10 Horror Movie Rip-Offs You Won’t Believe Exist

Mahakaal (aka 'The Monster', or 'Time Of Death') is a textbook example of the kind of creative purloining for which low-budget Bollywood productions have become notorious.

There are low budget horrors that make a virtue of the shoestring – for example, check out the UK’s very own Mycho Entertainment, home of no-budget ‘auteur of slaughter’ MJ Dixon. This is not one of them.

One of the last films created by schlock legends the Ramsay Brothers, a family business synonymous with populist horror cinema in India, Mahakaal is more or less a straight lift of Wes Craven's 1984 classic A Nightmare On Elm Street... only run through a masala filter to add an extra thirty minutes or so of goofy comedy and song and dance numbers.

The chutzpah here is something else, the Ramsay brothers having religiously copied almost everything that isn't a Bollywood style embellishment - camera angles, scene set-ups, deaths (which are also cribbed from other entries in the Nightmare On Elm Street series) and even the soundtrack, which is essentially a re-recorded version of the original A Nightmare On Elm Street score.

Thing is, unlike other movie monsters, Freddy Krueger is not scary because of the knives on his fingers or the scars on his face: he’s scary because he’s the grotesque embodiment of the fear that we cannot keep our children safe from the horrors of the world.

Mahakaal just has a big guy in a cheap mask. There’s no substitute for the original.