“Special Work to Do”: Inverting the Formula in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’

Nobody expected Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street to be the success that it was. In fact, Craven had shopped the script around for years making no progress, turned down by studio after studio because they simply could not grasp how the concept could work. A boogeyman who kills you in your dreams. Even Craven’s friend, Friday the 13th director and producer of Craven’s own Last House on the Left, Sean Cunningham — who would wind up directing a couple days on Elm Street — scoffed at the idea. Of course, it turned out to be a masterpiece, and Freddy Krueger became the perfect boogeyman for the era. Its success did not happen overnight, though. The initial release for A Nightmare on Elm Street was small, only opening in two cities at first and spreading via word-of-mouth. Even when the sequel was first put into production, the original hadn’t hit everywhere yet. But the reaction was there, and New Line seemed confident in it, so in 1985, development began on A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

The first idea for the sequel came from Leslie Bohem, which would have seen a new family move into the Elm Street house: a pregnant mother, father, and teenage son. It would have dealt with Freddy trying to re-enter the world through the dreams of the unborn fetus, a story idea that was saved for A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. The concept of the new family moving into the house, though, remained and made it into David Chaskin’s script for the second film as it wound up coming to fruition. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge deals with a teenage boy named Jesse Walsh. His family have just moved into the house where, five years ago, Nancy Thompson watched her boyfriend die across the street. She lost her mother and her friends. Upon moving in, Jesse immediately begins to have nightmares about Freddy, who seems to have a mission for Jesse, to use Jesse’s body to regain his strength.

Of course, the most prominent legacy of Freddy’s Revenge is its status — as it is often quoted — as being the “gayest horror movie ever made.” Which is objectively untrue. Frankly, it’s absurd to say that a studio movie that deals exclusively in subtext (however blatant) is the number one, when there are movies out there that do put their gay characters and relationships on the surface. There’s also the fact that the film’s portrayal of these themes certainly reads homophobic, as Freddy is essentially a manifestation of Jesse’s repressed sexuality, which is eventually conquered and defeated by the power of heterosexual love. The documentary Scream, Queen: My Nightmare on Elm Street did a tremendous job of exploring the positives and negatives of the sequel’s approach to its depiction of teenage sexuality. But the gayest of all time? I can’t co-sign that. Yes, the themes of Freddy’s Revenge cannot be denied, for better or worse, but it’s no Otto: Or, Up With Dead People.

Having said that, the sexuality of Freddy’s Revenge has been explored to death, by people much more qualified than I, so that’s not what I want to focus on. Instead, I want to take a look at the biggest criticism lobbed against the movie from fans over the years: the fact that it bends, twists and outright breaks the rules of the original film. This thing that people so often view as its number one weakness is, to me, its greatest strength.

The central concept of A Nightmare on Elm Street is perfect, almost classical at this point. Everyone knows it. It is the idea that if you fall asleep, you might die. That’s not the approach that Freddy’s Revenge takes, at least not exactly. Craven’s film was, for all of its innovation, a slasher — and a shot in the arm of a fading sub-genre, in that regard. He was clearly conscious of this, recognizing that the killers in these types of films usually wore a mask and carried a signature weapon. Craven gave Krueger a mask of scar tissue and the weapon of a claw, believing it to be the oldest and most primal weapon humankind had likely ever feared. It is obviously so much more than a simple slasher, given the supernatural elements that play out almost like a ghost story, and the surrealism inherent in the concept — but it is still a slasher when boiled down to its most basic elements.

It’s worth pointing that out, because the second one isn’t, at least not at its core, though its body count doubles from the first. That’s where the shift from the original most fundamentally occurs: it’s a different type of movie. It operates in entirely separate sub-genres from the first. While A Nightmare on Elm Street was a surreal slasher, Freddy’s Revenge is equal parts a possession story and a werewolf story. Freddy is inhabiting Jesse’s body. He is an alien presence manipulating Jesse for his own malevolent purpose. He is using Jesse as an instrument, a tool in his hopes of continuing to spread fear and carnage in Springwood. It’s very telling that this is the movie in which Freddy mostly appears without his signature glove. He doesn’t need it anymore. This time, Jesse is the weapon. Unlike the glove, though, he is a weapon that can — and does — fight back. These are classic possession tropes, too. The kind, pure person who is being overtaken can — often with outside help — regain control of their body.

