Horror Watch: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 - Freddy's Revenge (1985) / Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2020)

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge 

Watched:  10/09/2026

Format:  HBO

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jack Sholder

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

Watched: 10/10/2026

Format:  YouTube (link here)

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen

My guess is that because A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) is kind of interesting and tries to do character stuff, the fans hate it. 

I'm first to confess, I really don't know the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.  I've seen the first one a few times now, and the third one once.  But I just wasn't terribly interested in horror growing up.  At the time kids are getting into it, I was like "gimme Dracula or I have no time for your tomfoolery".  And then, when I was 14 and finally rented The Exorcist and The Shining, was like "Hey, THIS is horror?  These movies are great".  

My tastes have shifted, and I've come around on some of this stuff.  

Anyway, I was ten when A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 came out, so I did not see it.

Watching it now, I was surprised at how different it is from the first movie, and a different flavor of horror altogether.  It's about a young man whose family moves into Nancy's house, and he into her room.  Nancy is gone, having gone crazy following the first movie, and now he's figuring out that Freddy Krueger was real.  

This time, Freddy is trying to take over the mind of our hero, Jesse (Mark Patton), I would guess to do very Freddy things using Jesse's body.  

It feels more like a movie about demonic possession than a wise-cracking asshole invading one's sleepytime.

It wasn't too far into the film that I remember thinking "huh.  This feels like it's got some interesting subtext - maybe queer subtext in the context of the 1980's."  As happens, I broke the movie into two halves, watching the second half the next day.  I mentioned to Stuart I was liking the movie so far, and he said "Then you gotta watch Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street."  

And that confirmed for me that I wasn't alone in my reading.  

But, honestly, I was mostly trying to place the red-head in the movie playing "girl love interest" and it was Kim Myers.   Kim Myers played Pam on Seinfeld for one episode.   To this day, in this house, we still just shout "PAM!" sometimes.  

The movie isn't entirely thoughtful, but it's also working hard to not just be a photocopy of the first Nightmare on Elm Street.   It turns Freddy from something who just pops up into one's dreams and kills them into a parasite, something malevolent that will replace you and maybe put people you care about in harm's way.  All *sorts* of analogies can be made here as our hero, Jesse, can't even really fight back.

It's very much a Freddy movie, but also - you can't keep repeating his formula whereas I think you can come back to the first one more readily.  It's two different flavors of helpless nightmare horror, and this one is a bit more existential - you're not just getting murdered in creative ways, you're having an existential crisis.

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2020) tells the story of Nightmare on Elm Street 2's star, Mark Patton.  It's a look at his rapid rise and how the movie ended up blowing up in his face at the same time he lost his partner to AIDS as the disease ravaged the world - and these days it does seem what happened with the AIDS epidemic is something that seems shockingly forgotten or considered ancient history.

The doc picks up the ideas I was kicking around a bit and digs deep - how gay coded was the film?  According to who you ask, it's very gay.  And within the audience that reads the film that way, we have factions that support a gay horror film and others who rage against the idea.  In the 1980's at the height of AIDS and gay panic, that wound up impacting Patton, who chose to pack his bags and split from Hollywood after the movie and his personal tragedy.

As a doc looking at a specific person, it's pretty solid.  Mark Patton is a *survivor* in the truest sense of the word.  He did get full-blown AIDS just as the medications to treat it arrived, but it doesn't mean he wasn't horribly ill for some time.  But he also survived what 1980's Hollywood tried to do to him and has found what seems like a solid life and love.

What I think would make an excellent spin-off, and it might exist, is a doc on queerness in horror.  Hell, have Peaches Christ host it.

All in all, it's worth the hour and forty minutes.