It’s not just Freddy who would have been out for revenge.
The Big Picture
- A deleted scene in
A Nightmare on Elm Street
reveals that Freddy Krueger killed Nancy Thompson’s younger sibling, along with the siblings of her friends. - This additional detail gives the parents extra motivation for their decision to hunt down Freddy and burn him before he can hurt any more children.
- Although this would give
A Nightmare on Elm Street
an additional emotional layer, it’s for the best that the scene was left out. It would raise the stakes, but it would also make those stakes feel more predestined.
When Wes Craven directed A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, he changed the direction of horror. The genre was dominated by slashers at the time, with every scary movie seemingly about some silent hulk in a mask murdering teenagers. While A Nightmare on Elm Street has slasher tropes, it was something more, as the villainous Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is not a quiet, faceless assassin, but a supernatural presence whose burnt face is always exposed, and whose menacing words keep our attention while sending chills down our spine. Freddy’s motivation is simple: he is a child killer who was hunted down and murdered by the town’s adults, and now he is out for revenge by haunting the dreams of their children. A deleted scene, however, would have seen A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s final girl, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), out for her own revenge, changing the entire tone of the film.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Teenager Nancy Thompson must uncover the dark truth concealed by her parents after she and her friends become targets of the spirit of a serial killer with a bladed glove in their dreams, in which if they die, it kills them in real life.
- Release Date
- November 16, 1984
- Director
- Wes Craven
- Cast
- Heather Langenkamp , Johnny Depp , Robert Englund , John Saxon
- Writers
- Wes Craven
- Runtime
- 91 minutes
Freddy Krueger Is in Control in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’
For many slashers, the motivation of the antagonist is revenge. In Friday the 13th, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) kills any teenage counselor who dares enter Camp Crystal Lake because the counselors weren’t paying attention when her young son, Jason, drowned. In the sequels, Jason kills to get revenge for his mother getting her head chopped off. In The Burning, Cropsy seeks to destroy everyone who burned him in a prank gone wrong. Terror Train‘s killer seeks revenge over a childhood prank that left them emotionally scarred. The Prowler‘s masked murderer acts out because a girl broke up with him when he was at war. A Nightmare on ElmStreet is no different. Freddy wasn’t innocent like some of those people, as he was a vicious child murderer, but when the adults form a mob to burn him alive, he comes back after death to take out his rage on their children as well.
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This puts his victims on the defensive. Nancy is our wholesome final girl, having bad dreams about a man with knives for fingers. Her friends are all having the same nightmare too, and one by one they are taken out by Freddy until only she remains. None of these kids know why this is happening to them; all they can do is react and try to live through the night. Freddy has all the power, bringing his victim into his own world where he is in control.
A Deleted Scene in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Would’ve Given Nancy More Motivation
We don’t know who Freddy is or why he kills until it’s explained to us in the second act by Nancy’s alcoholic mother, Marge (Ronee Blakley), an aloof woman who doesn’t seem to take much interest in her daughter’s life other than to tell her what not to do. As Nancy’s dreams get worse though, and she speaks of a man named Freddy Krueger, Marge takes her daughter down to the basement and reveals who he is. “He was a filthy child murderer who killed at least twenty kids in the neighborhood.” she tells Nancy. When Krueger was set free on a technicality, “a bunch of us parents tracked him down after they let him out.” She then describes how they poured gasoline around the old, abandoned boiler room where he was hiding, before lighting a match and watching it burn.
Nancy and the audience now know why she and her friends are in mortal danger, but a deleted scene added even more emotional heft to the plot. Here, as Marge is explaining her actions to Nancy, she mentions how Freddy killed the siblings of Nancy’s friends. Glen (Johnny Depp), Rod (Jsu Garcia), and Tina (Amanda Wyss) all had a brother or sister. “You too, Nancy,” she confesses. “You weren’t always an only child.” These few extra seconds add so much to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Here, these aren’t just concerned grownups who got together to put a stop to a child killer, but the actual parents of his victims. It explains the actions of the parents in the film. Nancy’s mom is emotionless, her father, Donald (John Saxon), comes across as numb and disconnected, and the parents of her friends aren’t any better. These aren’t bad people or underwritten characters, but emotionally destroyed parents who have to look at their living children and relive what they lost.
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Works Better Without the Deleted Scene
If that deleted scene had remained in A Nightmare on Elm Street, it would have connected Freddy Kruger and Nancy Thompson on a deeper level. It wouldn’t just be Freddy seeking revenge, but Nancy as well, in honor of her sibling and the lost siblings of her friends. It would have put her in a more active space, creating a character who has greater motivation than simply trying to stay alive.
Although that added emotion could have made for an even more compelling movie, it wouldn’t necessarily have made for a better one. While a powerful scene, the revelation of a dead sibling isn’t needed. It’s more scary to have Nancy be on the defensive like most final girls, rather than to have a connection to her aggressor. That would have taken it closer to Halloween 2 territory, where John Carpenter decided that Michael Myers didn’t pick Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) at random, but because they were long-lost siblings. The final version of A Nightmare on Elm Street treats Nancy as someone who could have avoided all of this misery if her parents had simply minded their own business. The deleted scene takes all of that away, at once raising the stakes but also making those stakes feel more predestined. Of course her parents would join the mob then, and of course Freddy would turn his rage on Nancy. The killer is given too much motivation with this route. In the finished version, Freddy is more frightening when it seems like he has chosen her and her friends at random when he could have picked others. It gives his victims too much control and awareness when they should always be on the run.
Usually, a scene is deleted from a movie for a reason. It either adds nothing or it takes the story down the wrong path. That can’t be said here with A Nightmare on Elm Street, because the reveal adds so much, and it wouldn’t have changed anything that happened after, no matter if it had been left in or not. Nancy still would have fought just as hard and her friends would still have met the same fate. It’s only how we would have looked at who Nancy is that would have been altered. Either way, she’s still living a nightmare.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
This article was originally published on collider.com