It's not very often that one deleted scene can change your whole outlook on a movie, especially one that's over 30 years old, but in the case of the original A Nightmare On Elm Street that's exactly what's happened.
The clip, which was revealed earlier this year online, is an extended version of a scene which made it's way into the film's final cut. It's where Nancy's mother leads her down into their basement and she explains to her who exactly Freddy Krueger is. In the movie version that we all got to see, she tells her that Freddy was a child murderer that got out of jail on a technicality, so all of the parents decided to take the law into their own hands and kill Freddy themselves. That's what we were shown, but in the deleted scene, Nancy's mother goes on to tell her that they didn't help in burning Freddy to death out of some sense of justice or fear that the killings would continue, they helped kill Freddy because he had killed Nancy's older brother, a sibling that she never knew she had! "You weren't always an only child, " she tells her, and all of a sudden...it's a whole new story.
Think about how this little bit of news changes the way you look at the movie. Now, instead of Nancy going after Freddy just so she can survive this evil spirit, she's going after him because she wants revenge on the man that took her older brother from her, one that she didn't know existed until moments ago. This helps us understand why she is driven to kill Freddy once she finds out that there is a way to do so. It may have even changed the tone of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors when Nancy returned to the franchise to help a new batch of kids survive from Freddy. Information like this may have changed the story's ending a bit if this scene had been left in the original movie, and subsequently every movie that was released after that one. Or maybe not, who knows? Still, it's exciting to see that a scene that only lasted a couple of minutes could have changed the entire tone of the movie.
They tried rebooting the franchise back in 2010 and it didn't do well at all. One of the reasons that fans dismissed the film is because Robert Englund was replaced as Freddy Krueger, The 68 year old was recently at the Belfast Comic Con and was sitting on a panel promoting his next two projects, The Midnight Man and Nightworld, and was asked what he thought about the remake. He said that he like some parts of it, but he thought that they mishandled the teenagers in the film.
"They reshot the opening and it threw the movie off-kilter. You don’t see any of the people happy-go-lucky, they’re never untainted. They’re practically zombies from the get-go because they’re haunted by Freddy, and I think that was a miscalculation. You need to see before and after so you can invest emotionally with the children."
And that, my friends, is why Mr. Englund is a legend in the horror film world. He get's what it takes for a movie to make you feel something for the characters dying on the screen, because when you feel something for them, or you can relate to them on some level, it makes their death that much more powerful. Movie studios should pay attention. It's the story, guys. Not the title of the movie.
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