\u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy\u2019s Revenge\u201d opened less than a year after Wes Craven\u2019s \u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street,\u201d hoping to capitalize on the success of the groundbreaking original. The sequel, made without Craven\u2019s involvement, was a hit, making $30 million on a budget of just $3 million and establishing the franchise as a viable horror juggernaut. (After a break in 1986, there would be a new sequel released in 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1991, with subsequent installments in 1994 and 2003.)<\/p>\n
And while sequels like Chuck Russell\u2019s \u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors\u201d and Craven\u2019s own \u201cNew Nightmare\u201d were initially more well-regarded, \u201cFreddy\u2019s Revenge\u201d has taken on a new meaning as the years have rolled on, chiefly as one of the gayest horror movies ever made.<\/p>\n
For director Jack Sholder, this was something of a revelation, although he\u2019s thrilled that the movie has taken on this new life. It\u2019s hard to believe he didn\u2019t have some idea, considering this is a movie that features New Line Cinema head Bob Shaye as a leather daddy in a BDSM shop, but hey. Star Mark Patton even made a documentary about the experience and the movie\u2019s aftermath, 2019\u2019s \u201cScream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.\u201d<\/p>\n
TheWrap spoke to Sholder for the release of the new \u201cNightmare on Elm Street\u201d 4K box set, a deeply essential treat for any fan, and he opened up about his experience on the movie and its long afterlife as not only a cult classic but an essential piece of homoerotic cinema.<\/p>\n
Sholder said that he had known Shaye when New Line Cinema was only a year old. He would help Shaye on various projects and go out to dinner with him twice a week. In 1982 New Line Cinema released Sholder\u2019s feature debut \u201cAlone in the Dark,\u201d a creepy, underrated thriller about a bunch of lunatics who escape from an asylum and terrorize a psychiatrist\u2019s family. When Craven bailed from making the sequel, about six weeks before production was scheduled to begin, Shaye turned to Sholder.<\/p>\n
\u201cSequels, in the mid \u201880s, were usually less than the original \u2013 it was a way of squeezing a little more money out of the original and they didn\u2019t expect it to make as much money or get as good reviews,\u201d Sholder explained. \u201cThey offered it to me and my first reaction was to turn it down, because I didn\u2019t want to be typecast as a horror film director. I wanted to be Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut. I certainly didn\u2019t want to be typecast as a horror film sequel director.\u201d<\/p>\n
A producer friend of Sholder\u2019s told him, \u201cJack, you\u2019re out of your mind. Take the job. First of all, nobody\u2019s lining up to hire you. And second of all, the film\u2019s going to make a lot of money and you\u2019re going to have a career.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSure enough I directed movies for the next 20 years, he was obviously right,\u201d Sholder said.<\/p>\n
Scarier than Freddy Kruger (a returning Robert Englund) entering your dreams was Sholder having to prep the movie. Sholder was handed \u201csix single-spaced pages of special effects, none of which I had the slightest idea how to do.\u201d He had to cast the movie. He had to find locations. (Jacques Haitkin, the cinematographer from the original film, returned for the sequel.) New Line Cinema gave him two directives: \u201cKeep Freddy dark and keep it scary.\u201d Beyond that, Sholder was left on his own. The six weeks of prep was \u201ca six week panic attack,\u201d where Sholder took his time and diagrammed every shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the first day of shooting, all the nerves went away,\u201d Sholder said.<\/p>\n
Sholder said that the movie was primarily concerned with \u201cteen sexual anxiety.\u201d \u201cIn 1985 it was not a good time to figure out, if you\u2019re gay or straight, because it wasn\u2019t right. You could be arrested or beat up,\u201d Sholder said. At the time Sholder was living in the West Village \u201cjust before Stonewall happened and I lived there when AIDS came on.\u201d<\/p>\n
To Sholder, Freddy was representative of teen sexual anxiety. Instead of a final girl, \u201cNightmare on Elm Street 2\u201d had a final guy, one that is afraid of his repressed desire as much as he is the boogeyman in his dreams.<\/p>\n
When the movie came out, Sholder said, \u201cnone of the critics picked up on that.\u201d But the Wednesday after \u201cNightmare on Elm Street 2\u201d opened, he read the Village Voice, which was once New York\u2019s premiere alternative newspaper. The review, he recalled, described the movie as \u201cthe gayest horror film of all time.\u201d \u201cWe all just thought it was really funny that they would pick up on that,\u201d Sholder said.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, Sholder was offered \u201cevery crummy horror film script in Hollywood, which I turned down.\u201d He was finally given Jim Kouf\u2019s script for \u201cThe Hidden,\u201d which made Sholder think, Wow, I\u2019ve got to make this movie. (He did; it came out in 1987 and is now considered a cult classic.) \u201cI didn\u2019t really think much about \u2018Elm Street,\u2019 I was just going forward,\u201d Sholder said.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until a 30th anniversary panel for \u201cNightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy\u2019s Revenge\u201d at a fan convention, where most of the cast was there, including Patton and Englund that the film began to reenter his consciousness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI found out from Mark what had been going on. He left the business after \u2018Elm Street\u2019 because his agent said, \u2018You can\u2019t play straight. It\u2019s clear that you\u2019re not straight.\u2019 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 the whole thing,\u201d Sholder said.<\/p>\n
Sholder said that the movie\u2019s afterlife as a triumph of gay cinema was \u201cironic\u201d since \u201cit was never our intention.\u201d \u201cBut as I came to understand this, it\u2019s really great, because there\u2019s this whole group of people who can identify with this movie and feel that there\u2019s something in it for them. It\u2019s clearly in there and part of the story but that wasn\u2019t our point,\u201d Sholder said. \u201cBut I\u2019m really happy with this reading \u2013 it\u2019s being taught in colleges in queer studies courses and stuff like that. It\u2019s great. I\u2019m delighted.\u201d<\/p>\n
And you can be delighted by \u201cNightmare on Elm Street 2,\u201d which looks and sounds better than it maybe ever has before, as part of this new box set, which is available in stores and online now.<\/p>\n
The post \u2018Nightmare on Elm Street 2\u2019 Director Jack Sholder Had No Idea How Gay It Was, but Is Thrilled Anyway<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy\u2019s Revenge\u201d opened less than a year after Wes Craven\u2019s \u201cA Nightmare…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[136221,88,136220,136222,136218,136219,206,57150,134293,46646],"class_list":{"0":"post-249792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bob-shaye","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-freddy-kruger","11":"tag-freddys-revenge","12":"tag-jack-sholder","13":"tag-mark-patton","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-new-line-cinema","16":"tag-nightmare-on-elm-street","17":"tag-wes-craven"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}