Editor Ira is here today to usher us into the nightmare world of Freddy Krueger knock-offs.

I was never really scared of Freddy Krueger invading my dreams. That's not to say I wasn't scared of Freddy Krueger. I was a child in the 1980s; I was in fact terrified of Freddy Krueger. The VHS boxes of the various "A Nightmare on Elm Street" films on display at my local video store were more than enough to frighten me to my core. I couldn't step outside after dark without imagining that Freddy was lurking somewhere in the shadows, ready to tear into me with his signature claws.

No, the reason I wasn't scared of Freddy haunting my dreams was that I didn't know that's how Freddy operated. I was a sheltered kid who tried to avoid any direct knowledge of horror movie scariness (while also being perversely fascinated with all of the trappings of horror, naturally). It wasn't until I started to consciously explore the horror canon in college that I was clued into Freddy's dreamscape modus operandi, and by that time I'd moved on to lying awake in terror of political machinations and ecological collapse rather than movie monsters.

Still, the fact that even a kid who actively avoided "Elm Street" ephemera was aware enough to be that scared of it speaks to how pervasive Freddy Krueger was in 1980s culture. Freddy was everywhere. He was arguably the most iconic (and marketable) new movie monster introduced to U.S. audiences since the Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954. Sure, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees all made their impacts, but none of them captured the public imagination quite the way Freddy did.

That's evident in the abundance of "Nightmare on Elm Street" rip-offs and cash-ins that sprung up throughout the '80s. Where "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" inspired hundreds of variations on basic slasher movie tenets, "Elm Street" knock-offs tended more toward the specifics of Freddy Krueger. Disfigured killers*, clawed gloves, and dream-based torments ran wild through the video stores of the late '80s. Freddy actor Robert Englund reprised his role in a family friendly-ish TV horror anthology series and an MTV special co-starring Ozzy Osbourne, Vincent Price, and the Fat Boys. He even parlayed it into playing the lead of a nakedly Freddy-inspired "Phantom of the Opera" remake.

A comprehensive overview of Freddysploitation would take more words than I care to write or you care to read, so let's zero in on a few of my favorites.

Our journey begins in Mexico with "Don't Panic," a 1987 film that sadly has nothing to do with Douglas Adams. This is a pretty straightforward "Nightmare on Elm Street" rip-off about a group of high school friends in Mexico City who accidentally summon an evil spirit while using a Ouija board. Soon our hero is dreaming of violent killings that turn out to be real, leading him to wonder if he's become the pawn of a demon with a scarred face.

There wouldn't be a lot to distinguish "Don't Panic" (the Spanish title is "El secreto de la ouija," or "Secret of the Ouija Board") from a dozen other "Elm Street" clones were it not for the costuming department. In a choice that I couldn't begin to explain, someone saw fit to dress leading man Jon Bischof in a full set of children's dinosaur-print pajamas. He's not playing a child, mind you. He's a high school senior with a perm and an active social life, but he sleeps every night in adorable dino jammies. He wears them for most of the movie, even in the supposed action and horror scenes. It's hard to feel all that menaced by a scarred dream demon when he's tormenting a poor man's Alex Winter cosplaying as a sleepy toddler. It's the single least explicable thing I've seen in a subgenre that traffics almost exclusively in the inexplicable. (Incidentally, I bet someone could make a few bucks selling replicas of those pajamas to film dorks.)

My personal favorite of the "Elm Street" pretenders doesn't actually have a Freddy stand-in, or at least not a corporeal one. "Night Wars" follows two Vietnam veterans whose nightmares about their experience as prisoners of war are beginning to manifest in the physical world. That's right, in "Night Wars" the role of Freddy Krueger is played by… the Vietnam War.

It's a cheap, dumb, action-horror movie, but I can't deny that it's an intriguing way to tackle PTSD on film. Trash film semi-icon David A. Prior directed a number of very odd war films, and this may be the oddest. He's best known for the "Rambo" rip-off "Deadly Prey," a movie built around the concept of his brother/leading man Ted Prior being a really buff dude. Filtering war zone trauma through a Wes Craven knock-off may not be for everyone, but it's such a novel take that I find it fascinating. It's a heady concept for a movie that also features multiple scenes of unconscious men in full military fatigues sleep-screaming as they fire rounds into their bedroom ceiling.

Finally, let's turn to another area where Freddy really shined: merchandising. The knock-offs weren't just confined to the cinemas. Along with a whole lot of dubious licensed products, bootleg Freddy merchandise flooded the shelves of discount retailers and grocery stores across the world, and some of those artifacts have inspired cult followings of their own. There are multiple internet galleries dedicated to the sublime strangeness of Freddy cash-ins, from unlicensed Halloween masks to parodies in kids' cartoons to distressingly detailed figurines to bootleg fireworks.

But in the world of faux Freddy, two misshapen fedoras rise above the crowd. Sharp Hand Joe became a meme and a collector's item a few years back, and rightfully so. He's about as adorable as a toxic plastic toy of the unfinished clone of a world-famous child murderer could be. For my money, though, the king of Krueger rip-offs remains Nightmare Feddy. The linked article explains his appeal better than I could, but suffice it to say that he's another surprisingly detailed yet patently wrong imitation, that he wears sensible loafers, and that "Nightmare Feddy" is objectively the greatest name that could have been bestowed on him.

So there you go, another life-shaping childhood terror reduced to dinosaur pajamas, sleepy soldiers, and landfill fodder. Incidentally, I recently watched "A Nightmare on Elm Street" with my horror-loving 13-year-old, who was very impressed by the practical effects and found the whole thing fairly charming, if not remotely frightening. Those were different times.

*Speaking of the trope of the disfigured killer, I highly recommend the 2018 film "Chained for Life." It's a dreamy satire by a director who identifies as disfigured, starring a cast of disabled actors playing the cast of a horror movie that's exploiting their disabilities. It's a clever meta-commentary on the many layers of exploitation and discrimination in Hollywood's history of portraying people with disabilities, built around a fantastic performance by Adam Pearson. (Please don't confuse this with the rather egregious disability exploitation movie snidely referenced in its title, the 1952 film "Chained for Life." You're better off missing that.)

(Thanks to Letterboxd stalwart pd187 for this invaluable archive of Nightmare Feddys!)