, I began receiving
some pretty strange calls myself. There
was, for instance, the woman who
phoned at two o'clock one Easter morning, to deliver what she told me was a
message from God. "Rapist scum!" she
screamed, "apartheid rapist pig! Die
Freddy die!" She called at least a dozen
times that night, with variations on the
same theme. Her last ten messages were
recorded on my apartheid rapist
answering machine.
Allen Ginsberg has described fame as
"a koan," "a mystical riddle of identity,
to move through continuously and
solve in different ways." As I encountered, more and more often, adherents
of the cult of Freddy Krueger, I felt
caught in some kind of "mystical riddle" myself, a cosmic joke I had to puzzle through on the way to deciphering
my own true identity. I came to realize
how closely this identity was linked, in
ways both obvious and mysterious, to
what people called me, to what I called
myself.
I was Fred Krueger. That's who I'd
been since before I could remember. It
was the name printed on my birth certificate, inscribed on my father's
tombstone. It had been a part of me
through every instant of my waking life.
N
HAVE
been recognized
throughout history as powerful
talismans. So sacred was the name of
God to the ancient Hebrews, and so
powerful its properties, that its pronunciation was held a secret, accessible
only to the purified. The stricture
against writing the full name of God
was absolute, so that today we can only
approximatethe actual Hebrew word for
"Jahweh." "In the mystical disciplines
of the Indian Tantric tradition," writes
Joseph Campbell, in the first volume of
his tetralogy The Masks of God, "the
pronunciation of the name of any god
will cause him to appear and his force
to operate, since tI e name is the audible
form of the god himself."
In many cultures people keep their
true name a secret, known only to
themselves, their priest, and God. The
Papuans in the South Pacific believe a
person's inner qualities, even his guilt
or innocence of a particular crime, can
be discerned by the pronunciation of
his name. Westernersshare this belief in
the power of names. Consider all the
authors, actors, and celebrities who've
changed their names, from Voltaire,
Moliere, and Mark Twain, down
through John Wayne, Bob Dylan, and
Gary Hart.
There are even instances when a
change of name may well have changed
the course of history. William Shirer,in
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
notes that Hitler's original family name
was Schicklgruber, changed by his
father Alois before the dictator's birth.
"Can one imagine," Shirer asks, "the
frenzied German masses acclaiming a
Schicklgruber with their thunderous
'heils?' 'Heil Schicklgruber?'"
"A man's name," said psychologist
Herbert Silberer, in his 1913 article,
"Mench und Name," "is like a shadow
... it follows him all his life." But after
Nightmare I saw myself trailing two
shadows. The larger shadow meant that
my name rarely appeared in print unless
preceded-by such honorifics as "the
horrible," "the hideous," or (my favorite) "uncontrollably evil." This was
often accompanied by a publicity photo:
battered tramp's hat, hideous face,
malevolent smile, blood-washed razors.
Obviously people, strange people,
were getting some strange ideas about
me. My Easter morning messenger was
evidence enough of that. I thought of all
the dysfunctional souls out there, with
deadly fantasies waiting to be triggered
by one of the "big names" of pop culture. John Hinckley credits the mpyieTaxi Driver with driving the last
semblance of sanity from his mind.
Charlie Manson heard a Beatles song as
incitement to butcher movie stars and
precipitate a race war. Even a book as
wistful as The Catcher in the Rye was
read by Mark David Chapman as a
treatise on assassination. "From Holden Caulfield, to Holden Caulfield, this
is my statement," is how Chapman
inscribed his copy of the book, the night
he murdered John Lennon. What sort
Freddy the K., free of charge, when Fox
Television in Boston broadcast Nightmare as an "Eight O'Clock Prime
Movie." Critics consider A Nightmare
on Elm Street to be something of a
slasher masterpiece. The special effects
are indeed incredible, and the film's
creator, Wes Craven, is a recognized
master of the genre, using especially the
threat of mutilation, and the suggestion
of rape, to powerful effect. There is, for
example, the scene where the unsuspecting teenaged heroine, played by
Heather Langenkamp, dozes in her
bath, while Freddy's razor-extended
fingers rise from the steamy water
between her legs. We are treated to
numerous scenes of girls in nightgowns
stalked down dim-lit alleys, or through
the bowels of some hulking, nightmare
factory. And of course there is the
obligatory girl in white panties scene,
de rigueur for any self-respecting
slasher flick.
Predictably enough, Langenkamp
manages to elude Freddy because she
has resisted the entreaties of her date,
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Boston police have filed child abuseand
neglect charges against the parents of a
5-year-oldboy who stabbeda two-and-ahalf-year-oldgirl 17 times after watching
two horrorfilms.
