According to director Wes Craven, the enduring success of Freddy Krueger as a slasher movie icon can be directly attributed to his custom-made stab-glove. A piece of stab-a-phenalia that Craven has since admitted was partly inspired by, of all things, a small cat.
Specifically, according to the director the genesis of Krueger’s knife-gauntlet can be traced back to an evening spent watching his pet cat absolutely fuck his couch all the way up with its tiny cat-claws. An experience that made the director ponder the innate primal fears commonly shared by humans, such as being having their balls clawed off by a wild animal.
In particular Craven was curious about the idea of, to paraphrase a quote from him, transposing the fearsome claws of a mighty sabertooth tiger onto the human hand.
Craven would later expand upon this idea while refining the idea of Freddy Krueger, sagely noting that the success of the character hinged on him having a memorable signature weapon. Citing the success of characters like Leatherface, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers who ended up being defined by the weapons they used to eviscerate teenagers in their respective films.
To this end Craven decided to take the idea of a giant fuck-off claw gauntlet to it’s logical extreme and strap a bunch of steak knives to a leather glove. Which along with being kind of awesome, allowed them to one-up all of the other b-list slasher villains who just used one knife.
As Craven predicted, the glove very quickly became one of the most recognisable elements of the character to the point it became the target of industrial espionage during the production of the second film. To explain, whilst filming pick-up shots for the second film, Robert Englund heard rumours that people were planning on infiltrating the set dressed as crew members to steal as much shit as they could get their hands on, with the reported primary target of their pilfering being, The Glove. Englund, not liking the idea of that decided to just up and steal the thing himself.
According to Englund he then gave the glove to his agent as a gift who refused to give it back. However, as convincing as this is, there’s a persistent rumour that Englund actually stole a copy of the glove and not the original and that the original is in the hands of a fan who similarly stole it from the set.
As there’s no way to know for sure, we’d instead like to end on perhaps our favourite fact about Krueger. That he was so popular Robert Englund was once invited to take part in a threesome in full Freddy Kreuger costume with the sole condition being that he keep the glove on the entire time. Seriously.
