Wes Craven brought something new and bizarre to the horror genre in 1984 with his classic movie A Nightmare On Elm Street and its iconic bogeyman Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a child murderer reborn as a shape-shifting ghoul who invades teenagers’ dreams and murders them from the inside out. And now, that sweater-wearing cretin is featured—complete with his signature hat and razor glove—in a surprisingly dance-friendly new tribute video called “Freddy’s Back” by Melbourne filmmaker Aljojo Mojo. The video is set to the strains of a track called “Andromeda” by an Orange County, California duo called Dance With The Dead. That group’s eerie, throbbing music can be further explored here, here, and here. “Freddy’s Back,” meanwhile, serves as a greatest hits reel for one of the most original, memorable, and disturbing characters to emerge from cinema in the 1980s. For five glorious minutes, Freddy does what he loves: scare the shit out of teenagers. This guy can turn up anywhere, from a TV set to a bathtub. No space is safe when Freddy’s on the prowl.
Freddy’s Back (Dance with the Dead – Andromeda Video Remix) from Aljojo Mojo on Vimeo.
With Freddy Krueger at center stage, the video plays like a gorier update on such Halloween favorites as “The Monster Mash” and “The Haunted House Of Rock.” Besides showcasing the work of character actor Englund, who donned the grotesque Freddy makeup again and again in what proved to be a multi-film, multi-media franchise, the video also stars Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, and newcomer Johnny Depp. After all, where would Freddy be without some young people to terrorize? At that point, Depp was just 21 and a few years away from his breakthroughs in Platoon and 21 Jump Street. Nightmare was his first movie role, and Depp was forever grateful. “Wes Craven was the guy who gave me my start, from my perspective, for almost no reason in particular,” he wrote after the director’s death in 2015.