The Lobster Dance

Beloved spooky scary skeletons, Feminist Halloween is back with 31 days of feminist Halloween content: movie reviews, horror commentary, costume debacles, pumpkin-spice nope, and more.

Freddy Kruger caresses Jesse’s face with his blades.

Let’s kick off this year’s events with Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), which I went to see at Northwest Film Forum as part of their Pride Month Queer Fan Nights with Three Dollar Bill Cinema.

Note: the following post contains Patton’s description of homophobic attitudes, including a slur, directed at him.

Although none of the characters in are explicitly written as queer, there’s a lot of elements coded as queer in the film, including Freddy’s pursuit of Jesse Walsh, an S&M locker room scene with the coach, a leather bar, and more.

Mark Patton, who plays Jesse, is gay, and describes his coming out in New York and being forced back into the closet in Hollywood in this interview with Plus Magazine.

Although the NWFF presenters showed a clip from Never Sleep Again at the theater, Patton wrote in a comment on We Minored in Film’s discussion of the “homoerotic elements” that the interview was leading and that he is working on his own documentary, Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street. I’m looking forward to this since queer folks need to be able to tell our own stories. Case in point:

“By that point, AIDS was all around me. Everyone I knew was getting sick,” he says. To make matters worse, the gay subtext of the Elm Street sequel, which was purposefully woven into the script by screenwriter David Chaskin, began to be noticed by fans and critics shortly after the film’s release. But rather than admit what he’d done, Chaskin blamed Patton for making the film — which included a scene where Patton’s character runs into his gym coach at a gay leather bar and lines like “He’s inside me, and he wants to take me again!”—too gay.

“David would just blame me any time it came up alluding to something along the lines of, ‘Well, he’s a big old fag and he chose to play the part in a big old fag way.’” (Plus Magazine)

Check out the trailer for Scream, Queen! here:

ANOES2 contains gore, violence, body horror, body possession, slapping your leather daddy gym teacher literally to death with towels, extremely uncomfortable sexual tension with a murderer, exploding birds.

For more in-depth spoilery reviews with visuals by queer YouTubers:

Matt Baume on Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (contains major spoilers)

Needs More Gay: