Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) One of the reasons why I enjoy reading non-traditional perspectives on film is that they often offer compelling takes on things that would normally escape me in part or completely. Queer cinema theory, for instance, is one way to unlock the secret history of Hollywood, as it employed several gay cast and crew who brought their sensibilities to the big screen even when it was forbidden to be too explicit about it. That’s how, after a recent viewing of Nightmare on Elm Street 2, I learned about the substantial (but barely-visible-to-me) gay subtext to the film—the coding of the male protagonist as a female character, the references to mid-1980s Los Angeles gay culture, male-gaze cinematography, and the coded relationship between protagonist and antagonist. I was very, very late to the party on this one—gay audiences since the release of the film immediately noticed the almost-text-subtext, and the star of the film, Mark Patton, had to confront the stigma of playing a character seen as gay at a time (mid-Reagan administration, height of the AIDS crisis and reactionary politics) when he was closeted like every other gay actor in Hollywood. Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street details the ways the film was made with gay allusions, how the director was blind to them (“too busy with the details to see the whole” is the official excuse), and the lingering impacts of its reception on Patton’s career. The film also acts as a yardstick to measure progress in sexual orientation inclusivity within the film industry since 1985, as Patton left Hollywood but was eventually recognized and found a second (third?) career as an activist telling his own story and advocating for greater inclusiveness in Hollywood. Much of the film’s structure is built around a less convincing quest for truth-seeking, as Patton long resented screenwriter David Chaskin’s denial that he had crafted the film’s screenplay with gay subtext. This leads to a somewhat disappointing “confrontation” between the two men that leaves Patton unsatisfied and viewers wondering, “Geez, quit while you’re ahead, won’t you?” Still, the rest of Scream, Queen is quite interesting on its own—a sliver of queer theory as applied to a narrow, but welcoming field—genre horror in its wonderful diversity.