A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was the hit sequel to Wes Craven’s classic original, helping lay the template for the many Elm Street films that followed. But these days, Freddy’s Revenge is primarily known among horror aficionados as a bizarrely homoerotic movie. You can be sure people also noticed back in 1985, too, as it was called “the gayest horror film ever” by gay magazine The Advocate. And now, a new documentary called Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street goes into what actually happened during the pic’s production and how it affected the life of its star Mark Patton.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, the gay ‘subtext’ is pretty much just text. The lead is Jesse, who the film strongly, repeatedly and unsubtly insinuates is a repressed gay man. There’s a scene where he meets his teacher at a leather bar, he spends much of the movie half-clothed, the plot concerns Freddy’s attempts to take over his body (causing Jesse to yell “he’s inside me and he wants to take me again!”), he ends up in his friend’s bedroom terrified that “something is trying to get inside my body” and there’s a homoerotic scene where Freddy caresses Jesse’s lips with his blades. Adding another layer to this is that Mark Patton, who plays Jesse, is gay himself (though was in the closet at the time of filming).
For years, the production team denied that there was any intentional gay subtext to the movie, but in 2010, screenwriter David Chaskin admitted that he wanted to exploit the audience’s homophobia to horrify them. The whole affair might have just gone down as a weird chapter in horror history, but Patton has since explained that he felt exploited during the production of the movie, with the emotional stress of making it causing him to quit the industry altogether.
The documentary will explore the impact the film had on Patton’s life, showing him confronting the Freddy’s Revenge cast and crew for the first time. We’ll see chats with co-stars Robert Rusler, Kim Myers and Clu Gulager, as well as one with Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund. It’s already been awarded the title of LGBTQ Documentary of the Year by the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics and picked up rave reviews, and will be out digitally on March 3rd.
Personally, as someone who’s always been curious about what exactly happened during production of A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, I can’t wait to check it out.