Even in 1991, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare promised to kill Freddy Krueger once and for all—and, in the original franchise timeline, it delivered. The film ends with Freddy’s destruction, and while the Dream Demon later returned in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy vs. Jason, and the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, for hardcore fans, Freddy’s Dead marked the final chapter… or so we thought.

Now, director Rachel Talalay has dropped a horror bombshell on her YouTube channel: there’s a never-before-seen alternate ending to Freddy’s Dead, and it was actually filmed.

“Hey, kid…”

Talalay explains, “I don’t know how well known it is that there’s an additional ending, a coda, to Freddy’s Dead. Something we filmed, and it seems like no one has the footage at all. I know we shot it, and I even had an edit, but it’s gone MIA.” But she’s got screenshots to prove it.

In this lost ending, the demonic forces that turned Freddy into a supernatural nightmare find a new host after his death. “The coda basically had the demons from Freddy going into another boy’s body. The cycle perpetuates,” Talalay says.

“…You want a job?”

The scene was cut almost immediately. “It was pretty much agreed universally that you can’t call the film Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and have a coda like that. Pretty much everyone agreed it was false advertising,” she adds. The sequence never made it to test screenings and has since been considered lost—until now.

The official ending has Freddy’s daughter pull him into the real world and obliterate him, leaving no hint that the dream demons survived. Talalay’s alternate ending would have opened the door for a brand-new supernatural terror, echoing elements of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

Check out the recovered script page and screenshots from the lost ending—and imagine how much darker Freddy’s Dead could have been.