‘Freddy Krueger was my earliest memory,” says Tulsi Vagjiani, a 39-year-old plane crash survivor, who’s being featured in a new campaign challenging Hollywood’s attitudes to facial disfigurement. “I got compared to him when I was growing up.”

In 1990, the 10-year-old Vagjiani, from London, was rescued from the wreckage of an Airbus 320 that had crashed on its way from Mumbai to Bangalore, leaving 92 people, including her parents and brother, dead. Sustaining 45 per cent burns, she went through more than 50 reconstructive operations on her face, chest and legs in the years that followed.

But, aside from her physical injuries, there were deep psychological scars, and the Krueger taunts made them even worse. An embodiment of pure evil and insatiable revenge, the demonic baddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series would be few people’s idea of a positive role model. The make-up job on Robert Englund, the actor who played him, was itself overtly based on medical photographs of severe burn victims.

And Freddy Krueger is just one of a string of movie villains – from Scar in The Lion King to Darth Vader and Kylo Ren in Star Wars, and the phantom in The Phantom of the Opera – who have been given facial traumas by directors, and thus encouraged the assumption that disfigurement is something to be afraid of.