“A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” debuted 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 success, grossing $30 million on a budget of just $3 million and establishing the franchise as a viable horror juggernaut. (After a hiatus in 1986, a new sequel would be 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 “New Nightmare” were initially more beloved, “Freddy’s Revenge” took on new meaning over the years, primarily as one of the gayest horror films ever made.
For director Jack Sholder, it was something of a revelation, although he’s thrilled that the film is taking on this new life. It’s hard to believe he didn’t have it a few idea, given that this is a film that features New Line Cinema executive Bob Shaye as a leather daddy in a BDSM shop, but oh well. Star Mark Patton even made a documentary about the experience and aftermath of the film, 2019’s “Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.”
TheWrap spoke with Sholder for the release of the new 4K box set “Nightmare on Elm Street,” a deeply essential treat for any fan, and he talked about his experience on the film and its long life beyond as not just a cult classic but an essential piece of homoerotic cinema.
Sholder said he knew Shaye when New Line Cinema was just a year old. He helped Shaye on various projects and went out to dinner with him twice a week. In 1982, New Line Cinema released Sholder’s first feature film, “Alone in the Dark,” a chilling and underrated thriller about a gang of madmen who escape an asylum and terrorize a psychiatrist’s family. When Craven backed out of making the sequel, about six weeks before production was scheduled to begin, Shaye turned to Sholder.
“In the mid-’80s, sequels were generally inferior to the original – it was a way to squeeze 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 refuse, because I didn’t want to be typecast as a horror movie director. I wanted to be François Truffaut. I certainly didn’t want to be typecast as a horror movie sequel director.”
A producer friend of Sholder’s told him, “Jack, you’re crazy. Take the job. First of all, no one is lining up to hire you. And second of all, the movie is going to make a lot of money and you’re going to have a career.”
“Sure enough, I made films for the next 20 years, he was obviously right,” Sholder said.
Scarier than Freddy Kruger (a returning Robert Englund) walking into your dreams, Sholder had to prepare the film. Sholder received “six single-spaced pages of special effects, which I had no idea how to do.” He had to cast the film. He had to find locations. (Jacques Haitkin, the original film’s cinematographer, returned for the sequel.) New Line Cinema gave him two directives: “Keep Freddy in the dark and make him scary.” Beyond that, Sholder was left to his own devices. The six weeks of preparation were “a six-week panic attack,” during which Sholder took his time and diagrammed every shot.
“The first day of filming, all the nerves were gone,” Sholder said.
Sholder said the film was primarily about “teenage sexual anxiety.” “In 1985, it wasn’t a good time to know if you were gay or straight, because it wasn’t right. You could get arrested or beaten up,” Sholder said. At the time, Sholder was living in the West Village “right before Stonewall happened, and I was living there when AIDS hit.”
For Sholder, Freddy was representative of adolescent sexual anxiety. Instead of a final girl, “Nightmare on Elm Street 2” had a final man, who is as afraid of his pent-up desire as he is of the bogeyman of his dreams.
When the film came out, Sholder said, “none of the critics noticed that.” But on the Wednesday after “Nightmare on Elm Street 2” came out, he read the Village Voice, which was once New York’s first alternative newspaper. Critics, he recalls, described the film as “the gayest horror film of all time.” “We all thought it was really funny that they realized it,” Sholder said.
Subsequently, Sholder was offered “every crummy Hollywood horror movie script, which I turned down.” He was eventually handed Jim Kouf’s script for “The Hidden,” which got Sholder thinking: Wow, I have 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 moving forward,” Sholder said.
It’s only 30 years oldth anniversary panel for “Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” at a fan convention, where most of the cast was present, including Patton and Englund, as the film began to re-enter one’s consciousness.
“I found out from Mark what was going on. He left the company after ‘Elm Street’ because his agent told him, ‘You can’t play 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 all this,” Sholder said.
Sholder said the fact that the film was a triumph of gay cinema was “ironic” since “that was never our intention.” “But when I realized that, it’s really great, because there’s this whole group of people who can relate to this movie and feel like there’s something in it for them. It’s clearly there and part of the story but that wasn’t our goal,” Sholder said. “But I’m really happy with this reading – it’s taught in colleges in queer studies classes and stuff like that. It’s great. I’m excited.”
And you can be delighted by “Nightmare on Elm Street 2,” which looks and sounds better than ever before, as part of this new box set, available now in stores and online.
