Speaking as a onetime friend and promotional colleague of Robert Englund, the livewire, ready-for-anything actor who played Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I’ve always slightly regretted how Englund wasn’t more fully appreciated for his witty, snap-crackle, quasi-Rennaissance Man personality.
Just as the Frankenstein monster image always seemed to diminish or at least darken the classy gentleman aspect of Boris Karloff, there’s always been a lot more to Englund than that red-and-green sweater and those long razor fingers.
Which isn’t to say that Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, a forthcoming doc about Englund, won’t be worth a watch. Pic will have a brief theatrical run in late spring before the streaming launch on June 6th.
“Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15:
“I’m recalling my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).
“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.