A Nightmare on Elm Street: What Happened to Nancy Thompson?

What happened to Nancy Thompson, the final girl in Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street? The iconic character, played by Heather Langenkamp, met an ambiguous end in the original 1984 shocker.

Coming off the underperforming Swamp Thing (1982), Craven pitched his idea for a dream killer to every major studio – including Walt Disney and Paramount. No one wanted to produce his script until New Line Cinema, an independent distribution company, agreed to finance the film. Numerous additional investors were added while the film was under production as New Line struggled to meet certain financial commitments. Their gamble paid off, however, when they slowly began to roll out the film in the fall of 1984.

By the spring of 1985, after A Nightmare on Elm Street had played most of the larger U.S. markets, the film became an unqualified success. Much of this had to do with Craven’s transgressive approach to the teen slasher movie – a popular early 80s subgenre that was on the wane. The protagonist of the film, anxious teenager Nancy Thompson (Langenkamp), was the quintessential “final girl,” the smart, innocent who manages to stay alive and fight the monster to the end. A stock character in most slasher films, Nancy was an equal to dream killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) – proactively devising traps to capture and vanquish him.

What Happened to Nancy on Elm Street?

While Nancy was able to send Krueger back into the dream world at the end of Elm Street, a dark and ambiguous coda indicated a bad end for the heroine. Old diary entries were the only mention of her in the 1985 sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, where it was inferred that she went insane after witnessing her boyfriend’s murder. It wasn’t until the 1987 release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors that we found the true fate of Nancy. Original creator Craven came up with the concept of a group of teens at a psychiatric clinic, the last of the Elm Street kids, who were dealing with violent dreams surrounding burned psychopath Krueger.

Nancy returned as a therapist intern who was also an authority on sleep disorders. She taught the troubled youth how to use “dream powers” to fight the nightmare menace. In addition to bringing back Nancy, Dream Warriors dug deeper into Krueger’s past – eventually revealing a way to defeat him. While his bones were found in the real world in a race to bury his remains, Nancy and the Elm Street kids attempted to fend him off in a collective dream. Krueger appeared to Nancy as a vision of her father Donald, a returning John Saxon, and ended up stabbing her with his razor glove. Nancy was ultimately killed, but not before she was able to save Kristen (Patricia Arquette) by piercing Kruger with his own glove.

Langenkamp would return to the series with New Nightmare, a meta/reboot written and directed by Craven. In it, the actress played a fictional version of herself – dealing with the fame of playing Nancy while being haunted by a version of Krueger that invades the real world. The 1994 film was the last time that Langenkamp and Craven would participate in a Nightmare on Elm Street film.