Wes Craven's original ending to A Nightmare on Elm Street was much happier, but New Line Cinema scrapped it in favor of a franchise.
The Big Picture By definition, it’s not often a horror film ends with a happy ending. Certainly, there are exceptions depending on the subgenre and the creator's story goals, but as a whole, horror equals violence, dread, and a survival that's tainted with some kind of traumatic misery.
Only one person believed in Craven's dream-killer conceit. Bob Shaye, the film's producer and the founder of New Line Cinema, had experience distributing films to college campuses and was tiptoeing into original low-budget projects. New Line's finances weren't considerable. But Shaye gave Craven a budget of $700,000 to shoot A Nightmare on Elm Street, which ballooned into over 1 million.
Craven's idea is peaceful and pensive almost to the point of anticlimactic. It was also conclusive, and that was a problem for Shaye, who wanted to build a financially successful franchise. Shaye insisted they bring Freddy Krueger back for one last jump scare. The moment ruined Craven's happy ending, but it mimicked the "gotcha" endings of other slasher moneymakers and dangled the promise of a sequel.
Nevertheless, despite Nancy being this writer's ride-or-die Final Girl, there's little doubt the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise thrived on Krueger's unique presence and Robert Englund's delightfully perverse performance. Craven intentionally made Krueger a menacing villain who wittily taunted his victims. Krueger's obvious personality contrasted with the brooding, blank silence of Halloween's Michael Myers and Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees.
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