The movies themselves were outside of my experience even as I had picked up a vague cultural memory of them in the way you do

From Every A Nightmare on Elm Street Movie, Ranked by Freddie deBoer

I did not see an A Nightmare on Elm Street movie until I was in my 30s. There were a couple reasons for this. For one, I had always identified them as part of the schlocky 80s slasher craze that I saw as cheap, exploitative, and free of redeeming qualities - and not for no reason. For another, my name is Freddie, and I was a child in the 1980s, and you can imagine how that went for me. Literally every day for at least 10 years of my childhood I got “you mean like Freddy Krueger?!?!” (To which I would reply, no, my name is the far more tasteful Freddie.) It scarred me! 

So the movies themselves were outside of my experience even as I had picked up a vague cultural memory of them in the way you do. 

I love that description of knowledge which you have and yet don't have; knowledge not acquired from experience but none-the-less known by awareness.   

Growing up overseas but with occasional access to Mad Magazine, I later found myself surprised, when I moved to the US for my education, at how much American cultural ephemera I "knew" of (songs, movies, fads, scandals, etc.) without having known them.  All through having read of them through the pages of Mad Magazine.