Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 20 (A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge)

Dreams come true.

Really, it was either this or the one that Rachel Talalay directed, and I don't know enough about directing to talk about the wild shit she did in it so... Part 2! Which is, paradoxically, one of the most discussed AND least discussed films in the whole Nightmare On Elm Street series. I should clarify that statement; people talk about it, but they talk about it because of a major element of subtext going on in the movie and not so much because it's an iconic entry in a famous slasher series. Countless ink has been spilled on the subject, no doubt, and I have to at least mention it in this post. Yeah, there's gay subtext floating all through this thing. You'd think I'd have a lot to say on this, but I don't. Mostly because 1) the work's been done before and 2) it would have required me digging deeper into the special features and video essays to properly cover. The most blatant it gets textually, of course, is our poor hero staggering into an S&M bar and getting caught by his gym teacher who's in a leather vest, followed minutes later by the gym teacher being tied up and ass-whipped by telekinetically-moving towels before Freddy slashes the fuck out of him. This is also the first kill of the movie, 35 minutes in. Yeah. There is something going on here but I am in no way qualified to be talking about it... so I'm not going to. Take it on good faith that people who know what they're doing have discussed this in depth and can be found out there, and let's move on to the shit I know; alchemy and the power of love.


There is some real wild shit going on here that doesn't quite go on in the other movies, from what I recall. Even if it does, this one did them first by virtue of chronology. The dream aspect is carried over, of course, but it's all used for surreality. As poor Jesse is going through the bender, so too do all your perceptions. Absolute weird shit going on, but the point of the movie is the mixing of these worlds. Dream becoming reality. Freddy Krueger, who wants revenge against someone due to the title but I don't know whom, seeks to use Jesse to bridge the gap. To become real. This lets weird shit happen in reality, particularly involving heat. The house gets hotter as we go along, shit starts lighting on fire, birds exploding... it didn't click with me until near the end that this was all because Freddy, you know, was fucking burned alive. His manifestation in this world mirrors his previous last moments! Goddamn, that's clever! Why Jesse? Because he lives in the house where Nancy killed Freddy in the last movie, and I guess he lives on somehow waiting for a host. Now I'm really curious which movie made it canon that Freddy came back to kill kids and get his revenge on the parents. This one doesn't make it textual, and I'm wondering now if I imagined it. I do like how this one's a slow burn, though. Until the shit hits the fan, you only get two actual murders. The first we mentioned, but the second's wild because Jesse becomes Freddy in a real fucked-up transformation scene. Like some kind of horrific magical girl. Keep that one in mind, we're gonna come back to that. Eventually, Freddy does manifest in reality, and what follows is him running around a pool party and slashing teens. It seems off in an Elm Street film, but in a movie about dreams becoming reality this is par for the course.


The climax to this movie, and Freddy's weakness, is literally love. I can already hear a lot of people rolling their eyes, be it now or in 1985. Yeah, he can't kill the female lead because she loves Jesse and that is holding Freddy back. On the surface, it sounds silly as hell. Digging deeper, I can see some wild merit in it. Mostly because I wrote 20,000 words about Sailor Moon and I'm like a shark sniffing blood when it comes to utopian idealism. This isn't quite it, but it's almost it. A more tragic movie would kill Jesse and Freddy, together. Indeed, Lisa tries to stab him but it doesn't work out because... Freddy's stab-proof? I guess? No, what we get is Lisa confronting Freddy in an abandoned factory while all kinds of fucked up shit happens because... shit, dreams are reality now! Anything can happen! Lisa confronts Freddy, seeing right past him and looking to Jesse and declaring her love for him. Freddy is at first taunting, saying Jesse's dead... but as he starts to bleed from the sheer force of the returned love? His tone changes. He gets more panicked in his declarations that Jesse's dead. Eventually it's enough to burn him up, and things are mirrored once more. Freddy burst out of Jesse, and now Jesse bursts out of Freddy's re-burnt corpse. Yeah, we get a dumb fakeout dream scare that literally has a fake scare in it; Freddy's toying with us now. I liked this movie! I liked it a lot! Shame there's no other Elm Streets quite like it, as we went back to the well of killing in dreams and added the new wrinkle of "themed" dreams... but that's talk for Part 3, if we ever do that. For now, I gotta say... this one was nice. As nice as can be for a movie with a zombie dream murderer, but that's Halloween, kids. That's Halloween.


Any other dream shit I can look at?