Wes Craven, Samuel Bayer and Everybody Else Can Go *@%$ Themselves
ok – this blog doesn’t have anything to do with living abroad.
freddy krueger is a monster … killing sexy teens in their sleep since 1984.
his powers don’t just haunt and destroy in dreamland. his true power lies in the real world, where he causes a lot of hurt and harm to real people who have suffered severe burns.
“it’s all in good fun”
“he was a child molester”
none of that changes the fact that 12 year olds watch these movies and leave only with the lesson that “people with burns are monsters”.
growing up in the shadow of freddy and elm street, i remember movie posters, the trailers, and once i was old enough, the movie (in 3D). i didn’t understand any of it. all i knew was that man was scary. he was ugly. he was bad. i can’t remember a halloween from the 80′s and early 90′s that someone didn’t dress up as freddy.
imagine if your daughter, mother, brother, husband, father, son … anyone you loved were burned. imagine the hurt they would feel when someone called them freddy krueger. sound too cruel to ever happen? think again.
7 years ago, i was burned in a gasoline explosion. my face was burned. my arms were unrecognizable as anything other than raw bacon. it was the most horrible and painful experience of my life. boys at the mall called me freddy krueger. people stared. people told me to get a hat to cover my ugly face. teenagers at the mall yelled for me to put on some make-up or stay home. you cannot imagine the hurt. i am sobbing now as i write this.
the worst of all of these comments was being compared to freddy krueger. a monster. a killer. a boogie man. i was not a monster. i was not bad. but, the only thing that kids know about burn victims is that they are freddy. they are nightmares.
with the remake of nightmare on elm street coming out , im asking you to educate your family and friends. im asking you to stay out of the theater. and … with a whole new line of freddy halloween costumes in the works, im asking you to stand up and let people know that it is insensitive, offensive and just plain wrong to wear burns as a costume. there are too many people who can’t take their burns off.
… and me
it’s hard to share these with anyone. i still feel like i look like this sometimes. i hear those boys calling me “freddy”. i still look in the mirror and feel ugly somedays. i know i don’t look like this (and these were the good pictures), but the damage to my self-esteem won’t ever be repaired.
i made a lot of friends in burn support groups, online and in person. some worse than me. some better-off. almost every single one of them had been called “freddy krueger”. we all talked, cried and had to rebuild ourselves from it. to the world, we were monsters. we were the boogiemen. we made children cry, boys taunt and teenagers shout. we made grown men hiss insults. we were freddy.
- summer
