KruegerGenre: Horror/Crime
Director: Ari Aster
Writer: Joshua Collins
Based on the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise
Cast: Rhys Wakefield, Mia Wasikowska, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Trevante Rhodes, Olivia Holt, Rylea Nevaeh Whittet
Plot: The film starts with a young Amanda Krueger (Olivia Holt), working as a nurse in a mental asylum on Christmas Eve. The asylum is short staffed, and they receive word that one of the inmates is wandering around. Amanda happens to come across a rarely monitored wing of the Asylum, where she comes across the escaped inmate. The inmate rushes at her, causing her to run and slam a nearby door on him. The inmate locks Amanda in the room, she bangs on the door, shouting for help. She turns around and sees several of the most vile inmates advance on her. Amanda screams and the camera cuts away as “Sleigh Ride” is overheard, showing the rest of the staff ruthlessly killed by the maniac that left her in the room, implying she is helplessly left alone for Christmas weekend as the maniacs have their way with her.
The screams and cries transition to Amanda giving birth to a baby boy. When the baby comes out, she gasps to herself and says “thank fucking god that’s finally over” and refuses to hold the baby. She tells the doctors to “leave it for anyone that wants it. Little shit is lucky I didn’t take a clothes hanger to it.”
A small group of nuns arrive, they take rejected babies to orphanages and they take Amanda’s baby as one of the rejected. The nuns decide to name him Freddy.
Super fast forward to a now grown up Freddy Krueger (Rhys Wakefield). He is on a job interview for a custodian job at one of the schools in the town of Springwood. The interviewer says he is impressed with Freddy’s experience as a custodian of Springwood High School and hires him. Freddy goes home and is greeted by his very pregnant wife, Loretta (Mia Wasikowska). She suggests they celebrate, and he tells her he will meet her in the car. She leaves to get in the car, Freddy walks into the backyard, enters the basement. There, we see three young girls, triplets, tied up and gagged. He intimidates them, telling them its nothing they did, its what their father did. Turns out, when he was in the orphanage, one of the kids that bullied him took a rake to Freddy’s face and body. He tells them he is going to do the same, doing an ‘eenie-meenie-mini-moe’ on who was going to be first to be killed. The one he picks lets out a scream, as we cut to Freddy getting in the car. Loretta asks what took so long, Freddy said he was just cleaning himself up for his lovely girl.
Two detectives, Will Briggs (Trevante Rhodes) and Marlee Foley (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) are called to what theyre told is a lead on the missing Abernathy triplets. What they come across is a big pile of leaves in front of a house. Will uses a rake to move the leaves off and its revealed the the triplets were buried under the pile of leaves. The parents are distraught. They say they were just out in the driveway playing with their jump-rope one minute, and the next they were gone.
Meanwhile, Freddy comes home from work. Loretta mentions that a couple of detectives stopped by. Freddy gets worried and argumentative with Loretta, pressing her to tell him what they said and what she said. She says they were just going door to door since the triplets were kids in the neighborhood. Freddy leaves the house, Loretta falls asleep. From there, we get some snippets of how Loretta met Freddy. He was working as a janitor at Springwood High. One of the kids stole a garbage bag out of his hand and dumped the bag all over the hallway to roars of laughter from other kids. A student herself at the time, she was the only one that offered to help clean up the mess with Freddy.
We get to know the detectives, Briggs and Foley in the next scenes. Briggs is a married gay man, Foley is a single mother of a child she adopted just before her husband died. They are called to another scene where a high school student is slain. They find that the victim was killed with a gardening tool. The detectives are figuring out that we may have some kind of serial killer on the loose that likes to use gardening tools as their weapon of choice.
Loretta is laying on her bed knitting. We see an early prototype to Freddy’s claw glove open the door. Loretta laughs and says Freddy doesn’t scare her. Freddy tries to get intimate with Loretta, but she says the baby is due anytime and doesn’t want to stress it out. Freddy gets upset, says he’s tried of hearing about her and that stupid baby and leaves.
We get more insight into Loretta in a dream sequence. She started seeing Freddy while still being a student at the school. She fought with her parents over seeing Freddy and ran away, effectively being kidnapped by Freddy and developing a stockholm syndrome.
