Robert Englund Finally Reveals His Best Freddy Krueger Performance — Do You Agree?
The glove is off: Robert Englund has chosen his definitive Freddy Krueger performance from the Nightmare on Elm Street saga. Does it match your pick?
Everyone has a favorite version of Freddy Krueger. Mine tends to bounce between the original and Dream Warriors, but Robert Englund just picked a different high point for himself — and it is not the one that usually tops fan lists.
Englund's pick: the 1988 sequel The Dream Master
Asked by ComicBook.com which Freddy he thinks is his best, Englund went straight to Part 4, The Dream Master, directed by Renny Harlin.
"I like my performance in Part 4, the Renny Harlin film. Renny left me alone and he understood that Freddy only exists in this dream landscape. This sort of a landscape of the mind, of the dream, of the nightmare. And so, he's not real. He's been conjured by the subconscious of whoever is having the nightmare, and so it can be a little stylized, you know?"
That tracks if you think about how wild that movie gets — the series leaned hard into surreal, stylized dream logic by then. And yes, the roach motel kill is still living rent free in my brain.
How Freddy turned into the one-liner slasher
Englund also talked about how Freddy evolved compared to his masked peers — Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. Freddy always had some gallows humor, thanks to Wes Craven, but by the time the core series grew over two decades, the character shifted into a full-on joke-spewing executioner. Englund admits they pushed it too far by Part 6, Freddy's Dead (1991), but says that tilt was basically fan service: audiences loved Freddy's personality, his cruelty, his unapologetically not-PC bite, and, most of all, the jokes. So the movies leaned into what people kept cheering for.
Eight times on the big screen — and done for good
In total, Englund played Freddy eight times in theaters, plus some TV appearances. As he has said before, he is not putting the glove back on again. Whether someone else takes the sweater is one thing, but what Englund did with the character basically defined the slasher boom for a generation.
Where I land
It is hard to top the 1984 original or 1987's Dream Warriors (my personal favorite). But if Englund says The Dream Master is where he nailed the character, I am not going to argue with the guy who literally is Freddy Krueger.
Your turn: what is your favorite Freddy moment — the quip, the kill, the nightmare that still messes with you? Tell me.