Review: ‘Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street’

I finally had the opportunity to catch Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, the documentary that explores the infamous homoerotism of the first sequel to Wes Craven’s 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Co-directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen, this heartfelt documentary examines this aspect of the oft-maligned ’85 sequel in a unique way—by focusing on the human toll the film’s reputation took on its leading man.

Mark Patton was just 25 when he was cast as the lead in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, quite the professional coup after leaving home in the Midwest at 17 to pursue his dreams of a career as an actor. Patton’s all-American good looks led to immediate bookings in national commercials, with his big break coming shortly thereafter when he landed a plum supporting role in the Broadway play Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, directed by Robert Altman and starring Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, and a pre-Misery Kathy Bates—a role he repeated in the subsequent film version. By the time he landed the role of Jesse Walsh in the Elm Street sequel, Patton—who was gay and closeted, as the times dictated—had moved out to Hollywood where he met and began a relationship with Dallas actor Timothy Patrick Murphy.

Despite its commercial success, Freddy’s Revenge was widely derided and eventually became known in the early days of Internet film analysis as "the gayest horror movie ever made." Although time—and evolving social mores—have been kind to the film and elevated it to the status of a cult classic and even revered because of its not-so-subtle-after-all gay subtext, Patton’s career became collateral damage. The actor was wrecked by the negative response to the film and comments about his performance. Following an episode of Hotel and a CBS Schoolbreak Special, in which he co-starred—ironically—with A Nightmare on Elm Street final girl Heather Langenkamp, his acting career came to an unceremonious end. His personal life was no better—Murphy would die, tragically, of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 29 and Patton’s own HIV-positive diagnosis would eventually follow, complicated when he came down with tuberculosis. He left Hollywood in due course upon his recovery, retreating down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he entered into decades of self-imposed exile—albeit with some newfound personal happiness in the form of a husband and an art store, where he sells works of his own creation, including a line of painted handbags he designed.

In 2010, Daniel Farrands, director of the exhaustive Elm Street documentary Never Sleep Again, tracked Patton down and entreated him to speak openly about his experiences and his legacy as part of the iconic film franchise. It was during his participation in Never Sleep Again that Patton came to realize just how dramatically the critical and cultural tide had begun to turn in favor of Freddy’s Revenge, with the film now hailed for the very thing that had caused him so much past anguish. Patton found himself applauded across the horror convention circuit, and that led to his desire to get his life story out into the world by developing a film (then) called There Is No Jesse. Unbeknownst to him, he would soon cross paths on social media with two aspiring filmmakers with a shared love for A Nightmare on Elm Street 2—and four years later, the trio gifts fans with Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street.

Chimienti and Jensen have crafted a polished and engaging documentary, utilizing interviews, archival footage, and a “day-in-the-life-of” approach as they follow Patton from one convention to another. Although the documentary threatens at times to burst at its seams with all that the filmmakers earnestly include here, it’s Patton—the film’s center—who grounds the proceedings with his candid, sometimes achingly bittersweet recollections of his journey. Watching Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, I found myself raging at times over the homophobic inner-workings of the Hollywood machine during the AIDS plague, cheering for Patton’s self-discovery and journey to reclaim his legacy at others. It’s hard not to find yourself in a puddle of tears watching how Patton is revered by the Elm Street fans and to feel the palpable sense of empowerment as he takes to the stage to rightfully affirm his place as horror’s original “final boy” while embracing the “scream queen” title that was once weaponized against him. 

The central conflict of the documentary is framed between Freddy’s Revenge screenwriter David Chaskin and Patton, with the latter holding firm to the claim that Chaskin disingenuously skirted responsibility for the film’s overtly gay subtext. Chaskin long-maintained that it was Patton’s performance that was responsible for the film’s gay overtones that unsettled audiences upon its release, even going on record with the proud admission that his screenplay was meant to be homophobic versus homoerotic. In this 2007 interview with Bloody Good Horror, Chaskin says:

“Yes, there was certainly some intentional subtext but it was intended to play homophobic rather than homoerotic. I thought about the demographics for these types of films (young, heterosexual males) and tried to imagine what kinds of things would truly frighten them, to the core. And scary dreams that make them, even momentarily, question their own sexuality seemed like a slam dunk to me.

