Over 20 years later, the director behind the sixth installment of A Nightmare on Elm Street has revealed that Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare actually had an alternate ending that was filmed.
"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," said director Rachel Talalay over on her YouTube channel, How I Filmed This.
The version of Freddy's Dead released on screen ended with final girl Maggie tearing off Freddy's clawed glove and stabbing him with it. Then, Maggie proceeds to throw a pipe bomb into Freddy's chest, forcing the three dream demons to fly out of Freddy as the bomb kills him. However, in the never-before-seen ending, the dream demons leave Freddy's body and go on to find a new host to turn into a supernatural killer.
The lost ending was actually filmed, and Talalay has the receipts to prove it. "What I did find in my archives was proof that we did film the ending per the script," said the director. In the still below, you can see the script where the demons approach a young boy who was no doubt meant to be the new Freddy Krueger. "This coda basically had the demons from Freddy going into another boy’s body. The cycle perpetuates."
Talalay says the sequence was cut out of the film "almost immediately," before screen testing. "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... Pretty much everyone agreed it was false advertising."
The alternate ending would have completely changed the franchise as we know it, introducing a new horror figure to Elm Street. The 1991 movie was actually supposed to be the last film in the franchise, and was supposed to kill off Freddy Krueger for good. That is until he was resurrected in Wes Craven's New Nightmare in 1994, followed by the 2003 mash-up Freddy vs. Jason, and the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake.
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