As if A Nightmare on Elm Street villain Freddy Krueger wasn’t bad enough, a rare deleted scene reveals the true extent of his horrific crimes. One of the oddest pop culture rises of the 1980s belonged to Freddy, as played by Robert Englund. Despite being a brutal child murderer and implied molester, Freddy became a phenomenon, adorning every possible type of tie-in merchandise, hosting music videos on MTV, and even starring in his own anthology TV show called Freddy’s Nightmares.
A character as reprehensible as Freddy Krueger really shouldn’t be a fan favorite, but thanks to Englund’s charismatic performance and a progressively more comedic characterization, it wasn’t too long before Freddy himself was the protagonist of the Elm Street sequels. Yet, it’s really hard to get over just how odd it is in hindsight that Freddy was marketed to kids, with his own hotline, video game, music albums, lunchboxes, and the like. It was a different time, but still.
In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street film, a scene near the climax has heroine Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) have a talk with her mother in the basement. Nancy’s constantly boozing mom reveals that the man hunting Nancy in her dreams was a real-life serial child killer that got off on a technicality in court, leading Springwood’s parents to track him down and burn him alive. However, a deleted extension to that scene reveals that things were originally much worse.
A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy Had a Sibling Killed by Freddy
The deleted scene in question can be seen in full above, although the quality is a bit rough. While most of it did make the final cut of A Nightmare on Elm Street, at around 1:25 in the clip above, Nancy asks her mother why her and the other parents saw fit to take the law into their own hands. Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakley) then drops a bombshell on her daughter: Nancy wasn’t always an only child. In fact, neither were her friends Glen, Rod, and Tina, who of course were all killed by Freddy in the film. For Freddy’s killers, it wasn’t just wanting to serve justice, it was very, very personal.
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Nancy Having a Sibling Puts the Ending in a New Light
One wonders why exactly A Nightmare on Elm Street writer and director Wes Craven chose to cut the part about Nancy having a sibling from the film, as it would effectively cast everything after that point in a whole new night. While killing her friends and boyfriend would certainly be enough to make Nancy want revenge on Freddy instead of just achieving mere survival, knowing that the dream-stalker actually killed a member of her own family would no doubt make the final battle between Nancy and Freddy that much more deeply personal.
More: Freddy Krueger’s Twisted Origin Explained
