Claudio Sanchez, Freddy Krueger, and Retellings.

In an old post here, I wrote about Coheed and Cambria’s retelling of the Joker/Batman mythos. The lead singer of that band is Claudio Sanchez and he’s at it again. He wrote this song:

This time the song is about Freddy Krueger. He wrote the song from Krueger’s perspective. In the Coheed song about Batman, the Joker is still awful, but he has a level of self-reflection that allows him to critique Batman on a psychological level. In this case they rewrite Krueger as a misunderstood guy who has a crush on Nancy (the female protagonist in the first film). His obsession with her leads to poorly conceived flirting tactics that, in a creepily realistic way, lead to violent attempts to garner her attention with Krueger’s ability to confront people’s souls and endanger their bodily health in a realm of dreams.

In one sense, this song is kinda cute, because upon a first hearing, it’s just about a kid who loves a girl and has dreams about their future together. This is pretty standard fare for popular romantic music. On another level its macabre, but in a hilarious way. There’s a guy who savagely destroys several people’s lives in a sort of comedy of errors because he misunderstands how romance works. On a third and more realistically horrifying level, the song portrays the sort of obsession young men develop when they cannot manage their emotions and how they respond to being unable to relate to the opposite sex.

Anyhow, I wonder if Krueger just needed to read his Ovid:

  The title of this book when Cupid spied,
  “Treason! a plot against our state,” he cried.
  Why should you thus your loyal poet wrong,
  Who in your war has serv’d so well and long?
  So savage and ill-bred I ne’er can prove,
  Like Diomede, to wound the queen of love.
  Others by fits have felt your am’rous flame,
  I still have been, and still your martyr am;
  Rules for your vot’ries I did late impart.
  Refining passion, and made love an art.

P. Ovidius Naso, Ovid’s Art of Love (in Three Books), the Remedy of Love, the Art of Beauty, the Court of Love, the History of Love, and Amours (Medford, MA: Calvin Blanchard, 1855).