From the Archives: There’s Something Inside of Me!
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge may be the gayest slasher movie ever made
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰ ½
Romance: ✰✰ ½
Sex: ✰✰
Storytelling: ✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰
We’re so excited to announce that The Yearning is a Community Partner for NewFest 2024! We’ll be co-presenting the Shorts: Women’s Night Out on October 12th and the feature Queens of Drama on October 14th.
Grab a discounted ticket with our code NF36TYNDISC4 and come hang out with us!
Spoiler? I hardly know her!
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
It’s 1985, and Jesse Walsh just got a fresh set of four inch nails. Well, knives. If that sounds like your own personal nightmare, then–you’re not alone. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is about those nighttime terrors we all wish we could forget. Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), the titular villain of the multi-movie franchise, tortures his victims by haunting and killing them in their dreams. If you’re not familiar, Krueger’s origin story is that he was once a serial killer of children. The parents of his victims tracked him down and killed him by setting him on fire in a boiler room. Now resurrected as a brutally burned supernatural dream demon, he seeks revenge on the children of his victims. Hello, Doctor? I think someone’s got a case of mommy issues?
To watch Freddy’s Revenge, I cozied up in my living room, lit candles, drew the shades, pretended it was a chilly fall day, and cued up some seasonally appropriate horror. I was transported to the fictional suburb of Springwood, Ohio. Jesse’s family has moved into the infamous Elm Street house where Kreuger’s story began. Jesse’s just a regular teen moving into his regular room in his regular town–until he starts waking up at night, dripping in sweat and scared out of his mind.
The queer subtextual lore of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge precedes itself, and so I was primed to look for barbarous, violent yearning wherever I could find it. And it doesn’t take long. In his nightmares, something–or someone–is luring Jesse (Mark Patton) to the basement of his home. Towards his furnace. (It's Freddy.) Here’s where it gets interesting: Freddy doesn’t want to kill Jesse. Jesse is still a target, yes, but of another variety. He wants Jesse to kill for him.
As Jesse calls for help from his dad, still locked in his nightmare world, he turns and runs directly into Freddy’s mangled face, practically kissing him. “Daddy can’t help you now,” Freddy whispers, tracing one of his knife fingers gently across Jesse’s lips. According to an interview done with Patton in 2016, this was a tamer version of what Englund wanted the scene to be. “Robert asked if he could put the blade inside my mouth,” Patton recalled to Buzzfeed News. But as a young, closeted actor, Patton wasn’t comfortable, and was grateful to have the action beats of the scene pulled back. The scene is, however, still so full of sexual tension. Slowly, quietly, Freddy continues: “I need you, Jesse. We’ve got special work to do here. You’ve got the body…I’ve got the brain.”
This first pas de deux initiates an intimacy between Freddy and Jesse that carries throughout the entire film and speaks to what eventually made it into a queer cult classic. But Freddy isn’t the only rotten apple of Jesse’s eye–while he has a crush on Lisa (Kim Myers), a perfectly palatable girl next door, he seems far closer to his friend Grady (Robert Rusler). Grady and Jesse wrestle each other to the ground during gym class, Grady pantsing him in the process. While doing planks as punishment, Grady reports that sadistic discipline is kind of Coach Schneider’s thing: “He gets his rocks off like this. Hangs around queer S&M joints downtown. He likes pretty boys like you.” Um, Grady, do you have something to share with the class? Nearly every scene at their high school takes place in the boys’ locker room, with lots of shots of Jesse in his underwear or Grady fixing his mullet in the mirror.
These moments foreshadow a most iconic return to the locker room. And naturally, Freddy has a hand (wink) in it. In an attempt to keep himself awake and avoid Freddy’s nightmares, Jesse begins wandering the streets at night. And he wanders right into a proper ‘80s gay S&M bar, where he’s caught by a leather-vested Coach Schneider. In a hazy, confusing sequence that could be a dream or reality, Schneider takes Jesse back to the school gymnasium and forces him to run laps as punishment. While Jesse showers, exhausted from his workout, some haunted jump ropes string Schneider up to the gym showers and strip him naked. As he cries out for help, some flying gym towels spank him viciously on the ass. It’s incredible. Then, Freddy takes hold of Jesse, and does what Freddy does.
Jesse has a connection with Krueger, even as he fights it and tries to turn towards his crush Lisa. At a pool party, Jesse and Lisa are finally making out when Freddy’s disgusting tongue protrudes from Jesse’s mouth. Horrified, he flees to Grady’s house, where Grady is tucked into bed (under a leather comforter??). “There’s something inside of me. Something is trying to get inside my body!” Talk about gay panic! Grady retorts, “Yeah, and she’s female, and she’s waiting for you in the cabana. And you wanna sleep with me.” 😏 There are some incredible practical effects in this scene that I would argue make Freddy’s Revenge a great double feature to pair with The Substance. (If you want to see what I mean, watch this clip.)
An unfortunate cliff note in this juicy slasher story is the negative impact it had on our scream king. As early critics of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge began to comment on its homoerotic undertones shortly after the movie's release, Director Jack Sholder claimed to not be aware of the connotations of the film and screenwriter David Chaskin initially blamed Patton's portrayal of Jesse for this interpretation. Since then, Mark Patton has opened up about how damaging this was for him as a young closeted actor, at both the start of his career and the AIDS pandemic. He felt typecast and taken advantage of by the filmmakers. Sholder and Chaskin cast him as Jesse after Patton played a queer teen in a popular Broadway show, seemingly capitalizing on his would-be queerness by molding genre elements around a big cultural firestarter like LGBTQ+ identity. In the 2010 documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, Chaskin finally acknowledged that he was responsible for the film's deliberate gay themes, utilizing the moral panic of queerness at the time to amplify the horror and sexual angst of adolescence. (He offered Mark a crappy public apology in 2016.)
The movie is full of spectacle; impressive practical gore and body horror effects and strong performances by Patton, Rusler, Myers and Robert Englund. While there are many B plot beats that don’t work or make much sense, the film moves right along in that fun, twisted way that only frequently spewing blood and distorted villainous laughter can. It’s a really fun watch if you have the stomach for it!
You can stream A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge on Max.
