"Fear has been good to yours truly." — Robert Englund

Horror movies travel pretty well anyway. They're like action movies: People overseas can watch them and enjoy them, and they're not so culturally specific in terms of their references, and they can follow a good scary story.

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.

When I was a boy, I read a terrible article in a big weekly American magazine called the 'Saturday Evening Post.' In the middle of this family magazine on my parent's coffee table was an article about this family that was camping, and they were all mauled by a grizzly bear in their sleeping bags.

As a result of playing Freddy Krueger, I can remember having to look at some medical books, and at some of the disfigurement that fire can cause on people, because they were the source material for some of the prosthetic makeup that I wore. That aided and abetted this fear of death by fire. Which is sort of what happened to Fred Krueger.