If you really wanted to have fun, one might argue that the entire movie is a metaphor—Jesse is, in the end, finally able to control the monster inside him (his latent homosexuality) with the love of a good woman. Maybe they should show this film at one of those evangelical deprogramming sessions where they try to ‘fix’ gay people into regular Americans.

That said, there were certain choices that were made (e.g., casting) that, I think, pushed the subtext to a higher level and stripped away whatever subtlety there may have been. To this day, Jack Sholder says he read no such subtext into the script. It must have been by osmosis. At any rate, he should have seen it coming—when we opened in New York, we got a rave review in The Advocate.”

It’s here—with the resolution of this central conflict—that my one and only criticism with this otherwise pitch-perfect documentary comes into play: Chimienti and Jensen should have skipped it. It falls flat and lacks the requisite catharsis necessary to resolve the focal tension the film devotes much of its 99-minute running time to exploring. What should play as a pivotal moment in Patton’s liberation from this emotional shackle that he’s carried with him for more than three decades comes across as anticlimactic, with Chaskin’s “apology” being anything but. It’s a jarring moment of insincerity in what’s been nothing but a pervasive sense of sincerity throughout the rest of the film. Even Patton looks nonplussed. It’s an awkward scene that fails to give the audience the payoff it’s expecting—and the moment of unequivocal apology that Patton deserved.   

Yes, Chaskin is an asshole for intentionally injecting homophobia into his script, but I found Freddy’s Revenge director Jack Sholder far more culpable for his part in dodging accountability—and almost insultingly so. The film—as in, the one Sholder directed—includes a sequence in a gay bar (that was shot in an actual gay bar!), frequent male nudity, crotch shots, and glistening male chests, a bare-assed towel-whipping of a naked restrained man in the shower, a scene in which Freddy Krueger caresses Jesse's face before suggestively sticking a clawed finger in his mouth (which actor Robert Englund even admits was meant to be homoerotic), Patton in tighy-whities, Patton in a jockstrap, and Patton's butt-bumping solo dance to “Touch Me (All Night Long)” by Wish featuring Fonda Rae. That Sholder can claim no knowledge, no awareness of the gay subtext in his own movie is maddening to watch—especially in a later scene in which he basically tells Patton that it’s time to “get over it.” I was left shouting “WTF?!” at my television and wanting to throw the remote at Sholder’s clearly dishonest attempt to remove himself from any semblance of answerability by claiming naiveté. 

Chimienti and Jensen wisely employ a diversity of voices to fill their documentary’s requisite talking head roles, from the film’s cast and crew, to fans, to film scholars. UC Colorado Film Studies professor Andrew Scahill provides some of the film’s best academic moments, providing salient points in support of reclaiming A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as a progressive film about sexual identity. Drag performer Peaches Christ also speaks persuasively about the connection between horror and the queer experience. The reunion scenes between Patton and his NOES2 cast members have a trepidatious energy running throughout—no one (besides maybe character actor Marshall Bell) seems completely at ease. Still, it’s great to see Kim Myers, Clu Gulager, Robert Rusler, JoAnn Willette, Englund, and Bell all together again.

