Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) was the only film in the Nightmare on Elm Street series to be directed by a woman: Rachel Talalay.

It's a horror movie with more camp and humorous elements than its NOES predecessors, although it still contains disturbing imagery, continuing the series' theme of child abuse in particular.

Trivia

Talalay made a deliberate decision to get away from all the birth and pregnancy imagery used in some of the earlier films (such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child).

A section of the film was originally screened in theatres in 3-D, but this effect does not appear in most video releases of the film. The 3-D gimmick was a request from the studio, which constrained Talalay's options as a director by adding many technical difficulties to the ending, which she had originally intended to have a much larger scale.

Rachel Talalay has said:

3-D was really unwieldy and didn't work very well. We didn't have the resources to test the technology well enough. So we were winging it. I think it barely worked and limited everything I could do at the end. It was pure gimick, and cost a lot of money that I would have used to make the rest of the film better and not have a lame ending take place in a room the size of my bedroom.

The other day I was discussing with my man whether it was a mistake to go the humorous, tongue-in-cheek route with Freddy. I wondered if we should have gone full-on horror. He reminded me that at the time it was the right decision. We were burned out on ideas, on scripts, and horror was predictable. We were looking for something to make it different.

Summary

Freddy Krueger sends the only surviving teenager of the town of Springwood out into the world to bring him back new victims.

John Doe, who thought he was Freddy's son for most of the movie, dies. It turns out that Freddy had a daughter -- Maggie, the youth center's child psychologist. She enters the dream world and brings Freddy back to reality, where she kills him.

External Links

• Rachel Talalay's webpage for Freddy's Dead