A Nightmare On Elm Street Ending Explained: Sins Of The Mother
Wes Craven was inspired to write his 1984 horror hit "A Nightmare on Elm Street" after a real-life case of what was called Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome that, according to several articles in the Los Angeles Times, was afflicting America's Hmong refugee population. People would suffer from horrifying nightmares and soon became afraid to fall asleep. When they did finally lose consciousness, they mysteriously died. The deaths remained unexplained for years. Craven extrapolated a horror movie from these cases, envisioning a nightmarish killer who occupied multiple people's dreams. If the killer killed you in your dream, you died in the waking world.
Craven named his killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) and explained that Freddy was the ghost of a neighborhood child murderer who had been killed by a group of local parents — exercising vigilante justice — years earlier. Somehow, Freddy passed into the realm of the supernatural. Now he "lives" as a burned-up, blade-wielding dream demon seeking intergenerational revenge on the children of the parents who killed him.
Because so much of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" takes place in dreams, there are a lot of terrifying, surreal images to keep a horror movie audience constantly off balance. In one notable sequence, the film's protagonist Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) dozes off in class and dreams of her dead friend Tina (Amanda Wyss), bloodied and zipped up in a body bag, reaching out to her. She spits out a poisonous centipede. It's all very terrifying. The nightmares will grow steadily worse, and more and more people around Nancy will die. By the end, she becomes resolute in her quest to capture and kill Freddy.
Which she does. But she doesn't. Or perhaps it was all a dream. Let's delve into the details.
What you need to remember about A Nightmare on Elm Street
It's worth noting that Freddy Krueger has no actual beef with Nancy, Tona, Rod (Nick Corri), or Glen (Johnny Depp), the film's four main characters. Freddy takes sadistic pleasure in their misery and tortures them with fear and paranoia. He wishes the four teens dead, but not because he hates them or has any issue with them as people. Freddy's beef is with Nancy's mom, Marge (Ronee Blakley). Marge is constantly seen drinking throughout "A Nightmare on Elm Street," even going so far as to hide her morning cocktails from her teen daughter. Nancy's dad (John Saxon) still serves as the town's local sheriff, but he and Marge split up a while ago. A sharp-eyed viewer might even notice that Marge has a few unfinished paintings around the house, indicating a stalled hobby that she dropped recently. Nancy is being raised among alcoholism, divorce, and disappointment. What happened?
About two-thirds of the way through "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Marge finally explains what happened. When Nancy was still a toddler, Elm Street was afflicted by the crimes of Freddy Krueger, a murderer who killed several nearby children. A deleted scene clarified that the children Freddy killed were all the older siblings of the film's main characters. Freddy was arrested, but "got off on a technicality." This led to the parents, who lost children at his hands, to pursue Freddy and burn him alive. Marge kept Freddy's signature mode of murder, a razor-fingered glove. It was stored in her home's furnace.
Freddy didn't care about Nancy any more than he cared about his other victims. He only wanted to ruin the lives of her parents. Which, from the look of things, he was successful at.
The circumstances of the ending
By the end of the movie, one might argue that Freddy had already won, even before Nancy decided to go after him. He wanted to ruin the lives of the parents on Elm Street. From the looks of Marge, he accomplished his goal. It's not until a few people are dead — and after she's been tormented by Freddy for what seems like weeks — that Nancy decides to battle him. Earlier in the film, it was revealed that she was able to grab Freddy's hat in the dream realm and wake up still holding it. Nancy comes up with an elaborate scheme to pull Freddy bodily back into the waking world.
After Marge goes to sleep, Nancy begins building booby traps all around her house. She puts gunpowder — salvaged from a shotgun shell — into a lightbulb, so when she flips a light switch, it will cause a distracting explosion. She rigs up a sledgehammer to slam Freddy in the chest as he passes through a door. She tells her dad, investigating the murder of her boyfriend across the street (!), to come by in 20 minutes to arrest Freddy. She intends to fall asleep, grab Freddy, awaken to a specially timed alarm, and yank him out of the dream world.
When Nancy falls asleep to seek Freddy, she never wakes up. Or does she?
The many "Nightmare" sequels contradict this theory, but "A Nightmare on Elm Street" functions better if the entire climax — including the portions in the waking world — actually takes place in dreams. It would certainly explain a lot of the hasty themes and surreal, magical events we see.
The actual ending
Earlier in the film, Marge had installed extra locks on the house door and had bars put over the windows. She had finally seen that her child was in danger, although it's unclear if she believed that Freddy had returned. Marge was deeply afflicted by the death in her family, but also by the guilt of her vigilante justice. Add alcohol to that, and you have a character that's never thinking clearly. Nancy, meanwhile, is so sleep-deprived, that she's not thinking too clearly either. She builds booby traps using shotgun shells, but never thinks to arm a shotgun? The climax of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is undergirded by a hazy form of off-balance mania.
