The idea behind 1991’s sixth franchise installment Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was to kill off Freddy Krueger once and for all, and indeed the film did find a way to accomplish precisely that. Freddy’s Dead ends with the death of Freddy Krueger, and while the Dream Demon later returned to the screen in Wes […]
The idea behind 1991’s sixth franchise installment Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare was to kill off Freddy Krueger once and for all, and indeed the film did find a way to accomplish precisely that. Freddy’s Dead ends with the death of Freddy Krueger, and while the Dream Demon later returned to the screen in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason, and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, it could be argued that in the original timeline of the original franchise, the 1991 sequel was indeed the end of Freddy. But I digress.
It was Rachel Talalay who directed Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, and Talalay has taken to her YouTube channel this week to drop a bombshell. As it turns out, there’s an alternate ending to Freddy’s Dead that has never been seen and is believed to be lost, and the most interesting bit of information here is that the alternate ending was actually filmed!
“Hey, kid…”
Talalay details, “I don’t know how well known it is that there’s an additional ending, a coda, to Freddy’s Dead. Something we filmed, and it seems like no one has the footage at all. I know we shot it, and I even had an edit, but it’s gone MIA.” And Talalay has screen-grabs to prove it!
In the never-before-seen lost ending to Freddy’s Dead, the demons that turned Freddy Krueger into a supernatural monster find a new host in the wake of Freddy’s death. Talalay explains, “What I did find in my archives was proof that we did film the ending per the script. This coda basically had the demons from Freddy going into another boy’s body. The cycle perpetuates.”
“…You want a job?”
“We cut the sequence out of the film almost immediately, so we never even tested it,” Talalay continues. “It was pretty much agreed universally that you can’t call the film Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and have a coda like that. I have screenshots. I must’ve screenshotted it before I lost the footage. Pretty much everyone agreed it was false advertising.”
The final ending to Freddy’s Dead sees Freddy’s daughter pull him into the real world and blow him to pieces, with no suggestion of the dream demons finding a new host. Talalay’s alternate ending would’ve left the door open for the rise of a brand new supernatural nightmare, and the concept interestingly echoes the approach to .
