How did a pedophile become so popular?

How did they present him as cool? After all of these years of watching this film multiple times, I’ve never thought of him as cool. That impression was never given to me, but I’d love to hear your take. It’s fun learning others perspectives xo

i don't think he was considered a pedophile until possibly the 5th film, where i think there is a newspaper article mentioning this or at least the remake version.

I'd argue he's not supposed to be cool exactly. In the first 2 films he is creepy and you find him really scary. He is supposed to be completely unsympathetic. But then starting Part 3, which I like Part 3 by the way, he starts getting too talkative and spewing one liners. After Part 3, he just started getting sillier with every movie. Though even then you still don't sympathize with him. More like you just laugh at how corny he's acting. But that over the top humorous Freddy didn't happen til the 3rd movie.

Cool? You gotta be kidding, right?

I saw your other comment about kids dressing up as him for Halloween. The point of many Halloween costumes is to dress up as a scary monster. Think of the traditional Halloween costumes: witches, ghosts, frankenstein's monsters. The scarier the better.

I know there's a lot of sexy costumes out there too. Those are not considered canonical Halloween costumes though. Still, perhaps many people find them scary anyway.

But I doubt anyone is picking a Freddy costume to be sexy. Well, there are a strange few I imagine.

The sequels tried to paint him as "cool." In this, there isn't anything cool about him. He's just an evil, nasty son of a bitch.

probably things like this on MTV made him popular
https://archive.org/details/1988.08.20-mtv-the-freddy-krueger-video-hour-with-vjs-kevin-seal-downtown-julie-

was he supposed to be cool? nahh Freddy sucks..

Have you seen the movies? Because you have a very weird perception of "cool".

To start off, I don't remember any direct mention of rape or pedophilia (aside from the crappy 2010 remake). In the original movies he was described as a child killer. The viewer can choose to extrapolate and imagine more horrifying things if he wants.

So anyway, the emphasis was not on what he did when he was a child killer. It was nothing more than a backstory to explain why people chose to burn/kill him. What the movies showed was him killing teenagers in their dreams in lots of creative ways. That's what the emphasis was on, so that's what caught people's attention and that's why he became so popular. Even so... he was presented as a twisted homicidal maniac, with his dark humor and all. That's freaky. Not cool.

To me a character presented as cool by the film makers would be someone like Jack Sparrow or James Bond or freakin' Peter Venkman ! Not Freddy Krueger, LMAO.