At the same time, there is an element of transformation to this possession, which also classifies Freddy’s Revenge as something of a werewolf movie. Jesse isn’t just being used by Freddy, he is a vessel for Freddy to interact with the world through Jesse’s dreams. It’s not so much that Jesse is literally turning into Freddy, but rather that Freddy is bursting out from inside of him. Either way, it’s a transformation. The werewolf movies of the 1980s were defined by their show stopping FX, particularly in the transformation sequences. Freddy’s Revenge was coming along on the heels of some all-timer werewolf fare like An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, The Company of Wolves and Silver Bullet. The main transformation sequence in Freddy’s Revenge, which occurs as Freddy emerges from inside Jesse to kill Grady, is shot very similarly to these, highlighting the spectacular practical effects work by Kevin Yagher. Like An American Werewolf in London, nothing is hidden in shadow. The way Freddy slithers out of Jesse like a snake shedding its skin, however, is very similar in style to The Company of Wolves. That film featured a similar sequence in which a werewolf emerged from inside of a man, famously depicted on its poster. Even though Freddy is obviously not a wolf (at least not literally) and is a separate character possessing Jesse, werewolf stories often embody a general theme of “the beast within,” that classic trope of the animal lurking inside everyone. In that regard, Freddy’s Revenge certainly fits the bill.

It is the combination of these two elements, the possession story and the werewolf story, where the true strength of Freddy’s Revenge shines: it’s an inversion of the concept of the original. These are the things people tend not to love about it, some of the things immediately brought up by detractors saying it broke the rules of an original that was still very new at the time. But even though director Jack Sholder was vocally not a fan of Craven’s movie, the sequel doesn’t simply break rules for the sake of breaking them. The best thing about it as a film is that it takes that central concept and flips on its head to make a very different kind of movie. A Nightmare on Elm Street was about the notion that if you fall asleep, you might die. Freddy’s Revenge is about the idea that if you fall asleep, you could kill someone. Those are very different synopses that are scary for entirely separate reasons.

It’s the Elm Street version of the “beast within” trope, and I think that’s key as well. For as many different directions the story might take compared with the first film, it still embraces those key elements inherent to the original, especially where the main character is concerned. Jesse, like Nancy, is still struggling to stay awake, and worries his parents with his increasingly strung out appearance and behavior. Like Nancy, Jesse tries to warn his friends of what’s going on, but he cannot save them, not even Lisa — the one person who really listens to him — if the ending is to be taken at face value. There’s a genuine fear here of not being able to trust your own body. Jesse knows that if he falls asleep, someone could die, and his body will commit that murder even if his consciousness will not. Nancy was afraid for herself and those around her, because she knew the invisible threat of Freddy was targeting them as well, and nothing she said could convince them to save their own lives. Jesse is afraid for himself because he is losing his autonomy, losing any and all control over his own bodies, and afraid for others because he knows he could kill them the moment he closes his eyes.

Beyond the overwhelming themes of sexual awakening, there’s a strong undercurrent of adolescent masculinity being an inherently violent thing. Jesse is not an overly masculine character in the traditional sense of the time. He’s quiet, sensitive, slender. He’s a far cry from his best friend, Grady, who is much more of a standard jock — to the point that he has to basically fight Jesse before the two of them can actually be friends. There’s much more obvious aggression with Grady, grounded because he threw his grandmother down a flight of stairs, than with Jesse. Freddy represents that toxic, predatory, aggressive masculinity, buried inside and literally clawing to get out. There’s as much of that in the supernatural towel-whipping of Jesse’s gym teacher as there is homoeroticism, though these themes certainly go hand in hand in many respects. Using masculinity, in all of its forms, as that vessel for how Krueger manifests in this movie also highlights another of its biggest changes from the previous film: the protagonist is a teenage boy instead of a teenage girl, and the story certainly caters to that on a subtextual level.

The exploration of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’s central themes of sexuality are rich, even though they’re as intriguing as they are problematic. Those themes are a discussion unto themselves. But I think the way the film shifts into different genres than its predecessor, the way it inverts the concept to feature a protagonist more frightened by taking lives than losing his, these are the things that make it such an unexpected — and yes, for some, unwelcome — sequel. It’s an imaginative movie that truly stands on its own when compared both to its predecessor and to the franchise as a whole. While A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge may relish in body horror, it also undoubtedly has brains.