Michelangelo Maccabee | The Eldritch Horror of Freddy

My son is in fifth grade. As I’ve watched him go about his day-to-day life, I can’t help but think that he appears to be a much younger kid than I was at his age. I’ve got to say, I don’t mind that, really, considering the life we’ve seen up until this point. Hell, I’m even proud of it. His biggest concerns are getting some achievement on Roblox, or whether he is going to like whatever Dad makes him for dinner.  
 
I’ve been nailing it on the dinners, by the way. Last night was homemade pizza. 
 
He’s effectively the only child of two older parents. That’s a lot different than being the oldest child of two young parents, as I was. My mom was only fifteen when she got pregnant with me, and my wife was thirty-eight when we found out we were going to be parents. Again, this makes for incredibly different experiences. 
 
When your parents are teenagers in the 1980s, you remember your mom’s 21st birthday, and your favorite movie might be a Cheech and Chong sequel, which you are able to distinguish from the original well enough to discuss them both during a second-grade movie review while the rest of your classmates are talking about Ernest Goes To Camp and The Brave Little Toaster. Being a newborn in the first few months of a new decade, as I was in the 80s, makes it quite easy to remember how old I was during whatever year is being conjured in conversation. Are we talking about 1987? I was seven in 1987. It might not seem like much help when you’re young, but as you pack on the years, every handle you can use to grab hold of a reference point is welcome. 
 
1987 was the year that my favorite horror movie came out, though I would not see it until I was ten, in 1990, about the same age my son is now. I can’t imagine sitting down and watching A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 with my ten-year-old son, but then again, I’m not a parent in my twenties with four children and a documented history of making really shitty decisions. By contrast, he and I most recently enjoyed Stargirl on the CW, an almost too sweet bubblegum pop incarnation of a 1940s superhero group called the Justice Society of America. In this telling, the JSA was mostly wiped out and a group of kids have taken on the familiar names and abilities of those who came before them. This is a far cry from the horror stories I was watching when I was still too young to shave. 
 
For some reason, Freddy specifically spoke to me, but as 80s gave way to the 90s, horror started to lose its mainstream appeal and the once popular Freddy Krueger was turned into a joke. After a few more stabs at relevancy, he was no longer in on those jokes, try as he might to adapt. The once razor-sharp claws on Freddy’s glove had dulled and he receded from the spotlight, only to be pulled out for nostalgia pops once every few years and a terribly received reboot movie a few years ago. 
 
Freddy, for those of you who might not know, was a child predator. He specifically targeted children. Well, teenagers. Okay, twenty-somethings portraying teenagers. He attacked them in their sleep and often murdered them in ways that were reflections of their personalities. He was kind of like a twisted genie, taking a dream or a wish and perverting it into some deadly game or trap. It was a big part of the appeal, I think, watching him work. He could only get you when you were asleep, so if you didn’t sleep, he couldn’t attack. If you stayed vigilant, you were safe. 
 
I explained him once to my son. He excitedly said it sounded cool and a lot like Five Nights at Freddy’s. What? Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game series that takes place in a Chuck E. Cheese rip-off where you play a security guard watching surveillance monitors to keep yourself from being killed by the ghosts that haunt the animatronic animals that populate the restaurant. I mean, maybe on the surface there are some similarities, I guess, but I had to take a look for myself. 
 
As I soon found out, it is a lot more than that. 
 
I started my descent into the madness that was Five Nights at Freddy’s, or FNAF as its fans call it. I realized that this phenomenon might be seen as just as popular in some circles as the Nightmare on Elm Street flap was when I was a kid. Turns out, there are dozens of YouTube channels dedicated to discussing the deep lore of this relatively simple video game series. Not only that, but it also no longer simply exists as a videogame series and has spawned novels and merchandise lines that include everything from Halloween costumes to lunch boxes to action figures. You can even buy your kid a  FNAF plushie to cuddle with at night while he sleeps.  
 
A plushie. Of a murderous robot-bear. 
 
What? 
 
I never had any Nightmare on Elm Street plushies, or books on my shelf when I was 10 years old, and here’s my kid with several FNAF books, a bunch of action figures, a set of pajamas… 
 
PAJAMAS! What would Nightmare on Elm Street pajamas have even looked like? Would they be printed with children’s faces all over the chest like Freddy had in multiple entries, writhing around in agony, trying to escape from some kind of hellscape within Freddy’s tortured body? Would they have big red slashes all over them as if the wearer had been attacked by Freddy in the night? Yes, I know it is possible these days to get action figures and plushies of Freddy Krueger because nostalgia moves a lot of plastic junk from Target shelves, but this was not the case when I was living through this in the 1990s. Sure, we had a novelization of the first three Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but it wasn’t marketed at children and certainly wasn’t available in my school’s library or monthly Scholastic order form. 
 
So far so good, right? Though, how does any of this begin to touch the monolith that is Freddy Krueger, the knife-gloved dream demon that murdered kids in their sleep? Well, according to the ever-expanding library of media surrounding this franchise, Freddy Fazbear, a giant robot bear and the leader of the haunted animatronics, is inhabited by the spirit of a child who was murdered by Freddy’s creator, William Afton, who himself, is also a vengeful spirit that inhabits various animatronics as the story progresses. So, this is more than just a simple story of a security guard trying to stay alive during an overnight gig at a pizza place. It’s an epic struggle between a group of murdered children and a child murder that takes place in a haunted pizza place. 
 
And before we get too comfortable in a seat on the “Maybe you should pay more attention to what your kid is doing” train, I want to acknowledge right now that I played the first FNAF game and thought it was just a bit of silliness. I even thought it was a story of children’s empowerment, to be honest. The fact that you are playing as an adult guard at a haunted pizzeria where the souls of murdered children are inhabiting giant stuffed animals and attacking any adult straying after hours in a fit of unmitigated and uncompromising rage isn’t as scary to kids as it is to adults. The kids are the heroes of that story, regardless of who the player controls. The kids have the power. 
 
It even sounds like the kind of story I might have gravitated toward myself when I was his age. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why my favorite of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies was the third installment. It was subtitled The Dream Warriors because the kids in this one discovered a way to fight back. Maybe we are even drawn to these stories for the same reasons. It’s hard being a kid these days, whether we’re talking about the 1980s or the 2020s. Maybe a little bit of structured escapism isn’t so bad. Hell, I’m not going to sit back and pretend that I didn’t have some pretty twisted thoughts about getting some payback on a few of the adults in my life, so I get it. 
 
And look, if it sounds like I have some resentment against my parents… It’s because I do. Though let’s be real, a lot of us do, and I totally expect my own son to as well. I just hope he resents me for different reasons than I resent my own parents. I think that’s the dream, right? Not to mess up the same way our parents messed up, with the reality being that you’re inventing entirely different ways to mess up while you congratulate your partner that neither of you are like your parents. 
 
So have I messed up? Yup, but I’m not sure that dropping the ball on FNAF was much of a mess. This is a boy who grew his hair over the last few years and donated 14 inches so that someone else could have it. He often has to have his school snacks replenished a little faster than I would have expected because he shares them with classmates who don’t have any of their own. Yeah, I’m bragging. He’s a great kid. I’m incredibly proud. He also enjoys a robust diet of brutal fantasy where kids have decided that they are going to get their revenge on a child murderer… just like I did when I was his age. 
 
Hmm, maybe he’s a little older than I give him credit for.