just a curious thought for discussion.....
First:
What do you think the time period was within he took the twenty kids?Years? A single year?A few months?How much time passed for the Parents combined fear to grow to such a degree that they took to committing a vigilante crime?
I imagine Freddy began with a slow burn, building to a raging fire. At first one kid , here or there, snatched as opportunity allowed. With a cool down period between the firsts. But once Kruger gets a taste , he wants more.And the taking becomes more frequent. So much, that the children go from playing outside to being kept indoors as often as possible. The playgrounds and school yards now child free. So Krueger has to move closer to home. Taking them from backyards and bedrooms as the terror among the town grew. This risky child napping, might make him even go for younger kiddies. Snatching infants from cribs ( less fighting back on their part) .Maybe doing the dirty deed in the child’s room while the parents slept across the hall, leaving his handy work for them to discover the next morning.
All this leading up to him getting caught
We know of at least eleven parents(single or coupled) who were involved in the lynch mob.
But , how many in total do you think might have been part of the group? Even eleven couples would be a lot of people,more than enough,and certainly would have made it easy to spread the gasoline around Freddy's boiler room quickly for good effect. More the merrier would have ensured he was toast. ( wonder if any suzie homemakers brought marshmallows?)
Perhaps in some cases , the Mother or Father could not bring themselves to be involved in the crime, so only one partner participated. Decisions that would have led to a divorce in later years as arguments,trust issues and disdain for the deed increased.Divorce,Of which there were a lot among these families,was yet another way that Freddy hurt these families and the surviving children.Still mucking up their picture perfect suburban lives even within his death.
Might there have there been more? We get hints of other kids dying from severe sleep disorders via Dream Warriors.They could have been other Elm Street Children who Freddy got to off screen
And how might these folks have all met? I could see a small group of neighbors coming together and conspiring such an idea in their backyard at weekend barbecues(a little too ironic...don't cha think?). But how would it spread to all eleven or more?
The group probably didn't meet at the courthouse during Freddy's trial. Why would they ALL be there?....unless..... we take the original scripts deleted story that Glen ,Nancy ,Tina , and Rod et al had a sibling taken by Freddy.......then these Parents would be severely invested in the outcome of the trial.Appearing in the courtroom,testifying.Sharing their grief.
Then that might place the mob at 20....
Marge mentions that the children who were killed were "kids we all knew" ....and what better place to meet these kids AND their parents but than at neighbor hood gatherings,school functions ,PTA meetings.Car pools.Bus stops. Elementary school plays. Sports events, Parks.
The Thompson's probably knew the Grey's as Nancy and Tina felt like longtime best friends. They might have met the Lantz's, as they lived across the street from each other. But would any of them have personal lives where they would cross paths with or know or hang out with the Lanes? or the Parkers?
But all the others? They all didn't live on the same few blocks on Elm Street. Freddy would not restrain himself to just one streets worth of children. Some lived on the rich end, the poor end or somewhere in the middle and could have known or even been friends with each other from their own childhoods. If each had a child before the ones we met in the movies, they could have certainly known each other from school interactions.
If the background information introduced in Freddy's Dead were to be brought into the thought, what if Freddy lived with his family on Elm Street.And he took the kids of his neighbors who looked down on him or his family, or treated his child with disrespect. His familiarity in the neighborhood might have made it easy for him to get close to the kids when it came time to take them.
It seems likely that most of these parents had a child to replace the one Freddy took shortly afterwards when they knew it would be safe.I cant imagine each family having a second child at the time as they would have had to left that baby home alone with a sitter while they went out to torch a maniac. And, I imagine after Freddy's release, they would not be keen to leave their living children alone and unprotected.
While it was omitted from the movie, the characters of the Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street were to have a younger sibling in the original script. It was a scene that was even filmed. But it boggles the mind that if true that the subject of Freddy and their former brothers or sisters deaths never came up. Either in direct conversation or playground rumor. It seems odd that none of our characters really know of Freddy before the events of the movie. What he did in ones own town would remain a part of the spoken or whispered history forever.