The filmmakers take on a lot—from online bullying and the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis on the gay community to final girl film theory and queer cinema. Despite its ambitions that—in less capable hands—could have derailed the train, Chimienti and Jensen somehow manage to keep this hefty cinematic locomotive on the tracks, ultimately crafting an intensely personal, often painful, and surprisingly moving exploration of the life of a young gay man who reached for his Hollywood star during the Reagan era only to watch it fall from the sky as quickly as it began to rise against the backdrop of AIDS and the homophobia of the period. While Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street may have started out as a passion project for two gay horror fanboys and a lost celebrity they connected with online, it establishes itself as an instantly significant contribution to the oeuvre of film and the canon of LGBTQ studies. That Chimienti and Jensen are able to, in effect, teach an important lesson in queer history to a predominantly heterosexual audience by following Patton’s journey from closeted Missourian teenager and aspiring actor to self-described “Greta Garbo of horror” to his creative rebirth is nothing short of remarkable—especially for two first-time documentarians. As Patton says near the end of the film:

“My generation is gone. I have no friends my age. I want people to know their history. I want them to at least hear from somebody that the way the world is now…it wasn’t this way five minutes ago.”

Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is a heartrending requiem to missed potential and man’s ability to rewrite his narrative—tracing a proud scream queen’s journey from promise and unlimited potential through the darkness of crippling pathos and out into the light of hard-won personal peace. It’s about the promise of a second act no matter how long the first one runs over. 

SCREAM QUEENS: A Bloody Mess of Good Fun

Comedy and horror are two distinct genres, each with its own formulas and structures, devices and characteristic stylings. Blending the two is tricky stuff and, inevitably, one genre proves dominant when this hybrid model is attempted. In the SCARY MOVIE franchise, for example, comedy is the dominant genre at play, with the laughs outnumbering – even overshadowing – any frights. Conversely, in the films of the SCREAM franchise, scares trump the laughs in equal measure. 

So when Ryan Murphy, then best known for the straightforward comedy GLEE and upfront horror of the AMERICAN HORROR STORY anthology series, announced a comedy-horror anthology called SCREAM QUEENS back in October of 2014, the passionate pop culture junkie himself had to know that successfully pulling off the feat was a tall order at the outset. Then again, maybe not, as Murphy seemed to think – with arguable arrogance or naiveté – that he was creating something new here with frequent collaborators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan.

Expectations were high. Murphy – who had by that time developed both a passion and a penchant for successfully casting actresses of a certain age – wooed perennial scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis back to the small screen amidst negotiations of limited time on the show’s first season New Orleans set. Anticipation was also high because Murphy had proven himself adept in both genres. As the FOX and Murphy PR machines launched massive amounts of advance press – including a much-touted and successful dual AHS-SCREAM QUEENS panel at San Diego Comic Con – SCREAM QUEENS promised to be a slam-dunk. 

SCREAM QUEENS bowed on September 22nd, 2015, to decidedly mixed reviews from critics and (seemingly) lackluster ratings, attracting a disappointing 4.04 million viewers while lagging in same-night numbers behind shows on CBS, NBC, and ABC. Being beat by THE MUPPETS reboot didn’t ease what must have been Murphy’s initial pain. But Nielsen’s first delayed-viewing snapshot of the season would tell a different story, with SCREAM QUEENS realizing a 65% gain – the night’s biggest in both raw numbers and percentage according to Nielsen’s “live plus-3” estimates.

As reported by VARIETY, SCREAM QUEENS would prove to be an example of modern-day viewing habits, with only a fraction of the show’s audience watching live when it aired and viewership increasing by 189% when time-shifted viewing and multi-platform viewers for the entire season were factored in. The inaugural season ended up bringing in a total audience of about 8.1 million viewers, no doubt aided by the buzz-worthy show’s sizable social media presence.

Ratings and critical notice aside, the first season of SCREAM QUEENS was a mixed bag. The plot for the show’s thirteen-episode first season focuses on a string of gory murders plaguing the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority at fictional Wallace University, triggered by events linked to a twenty-year-old murder mystery and cover-up. Curtis plays Dean Cathy Munsch, nemesis to the sorority’s president, Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts). Dean Munsch wants to see the snobby sorority system dismantled; Chanel wants to rule over it with a Prada-coiffed iron fist. Interrupting this battle of feminist wills is a red devil-masked serial killer who dispatches at least one hapless cast member each episode in increasingly outlandish ways.

