VIDEO: Your Definitive Guide to the Gayness of Nightmare on Elm Street 2
Somehow this all escaped me as a 12-year-old horror viewer and in the intervening decades since its mythology has burrowed its way into pop culture, but: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is just about the gayest mainstream film of the '80s. Hell, not "just about" -- it is, as the new documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy illustrates in specific, awesome detail. Click through for the proof in a mildly NSFW excerpt.
Sure, the screenwriter calls it "subtext," and director Jack Sholder deflects a few of the more overt references (suggestive dance scenes, New Line president Bob Shaye as a frigging leather-clad bartender) as clues that came to him later, but hearing everyone from Robert Englund to gleefully out leading man Mark Patton discuss what they pulled off on the studio dime is nothing short of engrossing. "All I can say is were were all incredibly naive," one executive says. "Or all incredibly, latently gay. I'm not sure which." If this is what we all have to look forward to in the sequel to this year's turgid reboot, let's get that thing going already.
[via Vulture]
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Comments
I've never screened any of these films. Never had a desire. Until now.
Now the scene of Freddie's hand rising in the girl's bathtub, about to evicerate her vagina, takes on a new meaning.
That was fascinating. As a closeted teen of the 80's I noticed the undertones in the Shower scene (which would explain my attraction to Marshall Bell, and of course, chest hair.) Must rent that one again.
Besides the most blatent things, like the gay bar scene, just the fact that Freddy is supposed to be this monstrous force living inside Jessie, and Jessie must try to fight (ie repress) it... GAY!