Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is Ragingly Queer In the Best Possible Way

Jack Sholder's follow-up to Wes Craven's classic is incredibly gay. That's why it's so great!

For my massive upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror, I am trying to write about every narrative American movie about filmmaking. That’s one hundred years of a particularly fertile and fascinating corner of the movie world. 

That’s why it has taken me so long to finish the book. It’s such a massive undertaking that it could prove impossible unless I took steps to make it manageable. 

For the book, I cover a mesmerizing cross-section of important and essential American documentaries, but there’s no way I could cover everything, or even half of everything, or even a third, for that matter, so I had to be selective. 

My documentary choices reflect my long-term fascination with trash culture and failure and my enduring fixation with larger-than-life show-business hustlers. 

I also write about a lot of spooky stuff for the book because I love horror. I think it’s great. I don’t think that it makes people violent or nihilistic. Haters who say that fright flicks and terror tales warp viewers’ minds and lead to real-life violence should all be stabbed in the face repeatedly until they bleed out.

The four hundred and thirty-seven movies covered in The Fractured Mirror include multiple documentaries about how The Hidden director Jack Sholder’s controversial 1985 sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street was pilloried for being too gay during its release at the height of the AIDS crisis and smack dab in the middle of the Reagan decade before being embraced later for the very qualities it was criticized for before. 

The conventional wisdom used to be that Nightmare on Elm Street 2 was unrelentingly gay, and that’s why it sucked and ruined the franchise in its infancy. Now, the conventional wisdom is that Nightmare on Elm Street is unrelentingly gay, and that’s why it’s so awesome and ripe for revisiting.

I wrote up 2019’s Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street for The Fractured Mirror. I followed it up by watching and writing about the two hundred and forty minute long 2010 monolith Never Sleeps Again, which covers all the movies, the reboot, and the crossover. 

Never Sleep Again’s discussion of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is dominated by talk of its rampant, notorious homoeroticism and how it hurt the film at the time of its release with critics and audiences but led to it being reexamined and celebrated as an accidental queer milestone. 

When star Mark Patton asked the filmmakers what the movie was about, they could have accurately, if creepily, answered, “It’s about Freddy Krueger as the nightmarish manifestation of your torment about your barely closeted homosexuality, and how it threatens to destroy everything your character loves.” 

It is never explicitly established that Jesse Walsh, the perpetually perspiring, oft-unclad Twink Patton plays here, is gay. It’s not necessary. The several thousand hints the movie gives regarding Jesse’s sexual orientation are enough of a giveaway. 

As Scream, Queen recounts, the lead role in a sequel to one of the all-time great horror films defined and ruined Patton’s film career because its gayness was attributed to him rather than the screenplay or the direction. 

It almost feels like the movie played a cruel prank on its lead actor by making homosexuality so central to its storytelling and his character at a time when being out and proud was not accepted in horror movies or American life. 

The filmmakers outed Patton by making him the face and wiggling butt of a movie known primarily for its gayness. If this gayness was not intentional on some level, then Nightmare on Elm Street represents one of the great “Whoopsies” in all of horror history because this film is gayer than some gay pornography. It’s too gay for some gay people. Nearly four decades later, we’ve still only partially processed the film’s gayness. 

Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Revenge is legendary for its gayness, yet my first response is that conventional wisdom dramatically understates the film’s queerness, both in the sense of being very gay and also very strange. 

Freddy’s Revenge casts Patton as a teenager cursed to move into the murder house previously inhabited by Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), the plucky heroine of the original film. 

His old man snapped it up because, like all murder houses in horror movies, this one is still lousy with evil and bad mojo. Nancy might not still live there, but it remains extremely murder-y. 

Jesse is just trying to survive the gauntlet of high school hell as a closeted gay teenager in a world where traditional gender roles are strictly enforced. His life is one long panic attack even before he begins having visions in his dreams of a knife-gloved maniac with a weakness for sweaters, fedoras, and child murder, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund).

As Jesse blurts in one of the film’s many double entendres, a man wants to get inside him and own him, something he finds utterly terrifying and a little bit exciting. Freddy Krueger was still a serious figure of fright when Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was released.

He hadn’t yet devolved into a gory insult comic doing crowd work, prop comedy, and one-liners. He doesn’t even say “bitch” here. Englund spends much of the film ungloved since he uses it to control Jesse and force him to continue his reign of terror. 

Patton, in turn, spends much of the movie shirtless, covered in sweat, clad in deeply unflattering tighty-whities, and involved in some manner of homoerotic tableau, many involving showering, the gym, and a gym teacher who is first inundated with balls before having his bare ass spanked and dying a horrific death. 

Sholder, who followed up Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge with the 1987 science fiction cult classic The Hidden, retains the casual surrealism of Wes Craven’s original. The kills favor quality over quantity and stomach-churning practical effects over computer wizardry. 

Sholder keeps us perpetually off-balance by giving even the most mundane scenes the unsettling air of a bad dream. Freddy Krueger is an atypical slasher in that his world is the world of dreams and dark fantasy. He gets a lot of mileage from his patented razor glove, but his game is more psychological than physical. 

Freddy fucks with Jesse’s body and his mind. The famous monster of Filmland is the dark, malevolent id that Jesse represses to survive in a world that is hostile to his existence and his sexual orientation. 

Giving the tortured protagonist a female love interest in gorgeous classmate Lisa Webber (Kim Myers) only makes the film gayer. 

So, do a lot of ladies come into this bar?

In the history of arbitrary love interests, few love interests have conveyed less love and interest in one another than Patton and Myers do here. As the title of the crowd-pleasing documentary about Patton’s surreal journey through the weird world of queer horror suggests, Patton occupies a role generally inhabited by women, or rather final girls, in movies. 

Scream, Queen’s title is also appropriate in that Patton spends a LOT of time screaming very loudly. John Travolta’s character in Blow Out would have loved him. 

Jesse is the final girl tormented by the villain. Myers is the hero who must save him from a unique external threat and his demons. 

Jesse and Lisa are patently unconvincing as romantic partners. Lisa cares deeply for Jesse, but it’s a platonic love born of friendship rather than anything sexual or romantic. 

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge has aged in a fascinating way, but there are sequences that were wrong then and are even worse today. 

I am referring to the notorious pool party set piece in which Freddy flagrantly flaunts the series' logic by leaving the dream world to menace a pool party. 

Just because horror icons like Vincent Price appeared in 1960s beach party movies doesn’t mean that Nightmare on Elm Street should travel in the direction of How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.  

There’s never been a horror sequel like Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. It occupies a peculiar and unique place within the world of slasher movies and queer film. 

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is transcendently queer in both its sexual politics and its exhilarating, dreamy strangeness.