In case you need a little refresher, The Dream Child opened like most Nightmare flicks do, with a weakened Freddy finding a way to return to stalk the dreams of Elm Street's children. This time, after being soundly defeated by Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) at the conclusion of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy keys in on Alice's unborn child, using its dreams to gain enough power to once again begin stalking Alice and her friends. With the help of her buddy Mark (Joe Seely), Alice discovers that the nun she's been seeing in her dreams is Amanda Krueger, Freddy's mother (first seen in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), who is determined to stop her son; in an admittedly convoluted series of events, Freddy is defeated by a manifestation of Alice's son Jacob, then seemingly banished forever by the ghost of Amanda.
In the flick's final scene, we see Alice playing with her new son in the park — with nary a hint of an appearance by Freddy (sure, there does happen to be a group of creepy, jump-roping kids nearby, but the dude himself is nowhere to be seen). Given that uncharacteristic finality, fans could be forgiven for going into Freddy's Dead expecting a lengthy, enjoyably ridiculous explanation for how Freddy returned, but instead, they got... no explanation at all. The flick opens years after the events of The Dream Child, and Freddy is back, having killed pretty much every child on Elm Street. How is he back? Good question! He just... is, and the means by which it happened is such a glaring omission that some fans were left wondering if they somehow missed an entire movie.
