9 Creators Who Regretted Killing Off Movie Characters
5. Wes Craven Protested Against Marge Thompson's Ridiculous "Demise" - A Nightmare On Elm Street
A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the greatest horror movies of all time, so great in fact that it's easy to forgive the film's infamously goofy twist ending.
What begins as an eerie dream sequence in which Nancy rides off with her miraculously alive friends ends with a still-living Freddy (Robert Englund) grabbing Nancy's mother Marge (Ronee Blakley) and dragging her - or rather, an hilariously unconvincing dummy - through her front door window.
Craven, who had no desire at all to spin the film off into a franchise, originally wrote a more concrete, closed-off ending in which Nancy defeats Freddy and wakes up to find that the film's events were a nightmare.
But New Line Cinema boss Bob Shaye insisted upon a final twist implying Freddy's survival, and while Craven pushed back against some of the suggestions, he was basically "encouraged" by the higher-ups to accept the window ending as a compromise.
In Craven's own words:
"The original ending of the script has Nancy come out the door. It's an unusually cloudy and foggy day. A car pulls up with her dead friends in it. She's startled. She goes out and gets in the car wondering what the hell is going on, and they drive off into the fog, with the mother left standing on the doorstep and that's it. It was very brief, and suggestive that maybe life is sort of dream-like too.
Shaye wanted Freddy Krueger to be driving the car, and have the kids screaming. It all became very negative. I felt a philosophical tension to my ending. Shaye said, 'That's so 60s, it's stupid.' I refused to have Freddy in the driver's seat, and we thought up about five different endings. The one we used, with Freddy pulling the mother through the doorway amused us all so much, we couldn't not use it."
In an interview shortly before his death, Craven outright states that he regretted backing down and agreeing to end the film on Marge's dreamlike demise:
"Do I regret changing the ending? I do, because it's the one part of the film that isn't me."