Freddy’s Revenge: A Nightmare On Elm Street II (1985)

A Nightmare on Elm Street is now firmly established as one of modern horror’s urban legends. The sequel to Wes Craven’s all-time classic horror film was crafted intentionally as a “gay film”. There may well be some truth to this, especially after the scriptwriter David Chaskin decades later has spoken about the films undertones and deliberate “gay subtext”.

It appears as though the scriptwriter did indeed inject a rather obvious gay undercurrent. It also seems as though it was an unspoken secret among some of the film’s crew and that the director Jack Sholder played it dead straight without a clue about the gay references.

Overtly the film is about Freddy tormenting a young teenaged boy who moves into the unfortunate home of the family that he had so troubled in the original movie. Jessie (played by Mark Patton) is similarly tormented by recurring nightmares through which Freddy is attempting to possess his body and use him as a pawn to carry out his killings.
The film is a significant departure from the norm in that the “final girl” part is played by a young man who is shown in half the movie in the minimum of clothing due to the “heat” generated by Freddy Krueger’s evil. Usually, the domain of a young woman and Freddy’s Revenge tears up the “rule book” for slasher films this time around.

The storyline itself has been perceived as a young man struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. It adds fuel to the argument that Mark Patton happened to be a gay actor and his portrayal of Jessie in the movie is mannered, fit that mould intentionally or not. In the film, Jessie struggles to control this ugly urge growing within him in the form of Freddy, threatening to come out from within and take total control. He struggles to stop Freddy from taking power. Still, it’s a losing battle and Freddy soon “comes out,” causing havoc, death and destruction, not unlike the devastation being caused in 1985 by a virus that was called the “gay virus” and was mowing down scores of young men like a plague in the mid-80s.

Certain scenes also suggest a strong gay undercurrent to the film. The banter between Jessie and his friend about Gay S&M clubs that their coach frequents looking for fine young men somehow results in the two young men jostling each other to the ground. Jessie momentarily loses his tracksuit bottom, revealing a fine male rump for the audience to get a good look!

The primary “gay” scene is when Jessie, in one of his dreams, enters a gay leather bar frequented by many of the “New Romantics” of the 80s and there he is met by his sports coach in full leather regalia. Soon coach has Jessie running laps at the gym at night while he has some lustful thoughts of his own. Moments later, while a naked Jessie is in the shower, the coach is attacked by an unseen force, stripped naked and then thrashed on his buttocks by some demonically possessed towels before being left tied up to the showers; butt naked and very dead! Jessie watches all this in horror, the tennis balls popping out of their cans and all sorts of things exploding mirroring his exploding desires?

Some have read into this scene of the tennis ball cans exploding the way they do as a simulation of his sexual urges. How much of this is intentional or perhaps just reading into the film for the “shoe to fit Cinderella forcibly”. That remains a matter of debate. However, the scriptwriter suggesting that he wrote the movie with a specifically gay orientation provides grounds for imagination wandering furtively.

Meanwhile, as a horror film, the movie barely holds interest. There is no sense of building tension or danger as the film lumbers to its admittedly fun climax with Freddy/Jessie unleashing the monster within to murderous effect. Jessie’s girl Kim Meyers (a Meryl Street lookalike) is having a party for what looks like the entire high school, and Freddy turns up uninvited.

Some of the movie’s effects and set pieces are fun, especially considering this was the Pre-CGI era in which masters like Dick Smith, Rob Bottin and Tom Savini were simply brilliant with their cutting edge nightmares coming to celluloid reality.

If the theory does hold, it goes along the lines that Freddy represents the ugly “gay” sexuality. A struggle that is tormenting our young male protagonist who is battling with himself to suppress this terrible urge somehow but is somehow losing the battle as Freddy literally “comes out” of his body.

It absolutely cannot be denied that one way or another, intentional or not, Freddy’s Revenge is indeed laden with a queer undercurrent which is a dominant part of the films real battle between good and evil.

It may be a coincidence that Mark Patton happened to have turned out to be gay, but there are enough scenes littered through the movie that suggests the whole ‘discussion” has not been a baseless one, far from it.