A witnesstold police that shortlybefore
the stabbing, the boy had been talking
about the movies 'Fridaythe 13th' and 'A
Nightmareon ElmStreet.'
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of imagination, what sort of "statement," might be inspired by the uncontrollably evil Freddy Krueger?
"Wouldn't it be strange," a friend of
mine suggested, "if some lunatic
tracked you down and killed you,
because he thought you were the real
Freddy Krueger?"
"But," I replied, "I am the real
Freddy Krueger."
to meet my alter-ego for
years, but recoiled at the thought of
paying to see A Nightmare on Elm
Street. I've always detested slasher
flicks, even before my name was coopted. Their plots, from Nightmare to
Halloween to Friday the 13th parts one
through infinity,seem always to hinge on
violent retribution being visited upon
sexually active teenagers. Sex always
equals death in the world of these
movies, and girls who aren't virgins
deserve mutilation. It's no wonder that
these films are so popular, in an age of
TV evangelists, STDs, and "just say no."
"In Western society," says Diana E. H.
Russell, in her book, The Politics of
Rape, "there are still 'good girls' and
'bad girls', virgins and whores...because a whore is seen as 'bad,' conscience can be suspended."
I finally got my chance to meet
'D WANTED
as the personification of the fears of
many child survivors of actual sexual
violence, his message to them being:
you can run but you can't hide. And
those recurring nightmares you have
are just the avenue by which your
attacker will make his return.
Some media critics contend that films
like Nightmare desensitize their audience to the pain of violence, especially
sexual violence. And studies by
psychologists at several universities
indicate that viewers of slasher flicks
tend to more readily accept the common myths about rape: that rape isn't
traumatic, that women enjoy being
raped. I thought it interesting, then, that
twice during its telecast of Nightmare
Fox TV ran a public service announcement with the earnest message: "Violence against women: it's criminal."
Possibly the station managers were concerned about the film's impact on their
audience. Or perhaps it's just that
somebody at Fox TV has a very wry
sense of humor.
In any event, if the purpose of running the announcement was to guard
against someone taking Freddy's pastime to heart, in one case at least it
appears to have failed. This item
appeared in the Boston Globe several
days after Nightmare was aired:
who tries seducing her at the beginning
of the movie. Heather's promiscuous
girlfriend,on the other hand, is chopped
into giblets almost immediately after
having sex with her boyfriend. She is
"the whore" to Langenkamp's "virgin," which supposedly allows us to
enjoy her horrible death without any
uncomfortable feelings of guilt.
This link between sex, violence, and
death is hardly new. Susan Sontag, in
her essay "The Pornographic Imagination," notes that "it's toward the
gratifications of death, succeeding and
surpassing those of eros, that every
truly obscene quest tends." What violent pornography, such as the writings
of DeSade and Bataille, or The Story of
0, "exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection
with death."
But there are themes developed in
slasher flicks which may well be unique
to the genre. There is in Nightmare, for
example, the conceit of the resurrected
child murderer, a sort of Bizarro Jesus
Christ, risen from the grave to exact
vengeance on those who did him in.
This is as much an intriguing coincidence as it is powerful myth-making,
since pedophiles often threaten death
or mutilation to keep their victims
quiet. Freddy Kruegercan be seen, then,
FOR ALL its significance, I found it
remarkably easy to change my
name. I had to file a petition at the
county probate court, advertise the
proposed change in a local newspaper,
and then appear before a judge.
Altogether, the process took only three
months and cost less than seventy dollars. And watching the crowd in the
corridor outside the courtroom put my
troubles into perspective, when I considered that no one was suing, divorcing,
or indicting me, at least not yet.
There are times, though, when I
almost regret the change. It was my
name, after all. Abandoning it after all
these years felt something like betraying
an intimate friend. And if I was ambivalent about that name, well, sometimes
I'm ambivalent about myself. Here
again, the name was somehow linked to
the reality.
But my new name has brought with it
plenty of consolations. Months after
the change I still get a surreptitious little
thrill, every time I introduce myself,
write a check, or sign my new moniker,
as if I'm some holdover from the
Weather Underground. And it's such a
relief not to be on the receiving end of
so much strange noise. It's been months
now since anyone hung up on me, much
less threatened my life. And I no longer
flinch every time I'm asked to introduce
myself, or produce ID at a bank, hospital, or bar.
For a while I even considered changing my first name. What the hell, I
thought, in for a penny, in for a pound.
But researching it, I discovered that
"Friedreich," from which "Fred" is
derived, is German for "peaceful ruler,"
or "peaceable kingdom."
I figure I can live with that.O
THETHE
THREEPENNY REVIEW
18
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