Briggs and Foley dub the murderer of the slain teen and triplets as “The Springwood Slasher” They try to piece together a few other murders that happened several years ago with the same kind of feel to them…
Freddy is at work watching a few kids play hide and seek during recess. One of the kids hiding happens to run into a nearby building that happens to be a boiler room. Freddy stalks the kid. We get a quick glimpse that the kid Freddy is stalking is a child of another kid that used to bully him at school. This time, the child is the son of a girl that pretended to be in love with Freddy and tricked him into kissing a lizard in front of the other kids. Freddy kills the kid with his bladed glove. A kid that happened to witness what Freddy did is nearby in shock. Freddy kills the other kid as well and leaves the boiler room as the recess teachers call the kids back into class.
Loretta is trying to get a hold of Freddy. She is having the baby. After failing to get in touch with him, she has their baby girl, Kathryn Krueger, on her own. We get another memory of Freddy and Loretta from the past. Loretta is out of high school, but she finds out that he killed a few kids from her high school for bullying him, including the kid that dumped his trash all over the hallway. Blinded by love for her kidnapper, she forgives him and makes him promise not to do it again. Including these kills, this brings Freddy’s kill count to 10.
A few years pass and the Springwood Slasher murders seem to have come and gone with no real conclusion. Briggs and Foley have been hard at work trying to connect the missing pieces. They begin to realize the parents of a few of the victims(including the ones killed and found in a boiler room) had parents that went to an orphanage almost to the end of Springwood. The detectives set out to see what they can find.
There is an older couple of kids that sneak into the boiler room. A girl asks her boyfriend if its the place where a couple of kids were murdered. He confirms it, and they have some sick enjoyment out of it as if its some kind of fantasy come true. They begin to have sex, but Freddy smacks the boyfriend with a garden hoe. The girl shrieks, Freddy says he loves a good threesome with two hoes, and kills the girl with the garden hoe.
Freddy returns home. Kathryn (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet), a 4 year old, curiously has wandered into Freddy’s basement; the place where he’s been keeping his weapons and where he killed the triplets. Freddy catches her and yells at her not to ever go into his basement alone. She gets scared and runs away to find her mother. This leads to an argument between her and Freddy, in which Freddy slaps Loretta. Kathryn attacks Freddy and gets slapped and called a bitch. Loretta takes Kathryn and leaves with her. Freddy says she’ll be back and she has no other place to go, her parents disowned her, that nobody even knows that she’s still alive. After she packs Kathryn into her booster seat, she sits at the steering wheel and cries, believe what Freddy said. Kathryn says daddy was mean and they should leave, but she tells her ”daddy is all they got and we can’t leave.”
Briggs and Foley get to the orphanage and talk with the nuns working there. They see a disturbing drawing done by a kid with the initials F.K. They tell them about Freddy, son of a thousand maniacs. They don’t know what came of Freddy since he left the orphanage though.
There is a Springwood Town Meeting about the murders that have been going on for years and how nothing seems to be going on. Almost an entire classroom worth of kids have been brutally ended and they want answers, but nobody seems to be getting them. Freddy is at the meeting with Loretta. Freddy is wearing his trademark red and black sweater and hat during this scene. Loretta gets so caught up in the heat of the meeting that she leads the meeting, giving a speech about how we need to stay even more vigilant than ever before. Freddy appears to have sneaked out of the town meeting without being noticed.
Freddy takes the opportunity of the distracted town hall parents to strike. This time its a small group of about four high school kids walking down the street. He shoulder checks one of the kids as hes walking down the opposite direction. When the kids try to call him out, he flips the kids off. The kids pursue him and Freddy leads him to his basement, where he uses a chainsaw to kill them all.
A few days later, Briggs and Foley approach Freddy at school as he exits the boiler room. They press him for questions and Freddy gives them a false name. They remind Freddy about a few murders that happened in the boiler room and ask if he knows anything. He says he doesn’t, that he was never in the boiler room when the murders took place. They can’t get anything out of him, but they agree to keep an eye on him.
In the Krueger’s backyard, Freddy overhears a kid swimming in their family pool. He looks through a hole in the fence and notices the kid playing and the child’s parent is supervising, but beginning to doze off, due to what appears to be several beers stacked up on a pool table. We get a glimpse of a memory of the parent as a kid at the orphanage, holding Freddy’s head underwater in an attempt to drown him, or at least torment him. “Daddy, watch how long I can hold my breath!” The child’s dad smiles and nods off in a drunken overtired state, overtired due to the extreme vigilance of needing to protect kids of Springwood. The camera shows the boy underwater, holding his breath. Freddy’s bladed gloved hand holds the kid’s head underwater. He’s held down so deep that the struggling can’t alert anyone. Freddy just stares at the drunken sleeping father, grinning until the struggling stops. By the time the father wakes up, the kid is already floating in the water and Freddy is gone. The father jumps in the pool and tries to save the child, calling for help as Freddy is in the hammock in his backyard sipping tea and smiling.