When Nancy locates Freddy and pulls him into the real world, reality seemingly turns sideways. Freddy, who previously operated by his own logic, now seems to be abiding by the rules of Nancy's. The booby traps work, Nancy sets Freddy on fire and locks him in the basement. She manages to scream across the street and summon her father. He breaks into the house, and father and daughter find a set of flaming footprints leading upstairs to Marge's bedroom. The flaming footprints are dreamy, odd, and clearly not part of the real world. Upstairs in Marge's bedroom, Freddy — still ablaze — is attacking Marge in her bed. Nancy's dad puts out the fire, and the desiccated skeleton of Marge slowly sinks into a dimensional portal in the bed. Freddy, it seems, claimed his final victim.
But not quite. When Nancy's dad leaves, Freddy re-emerged from the bed portal, now doused. Nancy declares that Freddy has no power over her any longer, as she is no longer afraid. Freddy attacks her but vanishes mid-stab. What?
What the ending means
For Nancy, Freddy's attacks were all about her. To her hazy, fatigue-addled mind, defeating Freddy was all about facing her own fears and turning her back on them. Remember, though, that Freddy wanted revenge on Marge, not Nancy. Nancy, in her dream, recontextualized the final fight to fit what would be satisfying to her. Nancy says to Freddy that she's no longer afraid, failing to acknowledge that she was only suffering the sins of the mother (see also: "Scream.").
The climax, tragically, wasn't about Nancy. Nancy's subconscious mind "wrote" an ending for Marge — she is taken away by the evil she helped create — but she couldn't "write" herself as a mere pawn.
Nancy's tragic hubris is accentuated in the film's epilogue. The final scene in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" features a placid, foggy morning — clearly a dream — wherein Marge is clean and sober, everyone is smiling, and all of Nancy's dead friends are alive again. The dead friends pull up in a car, laughing. Everything is beautiful and serene. Nancy's unconscious mind is creating a "mega happy" ending. She gets in the convertible, only to have the top automatically close over her head. It bears the same stripes that Freddy wore on his sweater. She is still in the nightmare. Freddy will not let her go. She will be in an eternal state of torment. Freddy's arm bursts through the window of Marge's front door and grabs her, yanking her inside.
Yes, the dummy being yanked through the small window looks pretty ridiculous. It's funnier than it is scary.
The dream never ended. Nancy will forever be a pawn, and Marge will forever suffer. It's all very bleak.
And, it wasn't the original ending.
Wes Craven's original ending
In the March 1987 issue of Cinefantastique — released on the eve of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" — Craven went on record with the push-and-pull he had with New Line Cinema head honcho Robert Shaye over how the film should end. Craven wanted it to stay dreamy and ambiguous, while Shaye wanted it to be more sensational. Craven said:
"The original ending of the script has Nancy come out the door. It's an unusually cloudy and foggy day. A car pulls up with her dead friends in it. She's startled. She goes out and gets in the car wondering what the hell is going on, and they drive off into the fog, with the mother left standing on the doorstep and that's it. It was very brief, and suggestive that maybe life is sort of dream-like too."
But it seems that Shaye wanted more traditional sequel bait. The pair eventually came up with the dummy-through-the-window bit, and they knew they had struck gold, even if it was kind of goofy.
"Shaye wanted Freddy Krueger to be driving the car, and have the kids screaming. It all became very negative. I felt a philosophical tension to my ending. Shaye said, 'That's so '60s, it's stupid.' I refused to have Freddy in the driver's seat, and we thought up about five different endings. The one we used, with Freddy pulling the mother through the doorway amused us all so much, we couldn't not use it."
Shooting wrapped in July. The film was in theaters by November.
Then came the sequels
What the ending meant for the sequels
If one wants to make the argument that Freddy was tormenting Nancy, and that Nancy lost her mind into a self-structured dream-world torture, then it falls in line perfectly with "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge" which was released in November of 1985. That film was about a new protagonist, Jesse (Mark Patton), who found that Freddy was slowly emerging from the dream world into his body. The film is notoriously queer-coded, and it is now popularly accepted that Freddy was a symbol for a closeted gay teen facing his sexuality. If Freddy's goal is to torment teens and force them to live out their nightmares, then his MO doesn't change from the first film to the second.
That, however, is not where the series ended up going. The ending of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" was retconned for Chuck Russell's "Nightmare 3" in 1987. In that film, Nancy was still alive to pass on her knowledge of Freddy to a group of teens in a mental hospital. The climax of "Nightmare 3" was a badass sequence of teens, suffused with dream-granted superpowers, fighting Freddy with weapons and energy blasts. It's more like an action film than a horror movie.
Further sequels took a much more traditional approach to the story, dropping Craven's "sins of the parents" themes and focusing on mythology, character, and other ho-hum plot elements. The films are endlessly imaginative, of course, and the special effects are creative and gorgeous throughout. But they suffer thematically.
Craven returned to the series in 1994 for "Wes Craven's New Nightmare," a film set in the real world where Freddy stalked the original film's actors. It was clever and recontextualized Freddy as an ancient storytelling demon. That was a good follow-up.