Heather Langenkamp doesn’t think Freddy Krueger would be as scary today because he’d be turned into a goofy meme.
In the age of social media, it’s easy to imagine what would happen with the teenage targets if the horror movie took a more realistic approach. No doubt one would stop to snap a pic of the killer and turn them into the poop emoji in real time while another would take a selfie right before the killer pops up for that final scare. There, too, would be tweets along the lines of, “1,000,000 likes and i’ll remove this dude’s mask!” But how would the most iconic of slasher favorites fare with so much social media around? For Freddy Krueger, it’s all about the memes.
Sitting down for a joint interview with ComicBook.com, Heather Langenkamp – who played final girl Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street – said Freddy Krueger would lose a lot of his boiler room steam thanks to social media. “I mean, I almost think it’s impossible to have a scary character with social media because by the time you’ve already put out the scary side, there’s like 100 memes of you being ridiculous and they’ve figured out a way to humiliate you, so I don’t know if Freddy could even exist today…I see those memes the minute you’re trying to scare me, it’s like there’s a meme about something else.”
Robert Englund – who of course played Freddy Krueger across eight different films – confirmed, “Freddy texts. I wonder if I could get my tongue in a smartphone,” referring to the scene where a phone Nancy is holding turns into Freddy’s mouth.
It doesn’t take much to get Freddy Krueger to want to slice and dice, but we can totally see him getting frustrated when a tweet drops of him mid-blink, the caption reading: “My boy Freddy caught nappin’!”
For his part, Englund doesn’t see social media or the internet playing a role in any aspect of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, although it does have its place in modern horror. “I love the idea of technology being used as a tool in a horror narrative, I think I’m a sucker for that. I just think there’s probably better ways to do that than with the mythology of Nightmare on Elm Street.”