10 Terrifying Horror Movie Villains Ruined By Terrible Backstories

Freddy Krueger started out as a genuinely terrifying dream-stalker, slicing and dicing the children of Elm Street in their dreams as revenge for their parents taking the law into their own hands and burning him alive. It was a delightfully evil backstory for one of horror's most influential baddies, but where there are sequels (and A Nightmare on Elm Street has a lot of sequels), there is always a need for more backstories justifying a villain popping up time and time again.

And between Nightmares 3 and 6 in the original timeline of the franchise, Krueger's backstory was expanded upon to absurd new levels.

Matching the absurd direction the franchise was going down on the whole, with more and more cheesy one-liners and a real case of the cheap feel, it was revealed Krueger was actually born out of his mother, a Nun named Amanda, being raped by a hundred psychopaths. After his human death, Krueger was saved by three demons who, after apparently searching for the most evil soul on the planet, allowed Freddy to carry on his killing in the dream world.

Each and every Nightmare in the original timeline gets worse as the series progresses, and the constant shoehorning in of more and more pointless backstories goes a long way in ruining this icon's entire legacy. Somewhere along the line some poor screenwriter must have forgotten the point of their horror movie villain was to actually keep him scary, rather than as a cheap slapstick impersonator.