Do we like them?

Do we like Freddy Krueger?

A character from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Our score: 1 out of 10. No. He's funny and has great one-liners, but he's a cruel killer who enjoys frightening and murdering kids. We'd cheer for his catchphrases, not for him.

Freddy Krueger is the villain of Wes Craven's 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the story, he was a child killer in the town of Springwood, Ohio. The town's angry parents took the law into their own hands and burned him to death. Years later, the teenagers of Elm Street begin having the same nightmare about a scarred man in a striped sweater and a fedora, wearing a glove with blades on the fingers.

His method is what makes him scary. Anyone who falls asleep can be reached, and what he does to them in the dream carries over to the real world. The heroes can't stay awake forever, and the adults around them don't believe them. That leaves a few teenagers to work out how to fight something that only exists in sleep.

We give him 1 out of 10, and the one point is for charisma. Across the sequels he becomes a wisecracking showman, and Robert Englund's performance makes him an icon of the genre. But the jokes don't change what he does. He picks on kids, he's proud of it, and he never shows remorse. He is the monster in these films, so we wouldn't back him.

In the original film, the heroine Nancy beats him by learning that his power depends on fear, so she refuses to give him any. The series then keeps bringing him back, with sequels that give him a darker origin story and turn him into more of a showman. The extra backstory doesn't make him any more likeable.