‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Ending Explained: Did Nancy Kill Freddy?

Warning: This article contains major A Nightmare On Elm Street spoilers. Sure, the film is almost 40 years old, but if you haven’t seen it, it’d be a real nightmare for you if you waited all this time to watch it and we ruined it for you. Oh, fwiw, Elm Street is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Wes Craven’s 1984 slasher flick A Nightmare on Elm Street is full of imagery that, at this point, is commonplace. Freddy Krueger’s burned face, signature fedora, red-and-green-striped sweater, and of course, his knives for fingers were terrifying and a real novelty at the time, but after nearly four decades in the zeitgeist, Freddy, played by Robert Englund here and in all the subsequent sequels, feels like an old friend by now. The original film set up the mythology of Freddy though, here’s what you need to know:

WHO WAS FREDDY KRUEGER?

At the top of the film, we see a man fashioning a customized glove with knives at the fingertips. That man is Fred Krueger. Several years before the start of the film, Krueger murdered at least 20 kids in town. Due to a legal loophole, Krueger went free, so a group of vigilante parents (presumably all residents of Elm Street), tracked him down to an abandoned boiler room where he would take his child victims. The parents set the place on fire, intent on killing Freddy, hence his burns. They also removed his preferred murder weapon, his knife gloves, from the premises. A child’s nursery rhyme, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you, three four, better lock the door, five, six, grab your crucifix, seven, eight, gonna stay up late, nine, ten, never sleep again,” becomes popular in town as a result.

WHAT HAPPENS IN A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET?

Early in the film, teenagers Tina (Amanda Wyss), Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), Glen (Johnny Depp), and Rod (Jsu Garcia) have a sleepover at Tina’s house. Tina, Nancy and Rod all admit that they’ve had terrible nightmares in which the same creepy man in a striped sweater and with knives for fingers terrorizes them. In setting up horror’s classic “slutty girl has to die” trope, Rod and Tina have sex and then go to bed. As she sleeps, Tina is greeted by Freddy who slashes her to death. Rod is blamed for her death and sent to jail.

Nancy knows that Rod is innocent and that whoever the man in their dreams is, he’s the one responsible. Nancy tries to keep herself awake at night so she won’t fall into the terrifying dreamland haunted by the slasher, but when she nods off in class, she’s chased into the school’s boiler room and she burns her arm on a steam pipe to wake herself up. The burn mark stays on her arm, proof that her dreams are blending with reality. Nancy’s mother (Ronee Blakley) brings her to a sleep institute where she’s observed while she sleeps, and her mother and the doctor witness her having a nightmare in which she wakes up holding a rumpled hat. Freddy’s mom must have worried that he’d lose it, as his name is inscribed inside the brim and that’s how they learn the name of the man in their dreams.

When Nancy shows her skeptical mother, her mom tells her “Fred Krueger can’t come after you, Nancy. He’s dead. Believe me, I know.” See, Nancy’s mother was one of the parents who set Freddy on fire, and she is the one who’s been keeping his knife gloves stored in her basement ever since his death. Nancy doesn’t believe that Freddy’s not a threat anymore, and she devises a plan to meet her friend Glen at midnight so that he can watch over her as she goes into her dream to capture Freddy and bring him to justice. Glen reminds her that if you turn your back on the monster it can’t hurt you.

The problem is, stupid Glen falls asleep before he can meet up with Nancy, and Nancy’s own mother has locked her inside the house so she can’t leave. In one of the more insane moments every filmed, Nancy gets a phone call from Freddy, whose tongue comes through the phone, and he tells her, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy,” as his rubbery tongue licks her face.

Nancy realizes that this means Glen, who has been snoozing on his bed with a whole TV ON HIS LAP is in danger. In the film’s most iconic scene, Freddy pulls Glen (and his TV) into the mattress, and a volcanic spew of blood bursts out, covering the ceiling and everything else in sight. Glen is dead. R.I.P. Glen.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET ENDING EXPLAINED

Nancy booby traps her house, still hoping to execute her plan to fall asleep and catch Freddy. Her mother is passed out drunk, and she asks her father to stand guard over her so he’ll be there when she wakes. She drifts to sleep, dreaming that she’s being chased by Freddy in his boiler room. In the dream, she keeps an eye on her watch, which has a timer set to wake her at 12:30am. It counts down, an alarm goes off, and Nancy wakes up in her bedroom, unscathed. In a classic jump scare, Freddy lurches up from behind her and grabs her, no longer in her dream but existing in her real life. Freddy chases her into her basement where she pours gas on him and sets him on fire.

By the time Nancy’s father arrives, Krueger is on fire and leaving a trail of flame footprints leading to Nancy’s mother’s bedroom. It was her he was after this whole time, she was his killer after all, and Nancy and her father watch as Freddy wrestles with her, smothering her in the flames that already engulf him. Freddy vanishes into the sheet and her burned, skeletal remains fall away into her mattress which is now a hole to who knows where. Nancy approaches the bed, and while the mattress is intact, her mother is gone.

“I’m okay, you go downstairs,” Nancy tells her father. She summons Freddy from the depths of the bed, and he hovers behind her, but, as Glen advised her earlier in the film, if she turns her back on the monster, she takes his power away. She tells him “I want my mother and friend again. I take back every bit of energy I gave you, you’re nothing. You’re shit,” and with that, Freddy seemingly dissolves into thin air, unable to exist in a world where people don’t fear him. No one else in the film was able to conquer their fear of Freddy, but Nancy could, which is why she’s the sole survivor of the nightmares.

This is the point where Wes Craven wanted to end the film, but in order to keep the possibility of a sequel open, there is one final scene.

It’s a foggy, dreamlike morning, and Nancy and her mother, alive again, walk out the front door of their house. Nancy gets picked up by Glen in his convertible and Tina and Rod are in the back seat. As Nancy enters the car, the top of the convertible pops down and it’s striped, red and green, like Freddy’s sweater. The windows roll up and the kids become trapped in the car. Nancy’s mom, oblivious to their terror, grins and waves goodbye to them as some local children jump rope and sing the “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you” song, and Freddy’s arm grabs her, sucking her into the house.

Are the victims of the film still dead, or was the entire film just a nightmare in Nancy’s mind? There’s a purposeful ambiguity there that leaves that final moment open to interpretation. In a world where dreams and reality blend as one, maybe both versions can be true. But if Freddy had remained really and truly dead, as Craven intended in the previous scene, there would be no room for a sequel (or eight).

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.

Where to stream A Nightmare On Elm Street