"Edward Scissorhands" (1990), directed by Tim Burton, follows an artificial man with blades for hands who is taken in by a suburban family after living alone in a gothic mansion. The film ends with Edward killing his creator's cruel look-alike-chasing attacker in self-defense, retreating permanently to his mansion, and living out his life alone while the woman he loved, Kim, tells her grandchildren his story decades later. Edward was built by an inventor (played by Vincent Price) who died before finishing him, leaving him with scissor blades instead of hands. Avon saleswoman Peg Boggs finds him isolated in the mansion above the town and brings him home to live with her family, setting up the clash between his strange gentleness and the suburban community's curiosity, affection, and eventual fear.
Table of Contents
- Who Is Edward and Why Does He Have Scissors for Hands?
- How Does the Suburb React to Edward?
- What Happens Between Edward and Kim?
- What Happens in the Final Confrontation and How Does the Film End?
- What Does the Ending Mean?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Is Edward and Why Does He Have Scissors for Hands?
Edward is an android created by an elderly inventor in a mansion overlooking a pastel suburban town. The inventor gave him an artificial heart, memory, and personality, but died of a heart attack before he could replace Edward's blade-tipped prototype hands with real ones. Edward is left permanently unfinished, able to feel and think like a person but unable to hold anything without risking injury to himself or others. He survives alone in the mansion for years after his creator's death, his only skill an uncanny talent for topiary, which he carves into the mansion's overgrown garden.
Peg Boggs, going door to door selling Avon products, climbs the hill to the house and discovers him. Seeing a lonely, harmless figure rather than a threat, she invites him to live with her family. His scissor hands are the film's central metaphor: they let him create (hedge sculptures, hairstyles, ice sculptures) and destroy (he cuts his own face without meaning to, and he can never safely touch another person). Every relationship he forms in the suburb is shaped by that contradiction.
How Does the Suburb React to Edward?
At first, Edward is a sensation. The Boggs' neighbors treat him as a novelty, inviting him into their homes, and he becomes genuinely useful: he trims hedges into fantastical shapes, cuts the neighborhood dogs' fur into elaborate styles, and eventually cuts human hair, becoming briefly popular as an unlicensed stylist. The town's initial warmth comes from fascination and from what he can do for them, not from understanding who he is.
That warmth curdles once Edward stops being convenient. A neighbor, Joyce, tries to seduce him and falsely accuses him of attacking her when he resists; he's blamed for a bank-robbery scheme set up by Kim's boyfriend, Jim, that goes wrong; and a Christmas Eve accident — Edward accidentally cuts Kim's younger brother's hand while carving an ice sculpture — convinces the neighbors he's dangerous, even though it was unintentional. The film uses this arc to show how a community's acceptance is conditional. Edward is embraced only as long as he performs a role — entertainer, handyman, curiosity — and discarded the moment he becomes inconvenient or frightening, regardless of his intentions.
What Happens Between Edward and Kim?
Kim Boggs, Peg's teenage daughter, is Edward's emotional center. She's initially wary and even cruel to him — she manipulates him into helping Jim and his friends break into a house, which leads to Edward being falsely blamed for burglary — but she grows to care for him as she sees his gentleness and the way the town mistreats him. Their bond deepens through small, careful gestures, since Edward can never actually hold her without hurting her.
The closest they share to physical affection is an ice-sculpture scene where he carves a flying angel out of a snow-covered block while she dances beneath the falling ice shavings, snow that, in the film's internal logic, keeps falling over the town years afterward. Kim ultimately chooses Edward's safety over her relationship with Jim and over her own comfort in the community. Her protection of him in the final confrontation, and her decision to let the town believe he died, is the act that lets him survive.
What Happens in the Final Confrontation and How Does the Film End?
After the Christmas Eve ice-sculpting accident, a mob forms, believing Edward attacked the boy on purpose. Jim, Kim's boyfriend, chases Edward back to the mansion intending to kill him, having already shown he'll exploit and endanger Edward for his own gain. In the struggle, Edward kills Jim in self-defense inside the mansion as Jim tries to stop him from escaping.
Kim arrives, finds them, and helps Edward complete the deception that saves his life: she tells the mob and later the police that both Edward and Jim died in the mansion, allowing Edward to remain hidden there, safe from the town, instead of being hunted down or handed over to authorities. The film closes in the present-day frame that opens it: an elderly Kim tells her granddaughter the story as snow falls outside. The snow is explained as coming from Edward, who is revealed to still be alive in the mansion decades later, carving ice sculptures whose shavings drift down over the town as snow. Kim chose never to see him again, preserving the idea of him and protecting both of them, while he remains alone, immortal in effect since he was never designed to age, sustained by the one memory of their time together.
What Does the Ending Mean?
The ending frames Edward's isolation as a form of safekeeping rather than punishment. The town could only tolerate him as either a useful novelty or a villain; it had no framework for someone who was simply different and harmless. Returning him permanently to the mansion removes him from a community that was never going to accept him on his own terms.
The falling snow ties Edward's art directly to Kim's ongoing life: he's still creating, still thinking of her, even in total separation. It reframes the film's fairy-tale structure — the grandmother narrating to a child — as deliberately mythic, turning Edward from a literal character into a legend the town tells itself, softening a story that was, underneath, about exclusion and mob fear. The film never has Edward "fixed" with real hands or integrated fully into the suburb, and that absence is the point. His difference isn't a problem to solve; it's the reason he can't stay, and the ending accepts that without pretending it's a happy resolution in the ordinary sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Edward actually die at the end of the movie?
No. The framing story makes clear he survives alone in the mansion; the town simply believes he died because Kim told them so to protect him.
Why did Edward kill Jim?
Jim attacked Edward inside the mansion intending to kill him after the ice-sculpting accident turned the town against Edward; Edward's scissor hands caused Jim's death during that struggle, in self-defense.
Why can't Edward and Kim be together?
His blade hands make physical closeness dangerous, and the town's rejection of him makes any ordinary life together with her impossible, which is why Kim chooses to protect him from a distance instead.