A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge

Freddy gets an unexpected makeover in this hyper-homoerotic sequel to the horror classic.


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  • Director Jack Sholder
  • Producer Robert Shaye
  • Screenwriter David Chaskin
  • With Mark Patton, Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Marshall Bell, Robert Englund
  • USA 1985
  • 85 min
  • 18
  • UK distribution Park Circus

The Citizen Kane of gay horror movies, this iconoclastic sequel proudly annihilates everything that made Wes Craven’s original so creepily effective, opting instead for a hyper-homoerotic, and frankly inexplicable, tale of fetishistic desire and violent body invasion. Soon after moving into the old Thompson house on Elm Street, Jessie Walsh finds himself plagued by nightmares about a dirty old man with killer fingers. But now the man of his dreams wants to escape his nocturnal prison, and decides to use Jessie’s body as a vessel to unleash his evil on the real world. What is essentially the most traumatic coming out story ever committed to film, almost 30 years on, the unashamed queer subtext (if you can even call it subtext) remains staggering. How it ever got made is anybody’s guess. But we can be forever thankful that it did.

Michael Blyth