“A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” opened less than a year after Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” hoping to capitalize on the success of the groundbreaking original. The sequel, made without Craven’s involvement, was a hit, making $30 million on a budget of just $3 million and establishing the franchise as a viable horror juggernaut. (After a break in 1986, there would be a new sequel released in 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1991, with subsequent installments in 1994 and 2003.)
And while sequels like Chuck Russell’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and Craven’s own “New Nightmare” were initially more well-regarded, “Freddy’s Revenge” has taken on a new meaning as the years have rolled on, chiefly as one of the gayest horror movies ever made.
For director Jack Sholder, this was something of a revelation, although he’s thrilled that the movie has taken on this new life. It’s hard to believe he didn’t have some idea, considering this is a movie that features New Line Cinema head Bob Shaye as a leather daddy in a BDSM shop, but hey. Star Mark Patton even made a documentary about the experience and the movie’s aftermath, 2019’s “Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.”
TheWrap spoke to Sholder for the release of the new “Nightmare on Elm Street” 4K box set, a deeply essential treat for any fan, and he opened up about his experience on the movie and its long afterlife as not only a cult classic but an essential piece of homoerotic cinema.
Sholder said that he had known Shaye when New Line Cinema was only a year old. He would help Shaye on various projects and go out to dinner with him twice a week. In 1982 New Line Cinema released Sholder’s feature debut “Alone in the Dark,” a creepy, underrated thriller about a bunch of lunatics who escape from an asylum and terrorize a psychiatrist’s family. When Craven bailed from making the sequel, about six weeks before production was scheduled to begin, Shaye turned to Sholder.
“Sequels, in the mid ‘80s, were usually less than the original – it was a way of squeezing a little more money out of the original and they didn’t expect it to make as much money or get as good reviews,” Sholder explained. “They offered it to me and my first reaction was to turn it down, because I didn’t want to be typecast as a horror film director. I wanted to be François Truffaut. I certainly didn’t want to be typecast as a horror film sequel director.”
A producer friend of Sholder’s told him, “Jack, you’re out of your mind. Take the job. First of all, nobody’s lining up to hire you. And second of all, the film’s going to make a lot of money and you’re going to have a career.”
“Sure enough I directed movies for the next 20 years, he was obviously right,” Sholder said.
Scarier than Freddy Kruger (a returning Robert Englund) entering your dreams was Sholder having to prep the movie. Sholder was handed “six single-spaced pages of special effects, none of which I had the slightest idea how to do.” He had to cast the movie. He had to find locations. (Jacques Haitkin, the cinematographer from the original film, returned for the sequel.) New Line Cinema gave him two directives: “Keep Freddy dark and keep it scary.” Beyond that, Sholder was left on his own. The six weeks of prep was “a six week panic attack,” where Sholder took his time and diagrammed every shot.
“On the first day of shooting, all the nerves went away,” Sholder said.
Sholder said that the movie was primarily concerned with “teen sexual anxiety.” “In 1985 it was not a good time to figure out, if you’re gay or straight, because it wasn’t right. You could be arrested or beat up,” Sholder said. At the time Sholder was living in the West Village “just before Stonewall happened and I lived there when AIDS came on.”
To Sholder, Freddy was representative of teen sexual anxiety. Instead of a final girl, “Nightmare on Elm Street 2” had a final guy, one that is afraid of his repressed desire as much as he is the boogeyman in his dreams.
When the movie came out, Sholder said, “none of the critics picked up on that.” But the Wednesday after “Nightmare on Elm Street 2” opened, he read the Village Voice, which was once New York’s premiere alternative newspaper. The review, he recalled, described the movie as “the gayest horror film of all time.” “We all just thought it was really funny that they would pick up on that,” Sholder said.
Afterwards, Sholder was offered “every crummy horror film script in Hollywood, which I turned down.” He was finally given Jim Kouf’s script for “The Hidden,” which made Sholder think, Wow, I’ve got to make this movie. (He did; it came out in 1987 and is now considered a cult classic.) “I didn’t really think much about ‘Elm Street,’ I was just going forward,” Sholder said.
It wasn’t until a 30th anniversary panel for “Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” at a fan convention, where most of the cast was there, including Patton and Englund that the film began to reenter his consciousness.
“I found out from Mark what had been going on. He left the business after ‘Elm Street’ because his agent said, ‘You can’t play straight. It’s clear that you’re not straight.’ And he had a friend who was dying of AIDS, which none of us knew, and he just left. They actually had to hire a detective to find him. And then I found out about the whole thing,” Sholder said.
Sholder said that the movie’s afterlife as a triumph of gay cinema was “ironic” since “it was never our intention.” “But as I came to understand this, it’s really great, because there’s this whole group of people who can identify with this movie and feel that there’s something in it for them. It’s clearly in there and part of the story but that wasn’t our point,” Sholder said. “But I’m really happy with this reading – it’s being taught in colleges in queer studies courses and stuff like that. It’s great. I’m delighted.”
And you can be delighted by “Nightmare on Elm Street 2,” which looks and sounds better than it maybe ever has before, as part of this new box set, which is available in stores and online now.
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