Robert Englund Would Like to See A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Get a Reboot

The last entry in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is the 2010 reboot of the original film, though iconic Freddy Krueger performer Robert Englund thinks it would be interesting for a new film in the series to reboot the first sequel in the franchise, 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. On the surface, that first sequel followed a similar trajectory to the events of the original film, but with a new hero, though many audiences have praised the film for its many allegories about a teen-aged boy struggling with his sexuality, a theme that Englund thinks would be much more fascinating to explore in a new film.

“The secret of Nightmare on Elm Street is loss of innocence and the kids need to be like Midwestern kids, they can’t be hip, chic, junkie kids,” Englund shared with Too Fab. “They have to be middle American kids that think they’re a little hip and they are co-opted by evil and they lose their innocence on all levels; sexual, violence, murder, death, realization of their parents’ flaws, all of those things.”

He added, “If they redid Nightmare 2, for instance, and really deal with the subtext, Freddy toying with that boy’s sexuality. But the fact that we’re much more comfortable with that now, I think it would be really fun to have Freddy play with one kid who’s gay. Maybe one boy is not. Play with them. Tempt them. Force him out of the closet or back into the closet and we can do that. Audiences would accept that now. Freddy would do that because he’s in your head. But it is going to take somebody very clever to do that.”

The film’s star, Mark Patton, was closeted himself at the time of filming and has claimed that the filmmakers regularly modified the script during the production to lean into those homosexual themes. Writer David Chaskin, however, claimed for years that Patton himself chose to lean into those themes to play the character that way. In 2010, Chaskin opened up about intentionally incorporating those themes into the film.

“Homophobia was skyrocketing and I began to think about our core audience — adolescent boys — and how all of this stuff might be trickling down into their psyches at an age when raging hormones often produce dreams and urges that make them (if only unconsciously) begin to question their own sexuality,” Chaskin previously revealed. “My thought was that tapping into that angst would give an extra edge to the horror.”

Patton chronicles his journey with the film in the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.

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