Freddy Krueger, one of the movies' most durable boogeymen, returns to terrify audiences in the new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. (New Line Productions/Warner Bros. Pictures)

He lurks under your bed or inside your closet when you're (almost) asleep. He's the shadowy figure who knows your every fear.

Horror audiences still want their fix of thrills and chills, but cinematic boogeymen aren't what they used to be.

He is a boogeyman, and in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street — the 1984 horror hit whose remake hits theatres Apr. 30 — he's the one and only Freddy Krueger. The "bastard son of a hundred maniacs," this child killer transcended his corporeal state to enter the dreams of his young victims and kill them as they sleep. Freddy has always been a rakish fellow — the hat and stripey sweater add a certain je ne sais quoi — and he invariably has some witticism to utter as he does the deed. "Is she delicious or am I crazy?" he quips while daintily eating a victim in A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989), the fifth in the franchise spawned by director Wes Craven's original.

By that point in the series, Freddy was an irredeemable ham, a Don Rickles with knives for fingers. So it's easy to forget the power he originally wielded as one of horror cinema's great boogeymen. His shape-shifting talents gave him the air of a god or demon who relished his creative cruelty. What made him all the more vicious was the innocence of his victims. In the first movie, the teen characters (one of whom was famously played by Johnny Depp in his screen debut) simply had the misfortune of being the progeny of the townsfolk who killed him in the first place.

The inhabitants of Elm Street have a new reason to worry, now that longtime actor Robert Englund has passed Freddy's hat on to Jackie Earle Haley. But this fresh Freddy arrives at a curious time. Audiences still want their fix of thrills and chills, but boogeymen are not what they used to be. How could they be, when viewers are immersed in series about a likeable, domesticated serial killer (Dexter) or young women in love with hunky, brooding vampires (Twilight, True Blood)?

Things were much different when Freddy first appeared. A boom time for slasher flicks, the early '80s were salad days for fictional mass murderers. That said, they tended to be strong, silent, types like Michael Myers (Halloween) and Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13^th), characters who were already slaying their way through their respective franchises when Wes Craven concocted Freddy Krueger. (The director was inspired by real-life stories of Cambodian refugees who were apparently killed by nightmares about the Khmer Rouge.)

All three would terrorize audiences well into the next century, but fatigue set in, especially when the Scream films (also directed by Craven) made it almost impossible to ignore the many clichés of the slasher flick. The nadir was Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a long-anticipated but inevitably dire matchup that treated these once-terrifying movie villains — and the audience — as total buffoons.

Krueger's creator had been more successful with his own earlier effort to reinvent the character in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). In this fiendishly clever Charlie Kaufman-like meta-movie, Craven, Englund and original heroine Heather Langenkamp played versions of themselves contending with the demonic force that had compelled Craven to make the first Nightmare.

Tobin Bell stars as Jigsaw, the serial killer in the Saw franchise. (Steve Wilke/Maple Pictures)

By then, however, horror audiences were moving on to different breeds of villainy. If the last decade's most successful genre franchises are any indication, the predominant threat of choice is no longer some indefatigable, occasionally wise-cracking boogeyman — it was a more abstract brand of evil. In the Saw series, the central figure is a maniacal Rube Goldberg wannabe whose deadly traps literalize ethical quandaries for his victims — we're encouraged to believe they have brought their sufferings on themselves. (This concept is largely derivative of the Nietzschean morality originally espoused in Seven (1995) and repeated in pretty much every serial-killer tale since.)

In the cheekier and more philosophically dubious Final Destination franchise, the adversary is an omnipotent, all-powerful force that takes a perverse pleasure in devising creative "accidents" in order to finish off teenagers who've managed to evade his (or His?) designs for them the first time round.

These are strange days for bad guys in non-horror films, too. It's still de rigueur for heroes in blockbusters or action thrillers to face off against diabolical masterminds with their own superpowers, but they've become a pretty pallid bunch. The actors may change, but the high-tech terrorists in the later installments of the James Bond, Die Hard and Mission: Impossible franchises might as well all be cut from the same thin swatch of fabric. British actor Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, next month's Robin Hood) has emerged as a reliable portrayer of evildoers, but surely the makers of Kick-Ass could've come up with something better for him to do than play a two-bit gangster overlord. And as for Avatar, James Cameron evidently had higher priorities than creating villains more scary than the barking Sgt. Rock-style military hardman played by Stephen Lang or Giovanni Ribisi as a standard-issue corporate weasel.

The late Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his anarchic portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Arguably the most compelling onscreen baddie to emerge in recent years was Heath Ledger's incarnation of the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). Far from the campy, self-satisfied versions played by Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson, Ledger's Joker was something relatively unique and uniquely threatening. Here was a deadly, amoral evildoer who cared not a jot for objectives or ambitions — a figure of pure anarchy. As Alfred (Michael Caine) explained it to Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

In many respects, the Joker of The Dark Knight was close to Craven's original conception of Freddy Krueger, and not just because of their not-so-pretty faces. Both are threatening figures who defy our efforts to explain or contain them. If you take a longer view, you can see them as recent forms of the trickster deities who recur in religious and folk stories around the world. By committing their cruel and humiliating acts on us hapless humans, these spirits remind us how vulnerable we are, living as we do in a world full of forces we cannot control or predict. Maybe it's not such a bad idea to keep checking under your bed.

A Nightmare on Elm Street opens Apr. 30.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.