Horror is having its moment. 

It’s dominating the film industry, with ‘Sinners’ recieving a record 16 nominations and four wins at this year’s Oscars – Frankenstein and Weapons getting their nods as well. 

And a man who will forever be synonymous with horror is Robert Englund – the original Freddy Krueger. 

Even though he’s long since hung up his fedora, striped sweater, and razor-fingered gloves, he’s still involved in highly influential thriller projects, including Netflix’s Stranger Things. 

“I’m so proud of Sinners for, for kind of being one of the first horror films since ‘Silence of the Lambs’, then before that, perhaps ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, to really kind of be taken seriously at its time by the academy,” he told Jack Tame.  

“I think Sinners has really begun another kind of renaissance,” Englund said. 

“I sort of thought for a minute there that maybe all the zombie projects had sort of exhausted the audience, you know, for a while, but you know, Sinners was so fresh and so wonderful.” 

Some may take a view that horror is a lower form of art, that the actors just turn up and snarl, unaware of the training many horror actors have. Englund for example, was classically trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.  

“What it does is it gives you a technique if you need it,” he explained. 

“I sometimes get parts, I can’t believe they want me for these roles ... so then you have this technique to rely on. It’s an opening.”  

Performing for stage is also quite different than performing for screen – on stage you have to exaggerate things, perform to the back of the room, whereas screen acting requires a more naturalistic performance.  

But for Freddy, he brought those elements of stage acting into his performance. 

“I didn't worry about my thinning hair, and I didn't worry about my good side or my bad side, and I was able to change my voice and I was able to move differently than Robert Englund would normally move on film because Freddy occupies this sort of surreal imagination,” Englund told Tame. 

“I don’t like to use the word dance, but I was able to physicalize him more, kind of paint him into the frame of the imagination of whoever was having a nightmare about him, and that was really liberating.” 

“Playing Freddy for all those years was actually a very liberating thing for me, and it kind of gave me a career on the other side that I know I wouldn’t normally have had because I had been established as a genre star.” 

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