Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
A touching, sensitive documentary traces actor Mark Patton’s journey from horror icon to self-imposed obscurity and back again. Somehow, a whole lot of people missed what A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was about the first time they saw it. I certainly did as a small-town teenager in the mid 80s, having met exactly one (1) gay person up to that point. We all like to smugly claim that of course we knew it the whole time, but most of us didn’t, not back then. All we knew was that it had an odd vibe for a slasher movie, and that it was unusual for its young male protagonist, Jesse (played by Mark Patton), to be treated like a Final Girl, hero and victim at the same time. Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is an insightful, sensitive look at how Patton’s role in the film first destroyed his career, then became an touchstone for gay horror fans years later. It also touches upon the AIDS crisis, and how we’ve only barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to Hollywood’s casual homophobia. Patton was a promising young actor who had worked with no less than Robert Altman when he was cast in Freddy’s Revenge. Though it was a modest hit, critics and audiences alike had no idea what to think of the “subtext” of Jesse being picked up by his leather-clad gym teacher at a gay bar, or that same teacher being whipped bare-ass in a shower before Freddy kills him, or the delicate, rather effete Jesse often being filmed wearing little more than his underwear, or Jesse uttering the line “He’s inside me! And he wants to take me again!” There was a certain level of having one’s cake and eating it too, particularly by director Jack Sholder and screenwriter David Chaskin, in that Freddy’s Revenge sold itself by trying something new and different, but coyly refusing to articulate what that something actually was. However, Patton knew, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of “subtext” in the film. Closeted at the time, and with a live-in lover who presented as straight in teen fan magazines (Timothy Patrick Murphy of Dallas), he knew what playing a gay character (or even one that just coded as gay) could do to one’s acting career, let alone actually being gay. As if facing a potential lifetime of typecasting before his career had barely started wasn’t bad enough, once Freddy’s Revenge was proclaimed to be “the gayest horror movie of all time,” Sholder denied it, and Chaskin blamed it on Patton. Dejected, disillusioned, and thrown under the bus, Patton abandoned his career to move off the grid to Mexico, becoming “the Greta Garbo of horror movies” for many years. Continue Reading →