Especially considering the kids had their own jump rope song in regards to the event. It always struck me as odd that none of the kids in the movie had more than a passing familiarity with Freddy's past.Perhaps the parents went out of their way to hide the history. All pictures of the previous child put away. Forever tainted by Krueger's touch in their eyes. No longer their kids, now his. "Use to take HIS kids" Group promises to not let even the memory of Freddy to touch their new children. But someone outside this group would be talking about the past. Newspapers revisiting the scandalous event ,neighbors, gossip seekers. A whole town would not be silent of the slashers sins.
Another question comes to mind......How soon do you think they came up with the idea to torch Freddy and then take action? They couldn't have waited too long after his release as Freddy would be anticipated to leave town and get away to start all over in anew with someone else's kids. Would Freddy have been released immediately after the ruling? or later that evening in secret(The angry crowds outside the jail would be huge)?next day?
And since they couldn't have known each other as one group of friends, how did they all come together? Sure, Word of mouth could have spread from one pocket of parents to another ( "did you hear what the Thompson's are planning to do? " "Im in!" ) .Some of them might have come up with it immediately after the courts ruling and had a quick discussion, and then reached out to others......."you each bring one parent to the meeting....and they each should bring one parent "...and so on .
Maybe as soon as LT Thompson ( or what ever level of cop he was at the time) was seen to be part of the group, others joined in quickly. Maybe it was he who had the idea in the first place.
(Ive always wondered who signs a search warrant...and if LT Thompson was involved in some way or not , what if he was the one who forgot to sign it so he would have felt a greater need to right his wrong)
Eleven or more couples are a lot of mouths , and there would surely be a loose tongue or two in the bunch,how did they keep this all a secret for so many years? Some might have been only on watch, trying to find where Krueger ran off too hide.I don't believe they had found his kill playground before he was arrested as there would be enough evidence on that site to convict and Krueger didn't own the boiler room so would they even need a search warrant before entering an old abandoned boiler room that belonged to no one?
“Poured gasoline all around the place, made a trail of it out the door , and lit it up and watched the whole place burn”
A fire of any kind would attract attention not to mention firemen and other police even if they had found him in an old abandoned boiler room ,most likely out on the edge of town . If the building in Nightmare 2 was the place in question(Maybe Kruegers place was a older version of the boiler in the back of the lot.), that would be a huge fire.
Unless they consolidated most of the gasoline around the area where Krueger slept on site with a small trail to the outside so they could light it from a safe distance. Burning his escape routes and forcing him to run through walls of fire. But even controlling that fire would be a serious undertaking.
“The burned him in his boiler room and they hid the remains. “ Why they didn’t just shoot him and bury or burn the body? Why the elaborate execution? Sure, I understand their desire to make him suffer for what he did to the children. But why the risks that comes with fire? Could it have been a symbolic choice because Freddy burned the bodies of “his” children to dispose of them? Or was it a cleansing ritual? Burn him from existence .No gravestone,no body, no memory.
How the heck did they manage to set a place on fire AND collect the bones? Sticking around after Krueger came bursting out of the fire , screaming vengeance only to be shot down by Marge? Did they sing campfire songs, roast marshmallows on his twitching corpse while they waited for the fire to be put out?
Perhaps Donald Thompson managed to have removed the bones from evidence after the fact? Alter the paperwork. However, why did they choose to hide the bones in the middle of a junkyard in the first place? For what purpose ? So they could visit them whenever they wanted?
Sure, one would think middle of a junkyard would be a great place to lose something, but there is still the risk that someone would discover the remains. Seems fitting that the junkyard owner was involved in the crime.
But why not just bury the f#%king thing in the first place and be done with it. Maybe the bone disposal was a last minute decision. After the fire, they might not have many choices with the town and other police watching. Perhaps they collected the bones so the fire would have looked like an accident or arson and not a murder but they had little time or options to dispose of it at the time.
Interesting that Donald could remember EXACTLY where the bones were left. It's not like junk in a yard would get moved around over decades
Maybe he WAS actually a security guard for the junkyard,with a key. Taking the job,after losing his,so he could keep an eye on the remains. Because to him that would be the only way he could continue to convince himself that Krueger was really dead,despite all that he had witnessed with his daughter and her friends and the other deaths that must have followed after the first movie.
Now, the thought intrigues me : before they burned him.....how did they catch him?
