10 Terrifying Moments In Terrible Horror Movies

There’s almost nothing good about the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

But wait, didn’t we just insist that was true about the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes alike, only to manage to find an ameliorating sequence in each?

Well, yeah, but at least those are entire sequences. The best moment from the revisited Freddy Krueger origin story is a momentary, but nonetheless nearly transformative, scene between Rooney Mara’s disturbed protagonist and her love interest as the pair uncover the horrific truth of how their parents formed a lynch mob and murdered Freddy, vigilante-style, in a moment of violent street justice.

The scene plays out in a shadowy, chilling slow-mo, dwelling on Freddy’s murder and leading the audience to wonder whether this vicious retribution may have been misplaced. What if he was innocent? What if this was a moment of mass hysteria in the era of the McMartin preschool trials and satanic panic? Good god, what if Freddy Krueger actually did nothing wrong?

It's a distinctly chilling possibility which serves to elevate this flick from a standard slasher to a more ambiguous Candyman-esque exploration of how evil is created by an unsparing society, rather than born into being....

Then, a half hour of subpar slashing later, the film promptly ruins this moral ambiguity by clarifying in grossly exploitative terms that nope, he’s a sadistic child molester. Thank god, for a second there it seemed as if Platinum Dunes had gone somewhere clever and original—God forbid.