A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge ★★★½

THE second film in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is certainly an oddity.

Coming hard on the heels of the original, 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge should have been a stock-standard method of cashing in for the studio.

But, while director Jack Sholder and writer David Chaskin delivered on the dollars, they also created something that has become a cult classic for other reasons .

The basic slasher tropes and strong arc are all there, but the film’s homoerotic themes and subject matter have seen it labelled as the ‘gayest mainstream horror film ever made’.

There is a mountain of reference material exploring the film’s development – Craven passed on directing after reading the script – and its reassessment and over the years following its initial mixed reaction.

It’s five years later and a family has moved into the former home of Nancy Thompson from the first film. Their teenage son, Jesse, starts experiencing similar nightmares about Freddy Krueger and strange events start occurring, such as their pet birds suddenly bursting into flames.

Jesse starts trying to keep himself awake through various means, eventually walking the streets at night. On one of these occasions, he stumbles across one of his teachers in a gay bar which results in tension back at school and a series of incidents that lean into homo-eroticism and the fetishising of the Jesse character as a ‘final boy’, flipping one of horror cinema’s most enduring conventions.

Unfortunately, all this interesting deviation from norms creates disturbances in lore and logic that the film struggles to overcome.

With less jump scares and frights than the original, but achieving more drama and outright weirdness, Part 2 deserves its place as one of the franchise’s higher marks.

Watched on Foxtel.