Nothing puts me in a better mood than a horror movie.

Something about watching clueless campers being hunted down in the deep of the woods by a machete-wielding masked maniac just appeals to the senses. But the flux of unoriginal titles and remakes, especially over the past decade, has put a damper on a once-thriving genre.

The ’80s were high time for the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” franchises. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” was pretty spooky, too. Eventually, that well ran dry, and by the time the ’90s hit, the only Michael Myers fans cared about was the one wearing the blue crushed velvet suit and horn-rimmed glasses.

The declining figures for former box office titans forced a whole round of improvisation from the writers and producers of the once-popular series. One idea to make bank was pitting slashers against one another. Thus, “Freddy vs. Jason” and “Alien vs. Predator” were greenlit earlier this decade. Each of those films took in more than triple its budget. Despite solid sales, the “versus” concept was universally panned as shallow and lackluster, which left the door open to try something new. Or old.

Typically, when Hollywood runs out of ideas, there are two solutions: add to the original concept, or try and recreate the success spurned from the original concept. So it goes, the 2000s became the decade of the remade horror film. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “The Amityville Horror,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “The Omen,” “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th” and, most recently, “The Last House on the Left” all received reboots, some which were good, some great, some plain awful. None all that gratifying.

While it’s neat seeing an updated version of an old classic on the big screen, with new actors and likely a new ending, is it too much to ask to leave some of these franchises alone? That, or beat them into the ground, where they belong. One or the other. The way I see it, you could either stop creating these “reimaginations” or you could completely bypass that and tack on a handful of pitiful sequels in which the only discernible value is in the scenes featuring Freddy Krueger and a board with a nail through it. There’s no in-between.

Until something so fresh comes along that it makes me forget all about this onslaught of upgrades, I’m going to stick to that one scene of “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan” where the boxer guy gets his head punched clean off.

But until then, I’ll wait.