Why Freddy Krueger’s Iconic Sweater Is Red & Green

A Nightmare on Elm Street villain Freddy Krueger is iconic, as is his red and green sweater, and it turns out that color combo was no accident. A child murderer – and implied molester – turned dream prowler, Freddy is well-known even to those who don’t follow horror films, and would rather get a root canal than take in a slasher flick. Freddy is to the 1980s and 1990s what Dracula and Frankenstein were to the 1930s, a defining movie monster that still strikes fear into audiences today.

While Freddy became more and more comedic as his films went on – that is until Wes Craven sought to make him scary again with New Nightmare – fans never truly lost sight of the fact that even when dropping one-liners, Freddy is one bad dude. Sure, sometimes he’ll talk victims to death before actually inflicting it, but exceedingly cruel kills like feeding Greta to herself in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 or using Carlos’ own hearing problem to explode his head in Freddy’s Dead prove that Freddy never really stopped being sadistic, it just started coming with a sugary outer coating.

It’s not just Freddy’s creative kills or memorable dialogue that make him an icon though, it’s also his look, from his burned and scarred skin to his black fedora to his striped sweater. A Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven didn’t leave anything about Freddy’s persona up to chance, including the sweater’s red and green color scheme.

Why Freddy Krueger’s Iconic Sweater Is Red & Green

Freddy Krueger’s striped sweater, which he’s worn since the very first A Nightmare on Elm Street film, isn’t colored red and green by accident. It’s also not because Freddy is secretly a huge fan of Christmas. Wes Craven chose that color combination because he read a magazine article in Scientific American that said the pairing of red and green is the most difficult for the human eye to perceive correctly. Therefore, Freddy’s sweater is specifically designed to cause the viewer discomfort, appropriate for such a despicable character.

It’s worth noting that it’s the particular shades of red and green used on Freddy’s sweater that are considered the most difficult to view simultaneously. In certain lights, some fans have mistaken Freddy’s stripes for red and black, but according to Craven himself, it’s red and green. It’s just not Kermit the Frog green, instead it’s more of a dark olive green. Notably, in Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy only has stripes on the torso of his sweater, not on the sleeves. Every following film added the stripes to the sleeves as well, for reasons not entirely clear, outside of perhaps wanting to increase the visual discomfort.

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