Robert Englund Explains Why He Wants to See A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2 Get a Reboot
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was quite an interesting and unexpected sequel. While Freddy Krueger was the main monster, the film had a very different tone than the first one. While the screenwriter of Freddy’s Revenge, David Chaskin and director Jack Sholder claimed for years that they didn’t see any intentional gay subtext in the film while they were shooting it, for many, the movie clearly follows a teenaged boy struggling with his sexuality. The film has also been described as “the gayest horror film ever made.”
Robert Englund thinks the movie should be rebooted, and that this time it should lean into this LGBTQ subtext of the story. In a recent interview with Too Fab, the actor explained:
"The secret of Nightmare on Elm Street is loss of innocence and the kids need to be like Midwestern kids, they can't be hip, chic, junkie kids. They have to be middle American kids that think they're a little hip and they are co-opted by evil and they lose their innocence on all levels; sexual, violence, murder, death, realization of their parents' flaws, all of those things.
"If they redid Nightmare 2, for instance, and really deal with the subtext, Freddy toying with that boy's sexuality. But the fact that we're much more comfortable with that now, I think it would be really fun to have Freddy play with one kid who's gay. Maybe one boy is not. Play with them. Tempt them. Force him out of the closet or back into the closet and we can do that. Audiences would accept that now. Freddy would do that because he's in your head. But it is going to take somebody very clever to do that."
That’s certainly an interesting take and one hell of a cruel thing for Freddy to do. That would really mess these kids up psychologically.
The sequel’s star, Mark Patton, was actually closeted himself when he made the film and he claims that the filmmakers regularly modified the script during the production to lean into those homosexual themes, something that the writer had denied, saying that it was actually Patton who chose to lean into those themes to play the character that way. It wasn’t until 2010 that Chaskin admitted to intentionally incorporating those themes in the story, saying:
“Homophobia was skyrocketing and I began to think about our core audience — adolescent boys — and how all of this stuff might be trickling down into their psyches at an age when raging hormones often produce dreams and urges that make them (if only unconsciously) begin to question their own sexuality. My thought was that tapping into that angst would give an extra edge to the horror.”
There’s a documentary that explores all of this and Patton’s experience titled Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.
What do you all think about Englund’s idea of remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street 2?