Every Nightmare On Elm Street Film Ranked Worst To Best

By the dawn of the 1990s, the slasher movie boom was on its very last legs. Audiences were losing interest, filmmakers were running out of ideas; and this was particularly problematic for A Nightmare on Elm Street, which required more creativity than most of its contemporaries.

So it was that New Line Cinema opted to slam on the brakes with 1991's sixth instalment, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, giving the director's chair to Rachel Talalay, who had been with the series from the beginning, working her way up from assistant to producer over the first five films.

Unfortunately, Talalay and co had some strange ideas about what constituted a fitting send-off for one of the scariest horror villains ever. The Nightmare sequels had gradually put greater emphasis on Freddy's wisecracks, stripping away everything that made him frightening - so surely the best approach for the grand finale would have been to bring back the terror.

Sadly no. Freddy's Dead proved to be the goofiest Nightmare of them all. It's bad enough that there's nothing even resembling a scare in sight, but the jokes that fill the gap are embarrassingly bad. It's surely the lowest moment of the entire series when Freddy's once-terrifying claw becomes a Nintendo Powerglove.

On top of all that, there's almost nothing that feels truly climactic about Freddy's supposedly final send-off, with or without the corny 3D FX used in the original theatrical release. Happily, Freddy wasn't gone for good after all, and better days awaited him.