Nightmare

Some years ago, around Halloween, a Facebook post circulated about Freddy Kruger from the 1984 movie “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” The post stated the character from the movie was based on a real-life serial killer in Oklahoma back in the 1800s.

The post included a gravestone with Frederick Kruger’s name etched into it. It also recounted Kruger’s killing spree of young children using only a gardening claw, basically everything that occurred in the movies.

Freddy Kruger, today, is an icon among horror films. With his fedora, the claws scratching down a chalkboard, and to add texture, his burnt skin. But there was never a Frederick Kruger, child serial killer, and the movie was not based on such a false person.

Wes Craven, the director and writer for “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, said in an interview with Vulture on how the idea became a reality.

After reading an L.A. Times article about a family who emigrated to the U.S. from the Killing Fields of Cambodia, he said “Things were fine, and then suddenly the young son was having very disturbing nightmares. He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Extra: The Killing Fields of Cambodia were the burial spots of more than a million people killed by the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. This was the cleansing campaign Pol Pot led to rid those undesirable civilians.