Freddy’s back! Despite being stabbed, transformed into an infant, beheaded, and suffering several rounds as a human torch, the razor-gloved groundskeeper returned for a new film. Ninth in the franchise, the rebooted A Nightmare on Elm Street follows a new vision for the series: scarier, grimmer…lamer.
The Nightmare series has always been best when Freddy’s at his most creative. The joy that Freddy takes in crafting nightmares is his real mania and the real terror/fun of the movies. His warped sense of humor has been removed in the most recent adaptation, and replaced with a straight forward sharp-things-are-dangerous Jason-like mentality. Through the last couple decades, Freddy has been responsible for some of the most spectacular celluloid homicides. In hopes that they may not rest in too much peace over the life of the new series, here are the charges:
(If you've never seen any of the Nightmare films, including the most recent, this is all spoilers. Reader beware.)
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Krueger racks up four on-screen murders and at least twenty off-screen. He drags Tina around her bedroom with invisible claws; he strangles Rod with his own bed sheets. Glen is devoured by his own bed and vomited up as a fountain of blood & guts, while Marge is dragged through a window to suffer a fate left to our imaginations. We also learn of the real world hack and slash death by Freddy of 20 school children.
Freddy’s Revenge saw the first instances in the series of Freddy’s abilities to possess. In Jesse Walsh’s body Freddy slashes a gym coach, after supernaturally assaulting him with gym equipment. He later impales Ron Grady in the same form. Freddy finally erupts completely into the real world at a pool party, where he stabs two nameless students, throws two into a boiling pool, causes one to be trampled and one to be consumed by what appears to be an orange fire-moat that Krueger has created beneath the fence (the logical escape route to these young 
tacticians). This movie rounds off with Freddy’s hand bursting through Kerry in a bus after all seemed well.
Perhaps the best of all Freddy murders occurs in Dream Warriors. Before he stabs Taryn in the heart, tosses Lt. Donald Thompson on a fence, or lures Nancy Thompson to her death by impersonating her father’s ghost, Freddy appears on mental asylum TV. After killing Zsa Zsa Gabor, he stretches out of the television toward inmate Jennifer. Grabbing her head and lifting her up he utters the line, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” before smashing her face into the screen.
The largest number of actual character deaths occurs in The Dream Master, which also concludes Freddy’s war with the Elm Street children. Kincade, Joey, Sheila, and Rick are murdered with the glove in a variety of spots: junkyards, 
bedrooms, classrooms. In the series’ silliest death, Debbie is transformed into a cockroach, lured into a Roach Motel, and crushed. Kristen, the last of the children on whom Krueger is legitimately seeking revenge, dies in the exact same way Freddy did: she is burned alive.
The pendulum swings the opposite way in The Dream Child, which contains very few and very unoriginal deaths. Freddy possesses Dan, forcing him to crash his car; he force-feeds Greta until she collapses and Mark is turned into paper and sliced up. It seems likely that this is the movie that the producers of the 2010 Nightmare were watching when they 
decided to make the deaths in the new movie less spectacular. If not scary these deaths are at least fun, which is at least as important an ingredient of this series.
The next movie has the fewest on-screen deaths and the most off-screen. We learn that Freddy killed his wife, along with almost all of the teens who remained in Springwood. We see him kill John, the last remaining Springwood teen, before being killed by his daughter. Finally - Freddy’s Dead.
It’s not quite over yet, though.
In New Nightmare Freddy forces the husband of the heroine of the first movie in the franchise, Heather Langenkamp, to crash. He tears her babysitter, Julie, apart with invisible knives, and rips her son Dylan’s stuffed dinosaur to shreds. In 
Freddy vs. Jason the clawed maniac can only edge in one death: scratching “Freddy’s Back” into Mark’s ripped up corpse.
The 2010 remake offers no new deaths, only new names (Dean, Kris, and Jesse for those of you keeping count). And yes, they are included in this article’s titular 54 deaths. These three, plus Nancy’s mother, go down in similar ways to how their analogues did in the original, albeit “grittier.”
(End of spoilers)
As we look forward to the rebooted franchise, we have to wonder where it will go. The producers seem adamant to keep it as scary as possible. The old series quickly wandered into bizarre mythologizing and absurd dream sequences to make up for a plot which actually concluded with the first film. This seems to be against the spirit of the 2010 remake, though.
Regardless of what happens, we can always hold out hope that this repository of surreal deaths will outlast the all-too-serious ambitions of the new crew. Though even if it doesn’t, there’s something permanent about the weird horror of nightmares. If Freddy is no longer its king then perhaps someone new will pick up the clawed gauntlet.
