Revisiting Freddy Krugar

The horror sequel, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), exists in a very different realm from many horror films of the 1980s, and even films within its own franchise. While the other films in the series play as rather straight forward slasher fare with mostly young girls running from the horribly burned knife-clawed, Freddy Kruger, NMII focuses on the relationship between Freddy and a teenage boy. Lush with a sometimes suffocating subtext surrounding the young scion’s sexuality, the film is written much more like a possession film in the vein of The Exorcist, or even the underrated The Entity. Like most horror films, possession films are typically lead by female protagonists, or Final Girls, that eventually outwit their tormentors. However NMII subverts these tropes and instead works much more like a response to dominant portrayals of masculinity and sexuality.

Nightmare on Elm Street II opens with a post-apocalyptic dream that finds its hero trapped on a school bus with two innocent girls. The young man, Jesse (Mark Patton) eventually wakes up screaming; sweating and even aroused as if from a wet dream. This eventually segues into a Father Knows Best scenario, where Jesse’s family is introduced. Where preceding and proceeding families in the Nightmare franchise are ones of dysfunction with abusive single mothers and dads coping with alcoholism and depression; here the nuclear family appears immaculately intact. The very patriarchal gender order finds the mother cooking, the father fixing broken light fixtures, among various other appliances around the house, and even a doting younger sister who fawns over her older brother. Unfortunately the fissure in this gorgeous picture of domesticity is interrupted by super-villian Freddy Kruger, who initially meets Jesse only in his dreams. “Daddy can’t save you now,” the burned ghoul says in their first meeting on screen.

What becomes clear after the introduction of the boy's perfect family, is that his relationship with his found family, fellow teenagers attending a local high school, is equally as incongruous with Nightmare/Horror film lore. At the forefront is his bestfriend, Grady (Robert Rusler). A handsome meat-head jock who torments his best friend as much as lovingly cajoling him with sympathy. Like most films, following the fall of Hollywood's studio system and popularity of independent filmmaking in the 1960s, NMII alters the conventions between male and female characters. It takes on attributes of what film critic Molly Haskell has called the “buddy movie,” in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures carry the story without the distraction of women (Molly Haskell, Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 716). Haskell and other critics also argue that this tendency in dominant narrative film was because of fear of narrative conflicts with the corresponding birth of second wave feminism. However, unlike these analogous films like 48 Hours (1982), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), NMII doesn't ignore or minimize the female on screen, instead it subverts typical portrayals of sex, sexuality, and gender in general.

Jesse's sexuality is never questioned, primarily because there's his love interest, Lisa (Kim Meyers). Unlike the film's protagonist, she actually fits all the final girl archetypes seen in most horror films, but here she's positioned more like the supportive friend seen throughout the franchise (e.g she mirrors Maxwell, the doctor, in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (played by a young Laurence Fishburne), or Glen (Johnny Depp) from the first film. Much more than friends these characters seem more like ad hoc angels, future victims, that appear out of the blue as saviors and are guides even if it leads to their own demise. Despite the film narratively conveying Jesse's heterosexuality with this love interest, it is the relationships between Glen and Jesse, and Jesse and Freddy that complicate the typical representation of masculinity, and even eroticism, of men on screen.

In addition to the camera's lovely erotic posterior and crotch close-ups of Grady and Jesse, as well as the protagonist's wet dreams with Freddy, there's the inclusion of the butch gym teacher, Coach Schneider. Schneider (Marshall Bell) constantly chastises the two friends during school hours, provoking their wrestling matches and scenes in their locker room, where Grady notes “he's into pretty guys like you,” to Jesse. The protagonist ignores this, but the attraction is made clear later when Jesse, while sleep walking, walks into a crowded downtown leather bar. After ordering a beer, Schneider appears – gym clothes replaced with S&M leather. The next scene, finds the young protagonist running laps, as he is seen typically being admonished during regular school hours alongside his buddy Grady. But while showering (and still dreaming) Jesse begins to morph into Freddy. The possessed teenager disappears as jump ropes, weights, and other representative totems of any gym class become objects of torture directed toward the seemingly-closeted Schneider, who's eventually locked and chained. With his bear ass whipped raw, Schneider is then brutally murdered by Freddy, making his first kill.

Dreams are the primary source of action in the Nightmare series, but in NM2 Freddy is brought into reality through the body of the protagonist. In that way, it's very much aligned with possession films that are typically embodied by female characters. The previously released The Exorcist (1973) and The Entity (1982) focus on women being parasitically inhabited and haunted by men – and they also see these characters being erotized, fetished, sexualized and also brutalized. With Jesse, though, Freddy embodies the teens body in order to wreck havoc on his victims in reality rather than exclusivley in their dreams. Though neither of their sexuality's are questioned, Jesse has his loving girlfriend Lisa and later in the NM franchise, Freddy's wife and daughter are introduced, the parasitic relationship between the two find the men collectively creating chaos and disrupting the conventional forms of patriarchy which leads to the disintegration of the lives of all parties involved, sans tormentor Freddy Krugar.

While horror films usually use the bodies of girls and women as sites of brutalization and torture, ripe with allegory about shrouded and explicit societal mistreatment and the corresponding psychological ramifications, Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy's Revenge conjures up a distinct parable that differentiates itself from every other entry in the Nightmare franchise. In it, its antagonist Freddy, inhabits the body of a teenage boy, which disrupts not only the protagonist's relationship with his perfect nuclear family but also the traditional patriarchal norms of the world around him. The very-1980s franchise can be collectively viewed as an allusion to the suburban fears of the outsider other, and/or the dread bubbling under the surface of Ronald Reagan's presidency, and/or evolving habits in consumerism, and/or the Cold War, but NMII is distinct in that it magnifies the performance of its character's gender and if viewed closely-- hell, or even with poor near-sighted vision-- his sexuality. Released in 1985, four years after the announcement of GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and prior to the peak of AIDS/Gay Rights activism, this film's radical distinction, both implied and and direct, should be noted and bookmarked now and further into the future.