The snow gives away what happens at the end of Edward Scissorhands
Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands opened in December 1990 with a framing device most viewers half-forget by the time the credits roll: an elderly woman in a bedroom, telling a story to her granddaughter. The film cuts back to her at the very end. What she says there answers the only question the plot leaves open.
The old woman is Kim, played by Winona Ryder under prosthetics. She tells her granddaughter she never saw Edward again after that night, and that she believes he's still alive — because it never snowed in the neighbourhood before he arrived, and it has snowed every winter since. The final shot confirms it: Edward, unaged, carving ice in the attic.
Why the snow is the proof
The snow isn't weather. It's shavings. Edward carves ice sculptures with his blades and the debris drifts down over the suburb below — the same trick that produced the film's best-known scene, when he sculpts an angel in the Boggs' garden at Christmas and Kim dances in the falling flecks.
So a snowfall in a town that never had one is evidence that somebody is still up at the mansion, still carving.
"Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it," Kim tells her granddaughter in the 1990 film.
What happens in the last twenty minutes
- Jim dies — Edward kills him at the mansion after Jim attacks him, and Jim falls from a window.
- Kim lies — she goes down to the mob outside and tells them Edward and Jim killed each other when the roof came down, holding up a severed scissorhand as proof.
- The neighbours buy it — they go home, and Edward is left alone in the house for good.
- The frame closes — decades later, Kim explains why she never went back up: she'd rather he remembered her young.
Why doesn't she just go and see him?
That's the granddaughter's question too, and Kim's answer is the reason the film ends where it does. Edward is artificial and doesn't age. Kim did. She keeps the distance deliberately, which is also what keeps her account of him unverifiable — she believes he's alive rather than knowing it. The audience gets the confirmation she doesn't, in the closing shot of Edward at work with the ice.
Where it was shot
The suburb is real: a cul-de-sac in Lutz, Florida, where the production repainted around 50 houses in pastels and stripped the gardens. The mansion exterior was built on a nearby site. The film ran 105 minutes and earned one Academy Award nomination — Best Makeup, for Ve Neill and Stan Winston, who built the hands.
Fun fact: Johnny Depp has fewer than 20 lines of dialogue in the whole film.