The song happy birthday is heard as the scene transitions to two years later. Freddy and Loretta are singing happy birthday to Kathryn as she blows out the candles on her sixth birthday cake. Loretta tells Kathryn shes sorry that she couldn’t get her the party she wanted with all of her classmates. Kathryn says they don’t like dad because he scares them. Freddy tells Kathryn that he’ll take her to the movies for a birthday gift if she’d like to go.
There is a kid’s movie that’s playing at the theater. Freddy and Kathryn are trying to watch the movie, but a couple of teen kids and laughing and talking throughout the film. The kids laugh after they throw popcorn at Kathryn’s head. Freddy shoots them a dirty look, but they still laugh and trash talk him. He moves a little bit and feels something poke in his pocket. Thats when he realizes he left a switchblade in his pocket. “Kathryn, want to feel like a big girl? Go get us a refill on our popcorn,” he says, handing her the popcorn bucket. She happily obeys. The theater is practically empty, allowing Freddy to slit the unruly kids throats before Kathryn can return with popcorn.
When Freddy and Kathryn returns home, Freddy can’t seem to find Loretta at first. When he goes into the backyard, the basement door is open. Loretta has made the discovery. She is heartbroken, telling him he promised her he wouldn’t do it anymore and she was so stupid to believe him. Says she has to get her and Kathryn away from him and that she is going to turn him in. This sets Freddy off and he attacks Loretta, Kathryn witnesses the attack and she screams for her mother as Freddy strangles the life out of Loretta. Freddy realizes what he did and sees Kathryn mortified. “You’re not going to tell on Daddy are you?” Still stunned, she can only shake her head no. “Good little girl,” Freddy says.
Kathryn sees her mother’s lifeless body on the ground and she runs with Freddy chasing her, yelling out to her. She ends up at a neighbors house, banging on the door, crying and yelling for help. Freddy is almost about to get her when the neighbor opens the door, grabs her and pulls her inside, slamming the door shut in Freddy’s face. As Freddy is pounding on the door and screaming on the other side, Kathryn breaks down and says “he killed her…he killed her!” “Killed who” the neighbor asks. “My momma!” She cries.
Freddy is back at the house, trying to pack up as fast as he can. Briggs and Foley are agents called out to the scene along with other police officers as they surround Freddy. Giving up, Freddy confesses that he is responsible for all of the murders of the children in Springwood. Time passes, Kathryn is sent to an orphanage. As press goes around, Briggs and Foley are relieved to finally be off the case. They are in their offices at the police station.
“That son of a fucking bitch!” Briggs yells.
“What?!” Foley asked.
“Fucking Freddy Krueger! Some idiot signed a warrant in the wrong spot. They’re throwing the case out on a technicality.” Briggs says.
“But we have his confession, doesn’t that mean anything?” Foley asks.
“His stupid lawyers found something to make it invalid,” Briggs said, “Nothing to do but let a murderer just walk!”
Or maybe not? Parents of the slain children have been holding a meeting of their own to get some street justice on Freddy. They hunt him down and chase him to the boiler room, locking himself inside. “Lets some him out!” One of the enraged parents said. They throw molotov cocktails at the building, catching it on fire. The parents satisfied with the arson, leave before the entire building blows up, which it does.
Some time passes and Springwood seems to be back to normal. We see a shot of a playground in a park. A little girl is playing on the playground as her mother sits on a nearby bench with a book in her hand. As the girl continues to play on the playground equipment, we hear the familiar Nightmare on Elm Street theme play a few chords in the background. The sun catches the shadow, a figure of a person with a familiar hat, raises his bladed glove. The girl turns and sees a heavily scarred man staring at her. He is wearing the red and black sweater as well. The girl is more shocked than frightened to see such a wreck of a person.
“Hi pretty princess, new in the neighborhood?” He asks her.
“Yes, me and my mommy just moved here,” the girl says.
“Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Mister, what happened to your face?” the girl asks.
He laughs, tips his hat at her, “Its a long story, I’ll tell you when you are ready.”
The mother looks up from her book and sees her daughter talking to the disfigured man.
“Let’s go, Nancy!” the girl’s mother shouts to her.
“Bye Mister!” Nancy says before running back to her mother.
Nancy and her mother are walking away, with her mother reprimanding her for talking to strangers.
Freddy says to himself as he smiles and laughs, “See you in your dreams, Nancy.”
The camera pulls back as Freddy is still standing at the playground and we see a street sign at a nearby intersection of the road. The street sign reads “Elm St.”
