The Ending Of Leprechaun Explained
Leprechaun, the 1993 Irishsploitation comedy-horror guilty pleasure, starred Warwick Davis as the titular wee killer creature from the Emerald Isle and is currently available to stream for free on Peacock. The film's plot is fairly straightforward: ten years later after Dan O'Grady caught a leprechaun, stole his pot of gold, trapped him in a wooden crate, and then suffered a debilitating stroke before he could kill the creature, J.D. Redding (John Sanderford) and his teenage daughter Tory (Jennifer Aniston, in her first starring role in a movie) rent O'Grady's now-abandoned house. The malevolent leprechaun gets dimwitted house painter Ozzie (Mark Holton) to free him from the crate, and then he goes on a vengeful killing spree while he looks for his missing gold.
By the climax of the film, the leprechaun has gotten back all of his gold except one piece, which Ozzie swallowed. While the leprechaun prepares to kill Ozzie, Ozzie's friend Alex (Robert Gorman) takes a four-leaf clover — the leprechaun's kryptonite — attaches it to wad of gum, and shoots it into the leprechaun's mouth with a slingshot. The leprechaun starts to magically melt and falls down a well, briefly popping back up for one last "I want me gold" before Nathan (Ken Olandt) pushes him back down and blows the well up. The leprechaun seems to be dead, but in voiceover as we see the burning wreckage of the well, he says "I'll not rest 'til I have me gold, curse this well that me soul shall dwell, 'til I find me magic that breaks me spell." His soul was trapped down there for another 25 years.
It took a long time for Leprechaun to really explain what happened
The Leprechaun franchise is a proudly low-quality one that doesn't really concern itself with things like continuity or consistency between its eight films. Leprechaun 2 tells a totally new story that's entirely disconnected from the first movie, so don't go there looking for a resolution to the end of the first movie. The leprechauns are all different from movie to movie, with slightly different powers and personalities, until 2018's Leprechaun Returns, which is a direct sequel to the original. In Leprechaun Returns, Lila Redding (Taylor Spreitler), the daughter of Jennifer Aniston's character, goes to the house, where the leprechaun has been inadvertently restored to corporeal form. After getting his revenge on Ozzie, he goes on another killing spree while looking for his gold. He tells Lila that "if you leave a piece of a leprechaun intact, then you haven't killed the leprechaun," and once he got back the piece of gold that Ozzie swallowed — it was still inside of him after all these years — he was able to re-form his body. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it at least brings some closure to the loose end of the original Leprechaun.
As for the reason four-leaf clovers are toxic to the leprechaun, you'd have to ask Leprechaun's writer-director Mark Jones, because he totally made it up. It's not based in any sort of leprechaun folklore. It's probably as simple as "it would be fun if four-leaf clovers do to leprechauns what crosses and garlic do to vampires." The Leprechaun franchise is not one to overthink.