'The Shining,' 'A Nightmare on Elm Street,' 'Halloween.' Those are the greats.
In terms of fear, I still am most afraid of Freddie Kruger.
What makes Freddy Krueger such a horrible character? What makes him scare you to death? You can't get rid of the guy. He never goes away.
'Nightmare on Elm Street' wasn't that big. Over a long period of time it did very well, but this was different. 'Scream' didn't have a strong first weekend, and it went down the second, but then it kept going up.
Freddy Krueger, that's my boy. He's lean, and he's mean. I like scary movies, and when I had my head shaved, some people thought I looked just like him.
I like horror movies. Nightmare on Elm Street is my favourite. I even get scared a little bit watching horror.
If they do something like that, maybe a Freddy Krueger fan, a girl, a really sick goth girl starts killing kids herself and Freddy has to put a stop to it, or they have to fight it out.
Freddy Krueger was one of my childhood heroes.
As an actor, whatever I get the opportunity to do, if it has a good story then I'm in. I thought 'Dead End' had a great story; 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' of course, was probably the first real horror film I was in.
I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years.
No real fairytale scared me, but Freddy Krueger did. 'Nightmare on Elm Street' scared the living hell out of me, but no fairytale. Maybe 'Hansel and Gretel' a little bit when they were walking through the forest and they met the witch. But I liked being scared, I really enjoy being scared.
I couldn't find an actor to play Freddy Krueger with the sense of ferocity I was seeking. Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.
As a kid, I had nightmares about Freddy Krueger just from the trailers on TV!
I actually am grateful for Freddy Krueger, because the big surprise to me - with that sort of double punch of science fiction TV series and then the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' phenomenon - was that I got an international celebrity out of it.
I was on the cusp - or thought I was on the cusp - of celebrity, the result of starring as an adorable curly-haired alien in the miniseries 'V' on NBC. 'V' was a hit, and then got green-lit as a series. During the hiatus, the only job I auditioned for that fit my schedule was 'Nightmare on Elm Street.' That's the real reason I said yes.
I've never been a big horror genre fan, but I did go see 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in the theaters and I dug it. I thought it was cool.
The last time we had Freddy in reality was part two and Freddy sort of went out on his own.
