Cancel Freddy Krueger? Dude… He’s Dead Already.

Something very strange is stirring in the world of horror, and if you are one of the people who are currently shouting online that we should all be cancelling Freddy Krueger... Hello, you must be new here?

Krueger has been the undisputed poster boy of pop-culture nightmares for over four decades. Ever since A Nightmare on Elm Street hit theaters in 1984, he’s been headline-act royalty. Yet here we are, watching TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook implode with #CancelFreddyKrueger. Why? Because a huge new wave of horror lovers are just learning that the Dream demon is (pause for gasp).. a bad guy!!! This conversation arose due to online gaming juggernaut Fortnite dropping a Krueger skin, and the backlash has been loud and harsh. Cancel Freddy? Dude... he's dead already.

Okay, let's take a deep breath... First of all, Freddy Krueger's creator, Wes Craven, already predicted this outcry back in '84. You see, back when Craven was pitching his idea, he realised that selling studios on a child-molesting character would not fly very well. Realising that he had pushed things too far, he rewrote Krueger as a child killer instead, and this worked... New Line Cinema bought the script and spent decades building a franchise with the Dream Master at the helm. Now, I'm not saying that this makes him any less of a bad character; what I am saying is that Craven deliberately protected his creation by removing one hard-to-swallow element from his backstory. The 2010 remake decided to put that genie back in the bottle, and that ended pretty badly for that film and the hopeful franchise revival.

Reality check though: Freddy Krueger is the VILLAIN of the films. He's never celebrated as a character in the films. We enjoy him as much as we enjoy any horror figure because they are the very foundations of their franchise and the genre. We celebrate the chase, the lack of remorse, the brutality, and even the humour they bring. For every final girl, there is a killer clown or masked psycho ready to snap a cheerleader in two. Is that a nice thing to enjoy? Not really, but that's the point. Horror is about the enjoyment of the things we don't talk about. It's about experiencing things we could never do in our day-to-day lives. As much as we'd love to kidnap our bosses and imprison them in a torture porn dungeon, watching some sweaty, overweight nutbar dismember his neighbours with a chainsaw is about as close as we'll get to giving into our dark desires. I enjoy watching Jason smooshing people's faces in; I'm not a face-smoosher.

Many villains have dubious backstories; most of them stalk young teens. Chucky spent years chasing after 8-year-old Andy Barclay, Pennywise only went after youngsters, and the Grabber grabbed kids. It's just an easy sell to hate someone, or something, that feasts on the young. We don't have to cancel them, we don't have to cry about them, but you can enjoy the terror they bring, safe within their own fictional world. They are not real people wandering around, and you don't have to go Karen on them. And if people want to enjoy the films, buy the merchandise, and dress up in a red-and-green sweater at Halloween, that's fine.

Welcome to horror. It's about celebrating the worst things we can imagine, knowing that the bad things often get their comeuppance. Krueger has been burned alive, exorcised with holy water, ripped apart by the souls of children, trapped back inside his mother's womb, impaled with his own glove, blown up, cast into a fiery furnace, and decapitated by Jason Voorhees. Baby... Freddy's dead!

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