Horror Homos/ A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge at Chapeltown Picture House
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Dubbed “the gayest horror film ever made”, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge screens at Chapeltown Picture House this June. The screening is organised by LGBTQ podcast Horror Homos and proceeds from the event will go to the Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity.
Released just a year after Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street, director Jack Sholder’s 1985 sequel has earned a cult following thanks in part to the homoerotic undercurrent that flows beneath the relationship between Robert Englund’s knife-fingered villain Freddy Krueger and male lead Jesse Walse, played by Mark Patton.
While the film has since been reclaimed as a queer classic, Patton, a gay man told to keep his sexuality a secret, never saw his career properly recover following his experience on Freddy’s Revenge. Indeed, the actor starred in the 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street in which he detailed how he believes he was hung out to dry, with the film’s queerness laid entirely on his shoulders, despite its clear presence in the writing and direction.
While this controversy and the reception that greeted a film released in the middle of the AIDS epidemic are undoubtedly integral to its history, today Freddy’s Revenge is widely celebrated, especially by the LGBTQ horror crowd. This Horror Homos screening aims to provide a fun, judgement-free space to indulge in that celebration — 80s dress code encouraged.
