A Quarter-Century of Krueger: Freddy's Life and Times

For this second installment of my year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street, I bring you a highly masturbatory yet fascinating look at the fictional life story of everyone's favorite supernatural slasher. Told in timeline fashion, it incorporates all "canonical" events in the life of one Fred Krueger. And by canonical, I mean accepted by New Line as officially part of their character's story. And yes, I'll admit to a little license taken on my part to help "smooth things over," if you will, and take care of any inconsistencies.

Here we go:

1937: Amanda Krueger, by then a young nun known as Sister Mary Helena, comes to work at the Westin Hills psychiatric hospital in Springwood, Ohio. She is accidentally locked in the asylum over an extended vacation (some sources indicate Christmas, but Freddy's birth date would point more toward an Easter break). Sister Mary is repeatedly tortured and raped by the 100 inmates locked in with her. She is found days later, barely alive--and pregnant.

January 14, 1938: In a breech birth, Sister Mary delivers her baby, Frederick Charles Krueger. He is immediately given up for adoption.

1938: Baby Freddy is adopted by one Mr. Underwood, an abusive alcoholic.

1940s: The child's sociopathic behavior begins at an early age, and, as with many future serial killers, includes the butchering of small animals. He is a social outcast among other kids, who are aware of his unseemly background.

Early 1950s: In his teen years, Freddy becomes a "cutter", engaging in self-mutilation. Eventually, he works up the nerve to murder his sadistic foster father.

Early 1960s: Freddy meets Loretta, and the couple eventually marry. They move to 1428 Elm Street in Springwood to start a family, which includes the birth of a daughter, Kathryn. Krueger takes a job at the local power plant. Krueger begins acting on his twisted perversions, abducting a total of 20 children from the neighborhood and taking them to the boiler room of the power plant, where he tortures and kills them. His prime instrument of torture/murder is a glove equipped with razor-blade claws. When Loretta discovers his activities, he murders her as well. The cases remain unsolved, and police dub the killer the "Springwood Slasher".

1966: Krueger is finally connected to the missing children, and arrested. His daughter is put into foster care.

1968: Due to the warrant to search Freddy's premises being incorrectly signed, all evidence becomes inadmissible. Krueger is released from prison. His birth mother, who had been following the case, hangs herself in the Westin Hills tower. On the night after his release, Springwood parents take matter into their own hands, track Krueger down to his boiler room, and burn him alive inside. Just prior to his death, Freddy is approached by a trio of "dream demons", who offer him immortality in the dream world, and the ability to continue his killing spree there. Krueger's remains are taken to the local auto salvage yard and locked in the trunk of one of the wrecked cars.

1970s: Police lieutenant Don Thompson and his wife Marge, two of the parents involved in killing Freddy, move into his old house on Elm Street. The Thompsons and other Springwood parents work to erase the memory of Krueger and his crimes, as well as their own vigilante act. The subject becomes taboo in the town.

Fall 1981: After a dozen years, Krueger's malevolent spirit finally gains enough strength to begin exacting his revenge. Returning to life as a kind of "dream demon" himself, Freddy begins haunting the children of the parents who burned him to death, murdering them in their sleep--resulting in a supernatural massacre that would terrorize Springwood teens for a decade. Among his first targets: Nancy Thompson, the daughter of the people who had moved into his former home.

• Freddy's Famous Friends

Freddy cartoon by Montygog

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