Every Nightmare On Elm Street Film Ranked Worst To Best

There's no horror series quite like A Nightmare on Elm Street. While typically classed as one of the key slasher franchises of the 1980s, it's so much more imaginative and intelligent than most of its peers. Even so, the real genius of Wes Craven's sinister creation is how it can at once deal with sophisticated, abstract concepts, yet present it in a way that just about any viewer can relate to - so long as they can handle the terror.

Yet as if the idea of dreams that can kill isn't unnerving enough all on its own, A Nightmare on Elm Street's true masterstroke is the bogeyman mysteriously imbued with this power: the long-dead child murderer Fred Krueger, soon better known as Freddy, brought to life impeccably by Robert Englund.

The dirty brown fedora; the horribly burned skin; the ugly striped sweater; and, last but not least, that terrifying gauntlet with knives in the finger tips. In an era when mute killers in blank-faced masks were the norm, here's so much going on with Freddy that it almost shouldn't work - but it does. 33 years on from his first appearance, he remains one of the most iconic horror characters of all time.

It's been seven years since Freddy was last on the big screen, and while there have long been murmurs about a reboot, there hasn't been any big news on the subject for quite some time. But how do the existing nine Nightmares hold up today?

It sounds like a cliche to say that the remake never stands a chance of matching the original, but, as we've seen time and again, this is very often the case, and never more so than here. 2010's A Nightmare On Elm Street aimed high, but fell short by a very, very wide margin.

There had been some cause for optimism going in. Jackie Earle Haley, fresh from his scene-stealing turn as Rorschach in Watchmen, was an inspired choice to take over from Robert Englund as Freddy, and first-time feature director Samuel Bayer had the video for Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit on his CV. The film also seemed to be taking an intriguing approach, delving into the darker elements of Freddy's backstory; for the first time, directly addressing the implication that he was a child molester as well as a murderer.

But it's clear within minutes that this dour, lifeless take on Craven's film either doesn't understand what makes the franchise work, or - worse yet - is made by people who don't actually care, and are content to just churn out product. The material, and the fans, deserve a whole lot better.

Production house Platinum Dunes had already remade (amongst others) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th; this was the film that finally put the brakes on their horror remake production line, so for that at least we can be grateful. Nor has Bayer directed another movie, which is no big loss on this evidence.