DEADLY DIALOGUE: A Conversation on Cinema with Robert Englund

Hello, readers! Welcome back for the next installment of our monthly feature here at Daily Dead, “Deadly Dialogue: A Conversation on Cinema”, where we’ll be catching up with notable folks from the horror and sci-fi genres—both in front of and behind the camera—to discuss the films that inspired them to become the artists they are today.

For over 30 years now, Robert Englund has been a beloved fixture in the horror genre due to his timeless performance as the iconic Freddy Krueger throughout eight Nightmare on Elm Street films (including Freddy vs. Jason) as well as numerous roles in countless other notable films during his illustrious career. When asked about what initially inspired his love of cinema, he talked about his Encino childhood and how his fascination with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea first captured his imagination.

I was going to be a theater actor. That was my dream. I wanted to work on the stage. I wanted to maybe have my own theater company in California. That was sort of my dream. As a child, the movie that probably spoke to me the most and that I saw opening day was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. God, James Mason, Peter Lorre, CinemaScope, great effects with Disney's best people.  

Shortly after that, I went to the opening of Disneyland and, people forget this, but in Tomorrowland, I think—it could have been Fantasyland but might have been Tomorrowland—they have the original nautilus from the movie, the cutaway of it. You could go into it, you could touch everything, and you could push a button and the window submarine eye opened up so that when you looked out of it, you saw great shots of James Mason and Peter Lorre. 

It was just magnificent. The squid was there with monofilament moving its tentacles. They had the actual squid from the movie there. Before there was a submarine ride, the squid was in this area that they figured out how to make it look underwater with lighting, that underwater lighting effect in everything. As a child, this was amazing to me, to touch it and to see it after having just seen the film, it became this great bridge of reality and illusion that I walked across. That was always in me as a potential fanboy.

My mother and father didn't sensor, so my mother and father would take me to the theater down the street from where I lived as a child in Encino, California, up in the hills, a block and a half from Clark Gable's house. We weren't nearly wealthy like Clark Gable, but we lived down the street from Clark Gable in an old ranch house in the foothills of California. My mom and dad—I was an only child—we'd go down and then go to the previews, what they used to call movies-to-be, I would go down and partake of that.

I saw many so-called “grown-up movies” as a very young child. Sometimes I would fall asleep, sometimes I was intrigued. I think that stuff as a young, young, young child, a lot of that stuff buried itself in me and I knew way down deep that I loved that world. I had an uncle who was a famous film editor in early television. There was a lot of showbiz there. There was a lot of showbiz growing up.  

As I said, Clark Gable lived up the street. We'd see him in the market, shopping in the market down on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley in Encino. He'd see people. Even later in my life, I'd go surfing, I'd be at a stoplight and I'd look over and there was Lee Marvin. You'd see that. That's part of growing up in California.

That “show bizzy” part and just my fanboy interest in anything, whether it was Frankenstein, or horror, or matinees of horror movies, or Forbidden Plant, or any of that, that was all inside me. But that all went away. For a long time, I buried that. I was ashamed of it. I thought I had to be this serious theater actor, Shakespearean actor, an actor that does the classics. 

I was full of myself for a while and I was very good at that, but I also saw the politics and the snobbery for what it was because I was also coming of age in the 1960s and wanted to do more radical, experimental stuff, and I saw those people that I had trained with and wanted to be like, becoming very conservative about the new. That's probably the biggest reason why I came back to Hollywood.