“A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” is the best sequel to the series

Since 1985, Jack Sholder’s Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was an important part of queer horror. There are few horror fans left who haven’t heard about the sequel’s homoerotic themes. As David Chaskin has written, homoeroticism was the whole point, so to speak. I wasn’t born then, but I’m inclined to think that it certainly didn’t register with some viewers at the time. From a modern perspective, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is widely known as the gay Nightmare on Elm Street. What fascinates me just as much, if not more, than the queer undertones is how unconventional this horror sequel is. Compared to the franchise as a whole, Freddy’s Revenge increases its kitsch and quietly turns out to be possibly the best sequel in the series.

Hollywood always goes to Hollywood, that is, to the first nightmare was a huge success, and the executives at New Line naturally demanded a sequel. While Leslie Bohem’s original pitch is well known – his sequel was a Rosemary’s Baby Homage with Freddy controlling a fetus – the origins of David Chaskin’s approach were, at least to me, less clear. When I Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge This month, as part of my annual Pride Month tradition, I focused less on the queer elements and more on how weird (and lovable) the entire film was.

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The cold open with Freddy driving a school bus is cosmic horror at its finest. The climax is a strange, incredulous and liminal descent into the machinations of Freddy’s powers that is never adequately explained. It continues, especially with Dream WarriorRobert Englund’s Freddy became the star of the show, but in Freddy’s RevengeEven though Freddy is first in the title itself, he barely appears. There are also these strangely docile nightmare dogs. They never appear again, but I love them. A lot.

In the horror heavyweights of the 1980s, it was usually the killers themselves who were the main attraction. When Jason Voorhees removed his mask in Friday the 13th Part IIIthere was no turning back. The human players had not been particularly central before, but from this point on the series became a revolving door of teenage slaughter. Jason was the series’ selling point. Michael Myers, who was supposedly in Halloween IIalso got some titles in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. From that point on, the story was his. Michael was more important than anything else. It’s IP horror at its best and its worst, a profit-driven incentive to promote slasher killers at the expense of what made the original film in a series successful.

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Still, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is not Freddy’s story, but Jesse’s. Mark Patton deserves a lot of credit. Never Sleep Again: The Legacy of Elm StreetScreenwriter David Chaskin admits that the gay undertones were both intentional and his own, although they came at the expense of Patton’s well-being. Patton quit acting shortly after the role, and I encourage anyone interested to watch it. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street for further insights.

It’s messy. Patton and Chaskin are no longer on good terms, and Patton takes particular exception to the use of “subtext.” And, well, he’s not wrong. Chaskin has blamed Patton at various times, suggesting that his performance, not the script, enhanced the queer elements, but at its core Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a very gay film. Rather than revisit the actual damage the film did to those involved, I would like to focus on its role as a lucrative horror film sequel that defied convention in the best possible way.

Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors is often hailed as the best sequel in the series (and Wes Craven often gets too much credit – he admits that his script was radically rewritten), but it also represents the point of no return. Like Zombie Jason or The Cult of Thorn, Dream Warrior Was nightmare writes itself into a corner that the series will never escape from. While horror fans love the crazy dream logic and the inventive murders, the latter entries, aside from Freddy, have almost nothing in common with their predecessors.

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Wes Craven’s original was a horror film full of fear. Misleading, irresponsible parents, a culture of disdain – the general idea that young adults are coming of age in a world systematically designed to kill them. And nobody cared. Good intentions meant death. Freddy’s Revenge is the only sequel that cleverly captures that fear. And yes, that fear has its roots in an AIDS epidemic and the general idea that homosexuality means death, but it affects everyone involved. Dream Warrior While attempting to combat an epidemic of teen suicides, it regularly undermines itself with the next extravagant demonstration of Freddy’s power.

Tina and Glen die in a classic way in Craven’s original. They are remarkable and creative murders, but they are never fun. Conversely Dream Warrior has a lot of fun – maybe a little too much – killing off its main characters. Angst has been eschewed in favor of more Freddy, who is now a conventional villain who would only distance himself more and more from the hegemonic terror from which he was originally born.

But the cultural decline that fuels fears in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge makes it all the more effective. Little bouts of parental negligence or Jesse’s inability to trust anyone hurt more than Freddy beating a secret sports coach to death. The deaths in Freddy’s Revenge are rare and never particularly graphic, but they are among the most effective in the series because they serve a purpose that goes beyond satisfying the audience’s basic needs – they are more than prescribed horror cliches.

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Freddy’s Revenge is about teenagers. Teenagers trying to make sense of the world and fight the nightmares no one believes they have. Teenagers sentenced to death because their father made a great offer on a house on Elm Street, regardless of whether there were murders in the past or not. The real threat is the world and its oppressive culture, not Freddy. That makes for less driving genre films, but it also has a much more lasting and poignant effect. Think of it this way – just two nightmare Movies have seriously scared me, and it’s just the first two.

The series would get bigger and crazier (and more profitable), so the way forward that Nightmare on Elm Street 2 – The Big Dream: Freddy’s Revenge was never sustainable. The film defied convention. While most horror films looked outward, Freddy’s Revenge instead, it looked inward. It clearly tapped into adolescent (and queer) anxieties and challenged them in nightmarish, violent ways. The film is nightmarish, horrific, and deeply felt. In other words, it transcends its legacy not just as that one gay sequel, but possibly the best sequel in the series. Freddy would never seek revenge in that way again. In the decades since, that has happened to few horror sequels.