Review: ‘Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street’ Celebrates the Gayest Horror Movie Ever Made

June 20, 2020

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street review 0 — Shudder

With all the craziness going on in the world right now, you’d be forgiven for it slipping your mind that we’re in the middle of Pride Month. I mean, you’d be forgiven for not even realizing we’re in June, considering 2020 has felt like time stopped in March (remember February, when we were allowed to go outside and high-five each other and stuff?). But alas it is June, it is Pride Month, and Shudder has brought Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street to the LGBTQ+ horror-loving masses.

The documentary, directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen, celebrates ‘the gayest horror movie ever made’, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge; or more specifically the movie’s lead – the first EVER Final Boy, Jesse Walsh – played by Mark Patton. It analyzes the movie’s perceived homoerotic subtext and tells Mark Patton’s story: the impact the movie had on his career, and the struggles of being a closeted gay actor in Hollywood during the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.

As soon as it was released, critics were talking about Freddy’s Revenge and its homoeroticism – gay bars, boys shower rooms, pants-down wrestling, you get the gist – yet the movie’s writer, David Chaskin, denied these subtexts for years. He firmly claimed that Mark Patton was the only thing that made it gay, and that he was the reason for many fans’ dislike and disdain of the movie.

Featuring interviews with various members of the cast, including Freddy himself, Robert Englund, it gives an insight into how they felt making the movie, and whether they were aware of the film’s questionable subtext. More importantly, though, it tells Mark’s story, from his humble beginnings and troubled youth, the early days of his promising career, and the role that should have made him but, in fact, broke him, all in the middle of a deadly HIV epidemic that made gays public enemy number one.

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is a touching, thought-provoking, and emotional ride, putting you in Mark Patton’s often uncomfortable shoes. After everything he’s been through, he gets what he wanted – an opportunity to speak face to face with Chaskin, to confront him about the story he wrote, and its impact on his life. Patton gets an apology (albeit a pretty half-assed, passive-aggressive one, in my opinion) from Chaskin, in which he admits (from a 2007 interview with Bloody Good Horror) that the film was meant to come across as homophobic, not homoerotic. Because…that makes it so much better.

We get to see that, thankfully, times have changed, and the film is now celebrated for what it is, acting as a source of inspiration to its LGBTQ+ fans. The analysis of the movie, from fans and professionals alike, will tick plenty of boxes for film studies nerds, looking at its depictions of gender as well as homosexuality, and the representation of bullying and inner demons within this movie and the genre as a whole.

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is available on Shudder and other VOD services now.