14 of the Best Horror Ripoffs of A Nightmare on Elm Street

Like most film franchises, a long list of imitators try to leech off of their success. A Nightmare on Elm Street has plenty of them.

When A Nightmare on Elm Street graced the screens of movie theaters back in 1984 and became not only a hit but a cultural phenomenon, you had to know that besides sequels, something else was coming: a lot of imitators. From the 1980s through the mid-1990s, we would see a long list of horror films where a killer would attack us in our most vulnerable state of consciousness, our sleep.

Some of the films on this list of rip-offs actually hold their own as great horror films that fans admire. Some are schlocky, straight-to-video rip-offs, and even have Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, co-starring in the film. Then there are literally a few films that are the low-budget international versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street that have been used for internet memes and funny videos. Here are the best rip-offs of Wes Craven's landmark horror film.

For starters, here is one of the international versions of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Released nine years after the franchise's first film, Mahakaal or elsewhere known as Mahakaal: The Monster, doesn't formally promote itself as a rip-off of Freddy Krueger. But it is clear as day that it is. Its villain wears a glove with sharp objects at the fingers of it, and then there's the plot of this Hindi horror film. Mahakaal is about a vengeful ghost that haunts a woman in her dreams, and then enters reality.

Once her friends get killed off one by one, she seeks out the help of her boyfriend to stop the ghost. Sound familiar? It's a clear ripoff the second the film's monster is on-screen. But to not poke fun at it for a second, Mahakaal makes for a great midnight film due to its low budget quality and laughable comparisons. But the atmosphere of the film is a lot of fun to take in with its gore and smoke machine effects. Also, let's not forget about the dance numbers, and a Michael Jackson impersonator shows up.

Hellmaster is about a college professor (John Saxon) who injects his students with a drug that turns them into terrifying superhuman mutants. Hellmaster once went by the title, Them, and is inspired by and clearly ripping off A Nightmare on Elm Street based on a few things. The color of the movie looks reminiscent of the film, with its blue and red colors on screens.

It could be argued that Hellmaster is also ripping off other classics like Phantasm and Suspiria. It looks like a cheaper version of Nightmare. And of course, genre icon John Saxon is in both films. The film's villain looks like a cheap version of Freddy Krueger. Despite its comparisons, Hellmaster also feels like a blend of Clive Barker's Hellraiserunder the direction of Stuart Gordon.

It's hard not to think of Freddy Krueger in this version of The Phantom of the Opera. The reason being is that Robert Englund plays the title role in this adaptation. The cover art for the physical copy of the film looks like an installment in the Elm Street franchise.

Every version of Phantom of the Opera brings something special to the material. This version actually feels overlooked, with a cast that includes Bill Nighy and Saturday Night Live's Molly Shannon. It is also directed by genre filmmaker Dwight H. Little, who is fresh off bringing Michael Myers back to the big screen in Halloween: The Return of Michael Myers a year earlier.

Related: Robert Englund Recounts Scary Moment With Freddy Krueger

Imagine the pitch for this film: Let's make A Nightmare on Elm Street, but rather than Freddy Krueger, let's have it be the Vietnam War. Night Wars is a low-budget commentary on soldiers with PTSD. Whether it is effective is debatable, but the effort put into this film deserves praise. It's about a group of Vietnam veterans who continue to have nightmares of the war, and when they wake up, they have injuries and wounds from the dream. With this blur of reality beginning to take shape, the soldiers decide to go into the dream world and find their friend, who was killed in a POW camp, and bring him back. Night Wars is a brilliant low-budget blend of action and horror in this one.

Related: The 20 Best Horror Movies in Hindi You Need to Watch Next

Throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Italy loved to look at what was working in America and make their own version of it. Night Killer was their Nightmare on Elm Street ripoff. Directed by Bruno Mattei protégé, Claudio Fragasso, Night Killer is like if Freddy Krueger were in a giallo film. It is about a murderer who wears a grizzly-looking rubber mask that is paired with a rubber glove with claws on it.

He picks off women one by one, and once our final girl, Melanie (Tara Buckman), learns about the killing on TV, she is completely oblivious to knowing that she's next. Be advised, Night Killer and other films that were coming out of Italy at the time are loaded with unmotivated nudity and misogyny.

What do you get when you take the sport of motocross and fuse it with a tragic love story, then put it into the horror genre, and have it release during the boom of straight-to-video movies? You get Dream Stalker. A film about a motocross rider who dies, and his lover is now left with the memories that leave her in heartache. However, when she decides it is time to move on with her life, she ends up finding someone new. The dreams she has been having begin to turn into deadly realities.

