Every town has an Elm Street!

After a couple of years of doing cosplay, I’m kind of tired of the manner in which I’ve been putting a costume together. I kind of need a break from cosplay, without taking a break, if that makes sense in some sort of bizarre and twisted sense. The point that I’m trying to make, is that I need to rest up after several years of devoting myself to one specific costume where I’d pour all my energy into the construction and fabrication of it.

And I’ve found that project.

Essentially, I wanted to quickly get my hands on some parts, buy them and slap them together to create a costume. Which frees me up to pursue other hobbies, that are mostly reflected back onto the site. Winning! So I settled on my all-time favourite horror movie icon: Freddy Krueger. A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of those films that you have to see, at least once in your life. Or any of its myriad sequels at least, as they deal with teenage angst, dreams and pressure.

And an immortal dream demon who happens to be coming for you. You look at Freddy Krueger, and you see great design at work. The clawed glove. The Christmas sweater which was purposefully designed to have clashing colours. That trademark fedora. And of course, a face that not even a mother could love.

If you want to know just how striking the design of a character is, there’s a simple way to do so: Look at their silhouette. If you can identify any character from the shadow that they cast, then you know you’ve come across some ace design there. So how do you get started on a Freddy Krueger costume then?

I don’t have access to professional prosthetics, or a make-up artist who’ll spend several hours applying them to my face. So that method was never an option. I also don’t have time to actually sculpt my own head-form and make a mold out of it to cast a mask from. Fortunately, there are plenty of other great mask-makers out there. And the very best, use silicone as the base material for their masks.

Silicone is fantastic. It’s soft. It’s durable. It forms around your face and moves with it. And it looks beautifully real when properly painted. I ended up going with a Twisted Nightmares Roberto mask, which looks like an amalgamation of Freddy Krueger appearances, that doesn’t settle on any one specific look. Although it does lean heavily towards my favourite Krueger movie, Freddy Vs. Jason.

This is what it looked like, when I put it on:

It’s as close to creepy as you’re going to get when you’re on a budget. Now from a distance of a meter, I think it does a swell job. When you get up close, you can see that it’s a mask. But that one instant, that moment when you turn around and find yourself confronted by that image and freak the Fred out…That’s what I’m aiming for. And I’m confident that this mask will do the trick.

I’m already sorted for the other Freddy materials that I need. The glove, the hat and the jersey. Now, I just need to work on taking all those elements, and combining them into the performance of being the character. Nailing the movement, the pose, the swagger. Should be fun! WELCOME TO PRIME TIME!

Last Updated: November 24, 2015