10 EXACT Moments Horror Movies Self-Destructed

7. Painting Freddy As A Sympathetic Figure - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

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New Line Cinema

To be fair, the Elm Street franchise as a whole had already self-destructed way before Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare hit screens in 1991. Still, anticipation was high for Freddy's Dead - as highlighted by the film's impressive $35 million box office haul - purely for the fact that this was to be Freddy Krueger's swansong.

If this was indeed to be the end of the line for one of horror's most iconic characters, surely Freddy was to go out with a bang, right?

The Final Nightmare ticks off plentiful Elm Street tropes, with troubled teens Carlos, Tracy, Spencer, and 'John Doe' the ones tormented by Krueger this time out. For John Doe, he's suffering from amnesia and winds up at the same youth shelter as the other three youngsters... and it's soon implied that he's the son of Freddy.

With Freddy's Dead having already confirmed that, yes, Freddy Krueger did indeed father a child, the swerve is that this offspring isn't John Doe. In fact, it's not Carlos, Tracy or Spencer either. No, this child is actually Maggie, the doctor tasked with looking after these teens.

Unbeknownst to Maggie - who already knew she'd been adopted - she was born Katherine Krueger. On a mission to stop her old man, our heroine enters the dream world and gets treated to the backstory of Freddy; a backstory that bizarrely paints him in a sympathetic light.

Rather than being evil for the sake of being evil, Freddy's Dead attempts to humanize Krueger, explaining how he was abused by his step-father and bullied by his classmates. It was this troubled upbringing that formed the sinister ways of Freddy, and being shown this troubled upbringing turned The Final Nightmare into a muddled mess of a movie.

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