It seems fitting to compare this to the recent Devil’s Due, whose effective marketing campaign is concealing its justifiably negative reviews. The plot is a shameless rip-off of Rosemary’s Baby, but presented in a charmless found-footage style that eschews kooky characters and subtle explorations in favour of (few) cheap shocks and a meagre illusion of reality (because, apparently, some people still believe that found footage films are real). There are no idiosyncratic nuances or moments of character-driven brilliance in Devil’s Due. It has the classic goal of making us fear the encroachment of abject otherworldliness into the domestic space, but it’s utterly lazy in doing so.

The giallo classics Suspiria and Inferno were awkwardly dubbed, with hurried endings and worlds that are just giant horrorscape designed specifically for maidens to perish in – populated by rooms that happen to be filled with barbed wire for victims to fall into, inexplicably homicidal hot dog vendors, and bursts of rock-operatic music during calm moments. You’ll laugh more than scream at Argento’s semi-comprehensible worlds, which nonetheless immerse you in their unique fairy-tale aesthetics. The belated final film in the trilogy, Mother of Tears (2007) loses much of its charm with a murkier, more realistic colour palette and blood that doesn’t shamelessly look like it was bought in B&Q. In trying to integrate aspects of the modern horror paradigm into his unique style, Argento sacrificed one of the strongest points of his work.

Why has popular horror become so shy about embracing the absurdity of its own premises?

Compare the old Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead with their recent reimaginings. The latter of these two deserves credit for successfully carving its own identity that distinguishes it from the original, its dirty, jittery style complementing the film’s sense of franticness and panic. However, symptomatic of modern horror’s void of wit and absurdity. Evil Dead offers plenty of no-nonsense shocks and thrills, but I’m starting to miss a bit of nonsense, and the genre’s bygone ability to make me smile amidst the screams.

And then there’s Freddy Krueger, whose makeover of recent years is intended to make him look more like a real-life burns victim than the eccentric Freddy we’ve come to love. With a perverse panoply of websites for viewing real-life pain and suffering, supernatural horror should put some distance between itself and real-world bleakness. Furthermore, the reboot more or less outs Freddy as a paedophile rather than a jolly old child killer, making it feel like a contrived and distasteful exploitation of a well-documented social problem. Freddy’s executions, too, lacked the bizarre and comical ‘evil genius’ quality of the original films, sticking mostly to clawed-hand stabbings that a serial killer would have been equally capable of.