Dreamaniac has a killer poster for its movie. Sadly, it's really nothing special. But what it is trying to gimmick makes for a fun watch. The film is about a heavy metal musician who makes a deal with a demon in the form of a beautiful woman. The deal is to make him better with the ladies. In return, the succubus must be able to feed on the girls he encounters. When we say schlocky, this film is exhibit A. There isn't much more than a grainy, fuzzy version of the film floating around on streaming platforms.

The kills are pretty generic, but the atmosphere to the film is at times a very dreamlike, so that is a plus. Dreamaniac branches off A Nightmare on Elm Street's sequels more than it does the original, with the kind of MTV culture showing up in films of the late 1980s, with music playing a heavy factor in the film.

Have you ever worried that a guitar-drill wielding supernatural force was out to kill you? If so, then Slumber Party Massacre II will surely tap into your fears. The movie deals with dreams and dreams within dreams, which all have a rockabilly murderous greaser out to kill you in them. The film is completely wild, but never has a dull moment. Its villain isn't as scary as Freddy, but the Slumber Party franchise sure as hell is almost as entertaining as what it's trying to ripoff is when it comes to the sequels. It knows what it is and doesn't care because it's also trying to have some fun.

What a mid-1990s straight-to-video gem Sleep Stalker is. The makeup effects on the film's villain, known as The Sandman, are actually kind of menacing and scary. He's not better than Freddy Krueger, but it could compete. Sleep Stalker is about a murderer who gets sentenced to execution. On the night he is to sit in the electric chair, he is given his last rights, but the minister is actually a voodoo priest who is an ally to the killer. What this does is bring The Sandman back, stronger than ever to kill again.

Indonesia's direct rip-off of A Nightmare on Elm Street is 1986's Satan's Bed. There are elements of the Wes Craven classic film all over it, but instead of a burnt to a crisp, maniac killer with a glove that has sharp blades on it, it is replaced with a woman in a white dress. Satan's Bed is more of a haunted house ghost story than A Nightmare on Elm Street is.

But since a lot of the horror films have come out of that region of the world are on the rise over the past decade, you can see a lot of the earlier workings of the themes of the afterlife on display in this film. There are a lot of gags in it that are laughable, like a cheap-looking skeleton that pops out of a coffin. Not only does the film feel like it's ripping off Freddy, but it also feels like a bit of a ripoff of other classics of the genre, like Poltergeist and The Exorcist.

The Fear does not star Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon; that's just called Fear. The Fear, however, is a film about facing the things that torment you psychologically. Like the giant wooden demon named Morty. Sounds familiar in a sense. When you were walking around the video store in 1995, and saw the cover art for this on a VHS of it, you may have been intrigued. There is something ominous about it. A wooden demon coming to life to attack you.

But there are actually a lot of laughable, lackluster moments to it, as The Fear was made at the tail end of the Nightmare rip-offs. It needs to be noted that this film also has a cameo appearance from Elm Street director Wes Craven.

By 1989, Wes Craven was most likely trying to distance himself from A Nightmare on Elm Street and create his own new horror villain. In the midst of that, he ends up slightly ripping himself off because we got Shocker. A film about a serial killer with a catchy name like Horace Pinker, who also happened to be a television repair man, is executed but returns in the form of electricity after making a deal with the devil.

There is a lot crammed into Shocker, and it shows in the film not really knowing its tone. Regardless, the effects of Horace coming out of a television are always bonkers. And the film stars a young Peter Berg, who would eventually become a great filmmaker himself.

Edward Furlong was every kid in 1994's Brainscan. He liked horror movies, played video games, and had a really cool room. Brainscan is trying to create a film franchise here, but it just didn't pan out. Regardless, its plot is a capsule of the of media at the time. In the movie, Furlong's character Michael plays a CD-Rom game where he walks around from the point of view of a killer and commits horrible acts.

After he plays the game, bodies start piling up in the same way they do in the game. Brainscan also takes pride in creating the film's villain, The Trickster (T. Rydere Smith), a witty bad guy who you, the audience, actually kind of get comfortable with, just like how we all end up falling in love with Freddy Krueger.

Related:Edward Furlong Reflects on Controversial Terminator: Dark Fate Scene

Wishmaster is a 1990s horror film that still doesn't get the love it deserves. Yet it is also one of, if not the, most comparable franchises to A Nightmare on Elm Street due to its blend of horror and dark fantasy being twisted together. In terms of both villains in the franchise, the Djinn is a little more methodical than Freddy. He has a bigger agenda of how he toys with his victims. Freddy is just a predator roaming the halls of our nightmares. Wishmaster, oddly enough, has Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund in it.

It's a film that loses steam as the franchise goes on (most do anyway) but never gets the respect it deserves out of the gate. It's a rip-off that holds its own with its charismatic villain and inventive style of dread for the protagonists of the movie.