10 Embarrassingly Poor Horror Movie Monsters

10. Freddy Krueger - A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)

Everybody knows that there was no reason to remake A Nightmare on Elm Street. The franchise was thoroughly exhausted, having dribbled and wheezed to a stop after five increasingly redundant sequels and an ambitious but patchy reboot.

But if there's one thing franchises are good for, it's a cash-in, and in 2010 Freddy was duly dragged from the grave for yet another spree through the dreamscapes of yet more naughty teenagers.

It's not a total turkey. There are some good performances and some strong effects sequences, and Jackie Earle Haley’s interpretation of Freddy is commendable in many respects.

The decision to make Freddy’s burned face look more realistic, however, is one of the most important examples of the main problem with the remake: it just doesn't capture the sense of the fantastic and the weird that made Wes Craven's first Nightmare such a fascinatingly original and scary piece of work.

Freddy was always a burn victim, but Craven's decision not to be too literal with Freddy's facial disfigurement had important effects on the whole feel of the film. It allowed Robert Englund's devilishly charismatic performance to shine through.

It was expressive, and it was suggestive, in the way that great surrealism can be. And it made Freddy appear more ghoulish, less like a real person who had suffered vigilante justice and more like some dripping, grisly, otherworldly phantom.

When it's too anatomically correct, as it is in the remake, it loses its freakiness and feels - well, ordinary, and it should go without saying that a dream demon should never be ordinary. Even at his cheesy, quipping, shark-jumping worst, Freddy was never dull.