The original ending to “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare” was supposed to carry on the dream demon’s legacy but now it’s lost forever…
“The Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise is among the most beloved for horror fans but even the most rabid Freddy Krueger enthusiasts can admit that a couple of installments in the series were just flat out bad.
Perhaps near the top of that list is 1991’s “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” which was meant to serve as the last chapter in the series with Freddy finally meeting his demise — in 3D no less! The film did manage to open No. 1 at the box office before eventually earning over $34 million on just a $10 million budget but critics were not kind to the movie.
But now director Rachel Talalay has revealed that she actually shot an alternate ending that would have passed on the dream demons that created Freddy into another body, which effectively carried on the story with a new person haunting everybody’s nightmares. While Talalay says the final scene was filmed, they never bothered testing it with audiences and now the footage has been completely lost with only a couple of screenshots and a part of the original script to verify this alternate ending actually exists.
“We did film the ending, per the script,” Talalay said on her YouTube channel. “So this coda basically had the demons from Freddy going into another boy’s body. The cycle perpetuates, very horror film sequel. Actually we cut the sequence out of the film almost immediately so we never even tested it. It was pretty much agreed universally that you can’t call the film ‘Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare’ and advertise that it’s the final nightmare and then have a coda like that.
“Pretty much everyone agreed it was false advertising and it wasn’t a good look for what was supposed to be the final nightmare.”
See the screenshot and the script page below from the alternate ending:
Talalay says she has no idea whatever happened to the footage but she definitely shot that sequence to end the film but she assumes the only copy probably exists in the New Line Cinema archives somewhere.
While “Freddy’s Dead” aimed to put an end to Freddy Krueger, the infamous slasher was brought back to life (in a way) just a few years later when Wes Craven returned to the franchise and made the critically acclaimed sequel/meta film “New Nightmare” where actors from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series are haunted by a demon taking on the Freddy form.
But Talalay says her original ending would have potentially allowed the dream demons to carry on the story with another lead character, although obviously the studio wasn’t on board so the scene never saw the light of day.
