10 Badass Movie Villains Defeated Way Too Easily

3. Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare On Elm Street)

Freddy Krueger
New Line Cinema

While Freddy Krueger is one of the most feared bad guys in horror movie history, he does come off as a bit of a bumbling idiot in the original Nightmare On Elm Street film, especially towards the end.

He runs straight into Nancy's hammer-above-the-door trap like's in a deleted scene from Home Alone, falls down the stairs, somehow doesn't hear Nancy when she jogs up behind him and sets him on fire, and then falls down the stairs again, and all this buffoonery is capped off with his utterly pathetic and anti-climactic defeat.

Turns out all you have to do to bump off monsters like Freddy is to... stop being scared of them? That's exactly what Nancy does, telling blade-fingers that she won't give him any more of her fearful energy, and he subsequently turns into a bad special effect and vanishes from the room.

It's a bit of an "oh... is that it?" moment, with the writers giving the villain such a contrived and oddly-specific weakness. So all one of Freddy's previous victims had to do to end his reign of terror... was tell him to 'eff off? It doesn't get much easier than that.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!