There is a heavily growing trend in Hollywood these days - remakes of 80s movies. And they are picking very random films to remake. Short Circuit, Police Academy (probably), and Footloose, no genre is safe from being remade or (gulp) reimagined!

Horror has always been ripe for remake. The success of Michael Bay's slicker, prettier and usually dumber remakes from the Platinum Dunes Company has shown that modern audiences are more than happy to dish out money on stuff they have effectively seen before.

Late last year they announced that they were to remake a horror classic, a film that haunted many people's lives when it was originally released in 1984: A Nightmare On Elm Street.  A film that took the horror genre and injected a dose of fantasy into the mix, that created one of the most iconic scary figures in, not just horror cinema, but the history of motion pictures itself.

To prepare myself for the upcoming remake (which I will, no doubt, watch out of curiosity and hope that they will make something  better than the poor remakes I have watched so far - Halloween, I am talking to you!), I recently watched the first of the Elm Street saga. And it still stands up as a masterpiece of the genre 25 years later.

The storyline is movie history. A group of teenagers are being stalked in their dreams by a sadistic killer covered in burns and using a knife glove to slash them to shreds.

As an idea, it was remarkably simple. The slasher genre had taken off again with Friday The 13th three years earlier and director Wes Craven was no newcomer to the horror scene. After directing shock classics Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, Craven was looking for a new direction for his horror talents. He happened upon a story in a newspaper about a group of kids convinced they were risking their lives by going to sleep. This gave Craven a spark of an original idea. What if your dreams could kill you?

Watching the film, it still has amazingly striking images and visual effects that have stood the test of time admirably. Freddy the dream killer (who isn't even named until well over halfway through the film) is a terrifying creation. The hat, the stripy sweater and the knife glove are still iconic after all this time. It makes Freddy look far more real than Jason or Michael Myers in their masks. The fact that you could, from afar, see someone who resembled Freddy on an everyday street brought the terror far closer to home.

Other visual treats include Tina, the first victim. Her attack scene is slightly dated (on the DVD commentary Craven even admits you can see how the slicing of her stomach was done) but her showing up in a body bag to haunt the heroine Nancy at school, is an eerily creepy image even though there is minimal gore. It's all in the way she stands, the way her eyes look glassy through the clear plastic.

The film is filled with moments that people will always connect with Nightmare. An early image of Nancy in bed with Freddy coming through the wall, or the infamous death by bed scene will always stick in the memory.

Of course, some of the effects are slightly... well, ridiculous. Tina pulling off Freddy's face looks like a Halloween skull mask covered in tomato ketchup, and the less said about the final shock as Freddy pulls what is clearly a shop dummy through the front door of Nancy's house, the better.

But nevertheless, the film still has the power to shock. There are many parallels with Craven's later film, Scream. Even though the film is set in a land of dreams, that doesn't mean that in the daylight you are safe. Just as Scream's ghost face stalked Sydney through her school and college years, Freddy can attack in daydreams as well, giving the audience an uneasy sense that there is no escape.

Of course, it goes without saying that the film belongs to Robert Englund. More a figure in the shadows, he manages to quip and threaten without being pantomime. In the later films he would almost become an anti-hero, with audiences cheering as he came on screen. Not in the first film, where he makes some surprising entrances via a bed, a mirror and even in the bath. But the rest of the cast perform well, especially Heather Langenkamp and the first appearance by Johnny Depp. The pair makes an amazingly believable couple, which makes the threats towards them far scarier as the audience can connect with them.

The new film boasts an Oscar nominated star in Jackie Earle Haley, and I hope he makes the role his own, rather than copying Englund, or even worse, doing Rorschach after a term in the burns clinic.

Nevertheless, the original will always cause people to have nightmares, because as we all know: one, two Freddy's coming for you...