20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise

You might not have picked up on it, but Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is super focussed on homosexuality. Okay, chances are you did notice it: the lead is an insecure teenager trying to suppress something inside him, he can't sleep with his girlfriend because of that thing, and oh, there’s that scene where he ends up in a gay leather bar. 

It isn’t exactly subtle.

The interesting part is that almost nobody involved in the movie seemed to have any idea this was the case. Practically the entire crew has said that they were completely oblivious to the gay subtext at the time, but now they feel it’s incredibly obvious. 

As Producer Joel Soisson put it, “We made Nightmare 2 absolutely clueless that it had any gay overtones whatsoever, but looking back, it was so gay. It was amazing. All I can say is we were all incredibly naive or all incredibly latently gay.”

At least one person knew, though: screenwriter David Chaskin. “It was supposed to be subtext,” he recently admitted. “I started thinking about guys being unsure about their sexuality, and I thought, ‘oh, that’s pretty scary!’” So there you go. Nightmare 2 ended up being one of the only slasher films to feature a male protagonist, and as actor Mark Patton noted, “I may be the first male scream queen.”