Nightmare Retrospective: Freddy's Revenge

Nightmare Retrospective | #2 | A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Horror sequels are almost always bad; it's basically a fact of life at this point. More story usually demands more explanation, and more explanation takes away what makes these movies so scary in the first place. So many of them tend to pack this on top of a plot that is essentially the same as that of the first, but with less interesting characters, less nuance and subtlety, less atmosphere and less creativity. A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is often considered to be a bad sequel, perhaps even one of the weakest trips to Elm Street, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case. To say that it's bad is somewhat reductive; it certainly isn't good, but it has so many interesting things going on that it sort of transcends badness in a way that is a bit more than just ironic.

Don't get me wrong; this doesn't hold a candle to the original Nightmare in terms of quality. The subtlety and atmosphere of the original is gone, replaced by hamfisted exposition, nonsensical dialogue and a consistent effort to shove scary things in your face without the creative setpieces or quiet atmosphere building of the original. The intriguing mystery and likeable characters are likewise gone, with most of the cast of Freddy's Revenge being flat and one-note, and the plot revolving around a strange, incoherent possession arc.

It starts off fairly similar, with a bizarre dream sequence (this time a completely bonkers scene involving a bus driven by Freddy Krueger being suspended over a lava-filled chasm) introducing our protagonist Jesse. It's been five years since the original Nightmare, and the events as the rest of the townsfolk know them have become something of an urban legend. Jesse and his family have recently moved into the home of Nancy from the original - her ultimate fate is unexplained, but a diary left behind hidden in the complete open in Jesse's closet (he is sleeping in the room she used to stay in) explains to him exactly what is going on.

This is no doubt very boring, but it may in fact be somewhat of a smart decision on the film's part - by not getting too hung up in the same revelations we already discovered from the first film, it establishes them all fairly quickly, allowing the plot to move on from there into new territory. As baffling as Freddy's Revenge can get, it is a whole new take on Freddy Krueger. Rather than simply haunting teenagers in their dreams for the sake of killing them, Freddy now has his sights set entirely on Jesse, with the purpose of possessing his body to enter the physical world once again. How this is all supposed to work and why Freddy wants this are mysteries that are never truly answered, and the only thing that ends up any different because of it is a scene towards the end where Freddy gets to massacre a bunch of teenagers at a pool party at once. Other than that, the rest of the kills (all two of them) in the movie are not much different than how they would work in the original.

The first half of the film is laughably ridiculous. The characters are extremely boring and one note and the way in which the parents refuse to believe their children is far less believable than in the original - one particularly egregious scene involves a family bird exploding into flames in midair, which Jesse's father asserts "must be because of a gas leak" and then immediately turns on his son upon Jesse challenging that notion. The rules established in the original are thrown out the window, with the line between dream and reality blurred from the very beginning. Things just sort of happen and no real logic seems to be holding together even the real world scenes. Of course Freddy is played excellent by Robert Englund, but he's really not given much to do except pop up and say spooky things.

The second half starts to get interesting, however, as Jesse's reality begins to break down around him. The line between dream and reality finally begins to blur in a meaningful way, and Jesse's descend into madness is portrayed in a perfect mixture of camp and frightening sincerity, his desperation palpable. This is where the true meat of the film comes in; the famous gay subtext. While originally denying it, screenwriter David Chaskin intended for Freddy Krueger to be a manifestation of Jesse's internalized homophobia, a product of a society that in the 80's was seeing skyrocketing levels of anti-gay sentiment. Jesse is never outright confirmed to be gay, but the subtext is absolutely there, and amplified by Patton's acting choices and director Jack Sholder's direction. It only makes sense for a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street to take the true meaning of its villain - the darkness beneath the idyllic 1980's suburban image that only grows with ignorance and repression, given shape and form and the desire to kill - and use it to commentate on something a bit different but still very much in the same vein.

I'm not really sure that the queer subtext has aged particularly well - the fact that Jesse is never confirmed to be homosexual makes the fact that the only outwardly gay character is his predatory, perverted gym teacher who tries to seduce him at a queer S&M bar far more problematic. But throughout the rest of the film, we're constantly seeing subtle ways in which the direction emphasizes his queerness. He has far more chemistry with his friend Grady than his girlfriend Lisa, culminating in a scene in which he flees her house after they almost have sex and next appears practically laying on top of a shirtless Grady in his bed (this eventually leads to the best set piece in the film, in which Freddy Krueger breaks out of Jesse's body Alien style and murders Grady). Jesse is both the villain and the final girl rolled into one, and through him Freddy targets the objects of his affection; his best friend whom he likely has a crush on and the gym teacher whom he pays a little bit more attention to after hearing rumors that he is himself gay.

The horror ends with Lisa defeating Freddy by confronting him in the old boiler room in which he used to murder children and defeating him with the power of love and compulsory heterosexuality. But in a scene similar to the end of the original, Freddy doesn't seem to be gone for good, mirroring how those who fall prey to the conformist force of heternormativity and compulsory heterosexuality can never truly be free of their struggles with their sexuality until they confront their truth.

The subtext makes these messages somewhat muddled, and I feel like one could just as easily read it as a text vilifying homosexuality, with Freddy Krueger being a predatory force of homosexual urges that could only be defeated by a heterosexual relationship. I think that at the time, though, subtext was the most they could do. It really hasn't aged well as a result, but in the 80's this would have courted major controversy if they had outright labeled the protagonist gay, and made the subtext text.

Overall, Freddy's Revenge is a real mess of a film, losing a lot of the atmosphere and mystery of the original in favor of a chaotic, incoherent plot with flat characters and little in the way of real scares. At the same time, there's something about it that's really fascinating to think about and witness; it's rarely boring, and the way it tries to turn the themes of the original on their head and inject bold new ideas into the franchise - including some of the most blatant queer subtext in all of horror - is really charming. It's definitely not a good film, but even though it fails often, it fails spectacularly.