If there’s one thing that makes A Nightmare on Elm Street (and its subsequent films) iconic, it’s the now-legendary villain, Freddy Krueger.
Created by director Wes Craven, he was the malevolent spirit of a sadistic child killer who haunted his victims while they slept, able to kill them both in the dream world and the real one. And from the first installment of the Nightmare franchise, he’s always had a trademark look: a face disfigured by burn scars, a dirty red and green striped sweater paired with a brown fedora and a leather glove adorned with metal claws on his right hand.
The film’s concept was inspired by the real-life story of a family who escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and their son, who later died after having disturbing nightmares about what they witnessed. But Freddy’s ominous look was drawn from a childhood experience of Craven’s. In the documentary, Never Sleep Again: The Making of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the filMMAker revealed that as a kid growing up in Cleveland, he remembered being frightened by a drunk, lumbering man in a fedora who stared up at Craven as he watched him from his apartment window.
That fedora was one of the key elements that made it into Craven’s original description for the movie when Robert Englund was cast as Freddy. However, while speaking to PEOPLE, the actor, now 77, recalls how much work went into perfecting the character’s overall appearance — and how he had to fight for that trademark accessory during the pre-production of the film.
“I went through a lot of makeup work out in the San Fernando Valley at [special makeup effects artist] David Miller’s studio. He had converted his garage at his home and I was there a lot,” Englund tells PEOPLE while promoting Nightmare‘s 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) release in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary. “We worked out of these terrible, terrible books on burn victims that he had. Oh, I could barely look at them. But we worked and modified it and went through some strange ideas and changes. Wes contributed; [producer] Bob Shaye continued.”
It was during those makeup tests that Englund first found his voice for Freddy, which he was still working out at the time. “David pricked me with a crusty glue brush. And I yelled at him and my voice just caught in my throat for a second. And I said that kind of went with the look, the image of Freddy that I was looking for.”
Englund then had to try on various costumes before setting on the character’s signature look. “I was trying on pants. The original pants had oil all over them, but they were wet. I couldn’t work with those. We had to come up with dirty slacks,” he recalls, before getting the first glimmer of what Freddy would become.
“I just remember seeing myself in one of those little crappy dime-store mirrors, you know, not even a good reflection. But I remember one of those was tacked up and then seeing [myself] and getting the idea,” he says, adding, “Because of the overhead lighting, once I had that hat on and the glove, I saw the shadow. I saw the Freddy silhouette in the shadow and I went, ‘Aha, this is something I can work with. This is something I can exploit.’ “
While Englund felt like the character was coming together, he reveals that Craven and Shaye weren’t set on the final look — particularly the fedora. “They were trying to change the hat on me. They literally had me in a paperboy hat for 30 seconds and I felt like I was auditioning for Newsies,” he says with a laugh. “It was kind of silly. So I defend the fedora, which is in the original script, which is Wes’ idea and concept. But they were just getting panicky at the last minute.”
That’s when the production team brought in a box full of hats from Western Costume. “They were panicking a little … I think they thought I was gonna remind people of Indiana Jones or something. I said, ‘No one’s gonna confuse me with Indiana Jones,’ ” Englund says.
Luckily, Englund was right, with costar Heather Langenkamp, who played the film’s final girl, telling PEOPLE she knew Freddy was going to frighten audiences the first time she saw him on set.
“I hadn’t seen Robert in makeup for several days and I went into the [high school] scene where TIna [Amanda Wyss] leads me down into the boiler room and I got down there and I saw Freddy for the first time,” the actress, now 60, says.
Recalling how she saw him in “the shadow with the hat, the sweater, the boots and the glove,” Langenkamp says, “It was really striking and I knew at the moment he was terrifying. I never had to act that part because he was always terrifying to me.”
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While speaking to PEOPLE over the summer, the actress noted that Englund “had such great body language that he developed for Freddy. It was all right there in full force.” She added that when “that hat was tipped over his eye and he had one shoulder higher than the other, it was a full Freddy look that I had never seen before. And I realized that it was totally frightening. It did set me back a bit.”
