Hello and welcome to Queer's Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media.

My name is Eli.

And I'm Jason.

And today we're talking about the 1985 film A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Freddy's Revenge.

We have some content warnings before we start this episode. The big one is discussion of

periodical homophobia throughout the episode, including discussion of the AIDS epidemic and

conversion therapy. The episode also contains discussion of misogyny within the slasher genre,

a brief mention of a sadomasochistic act, and a brief mention of

animal death in film. If any of that sounds like something that you would not like to listen to,

please feel free to skip this episode and listen to any of our other episodes instead.

Okay, so let's talk about a nightmare in Elm Street, too. So as I said, this movie came out

in 1985, which is technically just after the golden

age of the slasher film, which stretched from 1978 to 1984, but it's still very much

defined by that particular period in film history. Slashar movies are very often either

ignored or maligned by critics, and they have reputation for being very brainless or shallow

pieces of media. But when you do a little bit of digging, it becomes clear that, like Crystal

Lake, there's a lot going on beneath the surface of a slasher. And in this case, there's a lot that's

of interest to us as queer historians or media analysts as the case may be. So if you'll indulge me,

we're going to talk about a little bit of horror movie history first. And then move on to talking

about the surprising and seemingly unintended ways that this film is subversive and complicated

in terms of sexuality and gender. I feel like the public is generally aware of what a slasher

is, but I thought that I would start

...