Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

How did I find this movie? The answer may surprise you.

Overview: Jessie moves into Elm Street with his family and begins to have horrific nightmares about Freddy Krueger, as he slowly comes forth from the dream world and into Jessie’s life.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street, I was ok with. It has some decent scares and special effects, and is considered a horror classic for a reason. I think at least in the slasher flicks genre. But after watching the original, og Freddy Krueger , I had no desire to see any of the sequels. They tend to fall in the “this was a huge hit so we are going to milk it for as long as we can” and it shows. I mean, when you watch Friday the 13th 8: Jason in Space, it tends to become campy instead of creepy. Remakes are the same vein, the producers and directors are so dedicated to make this aesthetically modern and scary, that they forget to add in decent writing to the mix. So seeing horror sequels or remakes never even cross my mind or interest.

But then I heard about how gay this movie is.

And it was intriguing.

I first heard about this movie while watching a youtube video analysis called “Monsters in the Closet- A History of LGBT Representation in Horror Cinema” (which it a very interesting watch too btw, totally recommend it). The video basically talks about the 3 ways the LGBT+ community is shown in horror series: Subtext, White-People Fears, and Villains. But when it got to Freddy’s Revenge, it pointed out how extremely obvious it was in gay subtext, which the writers/directors/cast had to deny it for years just so they can make sure the film was made.

It’s sort of hard to talk about what happened in this movie without talking about the gay subtext because I went into this movie to deliberately watch it as a gay horror film, trying to see and find the instances littered all over.

I mean, Freddy at one point put his finger to Jessie’s lips, caressed his hard, then grabbing the front of Jessie’s shirt and pushed him into a wall, I didn’t really need a magnifying class to find the gayness.

It goes even deeper when you can watch this film through the lense of “Jessie is battling through his internalized homophobia over the thought of being gay/bi and Freddy capitalizes on that to reek havoc on the town” (which is explained in much better HERE HERE)

Overall: yeah I recommend it. Honestly the production value of special effects and scares matched the first one pretty well so as a horror film. The actors were decent, the pacing was fine. It’s a passable and entertaining movie. But when you throw in the themes of being gay and homophobia (which no matter how you see it, the movie was written with those ideas in mind) it just makes it all the more interesting. Because I have never seen a horror movie quite like this before, and it is opening up a whole new world for me.