Robert Englund will forever have a place in the halls of horror history. His performance as Freddy Krueger in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series is one for the ages, with his sadistic, cackling and monstrous supernatural villain still able to send a chill up the spine. But while the events of Elm Street are (mercifully) within the realm of fiction, his next project features stories ripped from the headlines.
The Travel Channel has just announced that True Terror with Robert Englund will premiere on Wednesday March 8th at 10pm ET/PT. The show aims to bring to light obscure dark and twisted stories from our nation’s past, sifting through the archives to find out the most gruesome tales.
Here’s how they’re billing it:
“In each episode, Englund uses his ominous tones and creepy charisma to masterfully weave together a trilogy of spine-tingling tales, guided by newspaper accounts and layered with commentary from historians and experts that prove that truth is always stranger than fiction.”
Sounds neat! Interest in true crime and the supernatural is on the upswing at the moment, so a show that gets under the skin of less famous stories that haven’t been analyzed to death sounds like it could be a winner.
Here’s Englund himself on the project:
“Revealing the sinister side of our history, I’m thrilled to bring nightmares to life on ‘True Terror’. These are tales so terrifyingly twisted, we can only hope they stay on the blood-soaked pages of the newspaper headlines from our past.”
And the show’s producer, Matthew Butler, says:
“We’re delighted at Travel Channel to have the true icon of horror films, Robert Englund, take a ‘stab’ at leading our viewers through these hair-raising tales. In his signature spooky storytelling style, Robert resurrects the creepy and odd of America’s past, bringing viewers real stories that reveal sometimes our fears aren’t mere figments of our imagination after all.”
The first episode is titled “Twisted Relationships” and shows a North Carolina storekeeper tormented by a prophetic countdown, a New Orleans teenager trapped inside a waking nightmare (Englund is going to knock that particular story out of the park) and a vengeful spirit inside an Atlanta police station. Further episodes will then see cursed farmers, serial killers and a family stalked by a mythical creature. All things considered, True Terror with Robert Englund sure sounds fun to me.
