Plot
A 96 year old woman describes to her great-granddaughter where snow comes from, by telling her the story of a young man named Edward (Johnny Depp), who has scissors for hands, the creation of an inventor (Vincent Price). The inventor's final result was a humanlike young boy who had everything except for hands, but the inventor had a heart attack and died while in the act of giving a pair of real hands to Edward, leaving him "unfinished" forever.
Many years after Edward was created, local Avon saleswoman Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest) visits the Gothic mansion on the hill where Edward lives. There, she finds Edward alone, and decides to take him to her home. Edward becomes friends with Peg's young son Kevin (Robert Oliveri) and her husband Bill (Alan Arkin). He later falls in love with the Boggs' teenage daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder).
Peg's neighbors are impressed by Edward's adept hedge-trimming and hair-cutting skills (both of which he does with his scissor-hands), but two of the townspeople, a religious fanatic named Esmeralda (O-Lan Jones) and Kim's boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), immediately dislike him. Joyce (Kathy Baker), a housewife in the neighborhood, suggests that Edward open a hair-cutting salon with her. While examining a proposed site, she attempts to seduce him in the back room, causing Edward to leave in a state of panic.
Wanting money for a van, Jim takes advantage of Edward's ability to pick locks, and breaks into his parents' house. The burglar alarm sounds and everyone except Edward escapes, despite Kim's angry insistence that they return for him. Edward is arrested and released when a psychological examination reveals that his isolation allowed him to live without a sense of reality and common sense. Meanwhile, infuriated by Edward's rejection, Joyce exacts revenge by claiming that he tried to "rape" her. This, added to the "break-in", causes many of the neighbors to question his personality and ruin his popular reputation. During the Christmas season, Edward is feared by almost everyone around him except the Boggs family, resulting in him and the family becoming outcasts.
While the family is setting up Christmas decorations, Edward creates an angel ice sculpture. The shavings create an effect of falling snow, which Kim dances under. Jim calls out to Kim, distracting her, and Edward accidentally cuts her hand. Jim says that Edward had intentionally harmed her and attacks him. Edward runs away, tearing the clothes Peg gave him, and wanders the neighborhood in a rage. Kim, fed up with Jim's behavior towards Edward, breaks up with him and he goes to his friend's van to get drunk. While Peg and Bill search for Edward, he returns and Kim greets him with a hug. When Kevin is almost run over by Jim's drunk friend, Edward pushes him out of the way, but cuts his face, causing witnesses to think he was attacking him. When the police arrive, Edward flees to his hilltop mansion and the worried and concerned neighbors follow.
Kim runs to the mansion and reunites with Edward. Jim follows them and brutally attacks Edward, who does not retaliate until Jim slaps and pushes Kim. Edward stabs Jim in the stomach and pushes him away, causing him to fall out of a window to his death. Kim confesses her love for Edward and shares a kiss with him as they say goodbye. Returning downstairs, Kim lies to the townspeople saying that Edward and Jim killed each other in the fight. She tells them that the roof caved in on them and shows them a disembodied scissor-hand similar to Edward's. Shocked at this, the neighbors return to their homes with Joyce having a guilty look on her face before leaving feeling it was all her fault for lying about Edward causing the whole neighborhood to hate him.
The elderly woman (now revealed to be Kim in her old age) finishes telling her great-granddaughter the story, saying that she never saw Edward again. She chose not to visit him because she wanted him to remember her the way she was in her youth. She also reveals that Edward is still alive, seemingly immortal since he is artificial and can never age, and he "creates snow" from his ice sculptures, which falls upon the neighborhood below. She tells her granddaughter that "Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it." While Edward creates more ice sculptures, a flashback of a young Kim is shown dancing under the snow falling from the angel ice sculpture above her.
Read more about this topic: Edward Scissorhands
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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