10 Horror Movie Scenes Filmmakers Regret
5. The Sequel-Bait Ending - A Nightmare On Elm Street
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a fantastic film with a slightly iffy ending, where Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) seemingly defeats Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), wakes up the next morning and finds her dead friends alive once again.
At that moment, their car is then hijacked by Freddy before Nancy's mother (Ronee Blakley) is dragged through her front door window by him - realised with an outrageously unconvincing dummy.
Yet Wes Craven has gone on the record to confirm that his original ending was totally unambiguous, concluding with Nancy concretely defeating Freddy and heading to school the next day.
In an interview with Vulture shortly before his 2015 death, he regretted that he agreed to change the ending, giving it a sequel hook at the behest of producer Bob Shaye (sister of Insidious star Lin):
"Bob wanted a hook for a sequel. I felt that the film should end when Nancy turns her back on Freddy and his violence - that's the one thing that kills him. Bob wanted to have Freddy pick up the kids in a car and drive off, which reversed everything I was trying to say - it suddenly presented Freddy as triumphant. I came up with a compromise, which was to have the kids get in the convertible, and when the roof comes down, we'd have Freddy's red and green stripes on it. Do I regret changing the ending? I do, because it's the one part of the film that isn't me."