Murphy and company wear their horror influences proudly on their sleeves with the elaborate murder set pieces here harkening back to the high camp sensibility of the giallo films of the mid- to late-70’s. Highlights of the pilot alone include a maid getting her face melted off in deep fryer, a prank involving a spray-tan tank spiked with hydrochloric acid, and the Red Devil tooling around on a lawnmower decapitating a sorority sister buried up to her neck in the sorority house lawn. Visually, the show is a treat with garish colors and flamboyant couture that give the gruesome proceedings a highly-stylized aesthetic.

Cast is uniformly excellent, with Murphy’s knack for attracting talent on full display. Roberts seems born to play the uber-bitchy Chanel, with Billie Lourde (real-life daughter of Carrie Fisher and granddaughter of Debbie Reynolds), Abigail Breslin, and pop ingénue Ariana Grande ably rounding out her clique of Chanels. Keke Palmer (in a breakout role here) plays sassy KKT pledge Zayday Williams, while Skyler Samuels plays fellow pledge Grace Gardner, who’s drawn into a Nancy Drew-like amateur detective role as the murderous goings-on escalate. Oliver Hudson (replacing originally cast Joe Manganiello) plays Samuels’ alumni father, while Diego Boneta takes on boyfriend-sidekick duties as journalism student Pete Martinez.

On the fraternity side, Glen Powell emerges as a real breakout star playing the narcissistic dumb jock Chad Radwell, President of the Dickie Dollar Scholars; pop hunk Nick Jonas as Boone, his gay best friend and fraternity brother; English actor Lucien Laviscount as the appropriately named Earl Grey, and YouTube twins Aaron and Austin Rhodes as Roger and Dodger, respectively. Niecy Nash is the genuine scene-stealer throughout the show’s first season, her uproarious portrayal of skittish security guard Denise Hemphill marked by over-the-top shrieking, screaming, and zippy one-liners.

Interestingly, the show’s first season both succeeds and fails in the same key creative aspect: the writing. With writing duties shared and handed off between Murphy, Falchuk, and Brennan (or MFB, abbreviated), one could reasonably expect some problems with consistency. But what we get with the first installment of SCREAM QUEENS is painstaking attention to detail when it comes to character dialogue and an overall disjointed larger narrative.  MFB have an uncanny knack for dialogue, and their work here on SCREAM QUEENS is exemplary with lines that snap, crackle, and pop with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. Roberts’ lines, in particular, are razor-sharp with snarky, cringe-worthy political incorrectness. Her petulant coffee-shop rant over an incorrectly made pumpkin spice latte boils over with brilliant social commentary on millennials and entitlement. Curtis, meanwhile, is handed lovingly-crafted monologues that anchor the show’s abject silliness in weightier themes of feminism, politics, and the inherent evils of social hierarchies.

Plot-wise, SCREAM QUEENS maintains strict adherence to the slasher formula while borrowing heavily from Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE model, complete with a sizable body count that slowly narrows down the identity of the killer through a bloody process of attrition and dramatic drawing room-like denouement. One would think that such a solid (if clichéd) narrative structure would lend itself to an easily sustainable level of coherence – but it doesn’t. MFB, while giddily constructing tongue-twisting lines of deliciously glib dialogue for their characters to spew at each other, quickly lose sight of what matters most in a murder mystery – plot. The narrative zigs and zags all over the place, with illogical twists and turns that smack of convenience. It’s as if MFB use the parody element of SCREAM QUEENS as an excuse to lazily eschew any and all semblances of logic.

The first season of SCREAM QUEENS ultimately wallows in its own absurdity, with cartoon pacing and overblown…well, everything. It’s gaudy, glitzy excess in every sense of the word. But it’s deceptively mindless fun, with an underlying satirical brilliance that peeks through its garish coating in snippets of spot-on pop culture deconstruction.

Halfway through the first season, it was obvious to most that SCREAM QUEENS would enjoy a single-season run. Viewers were torn – too macabre for comedy fans, too silly for the horror crowd – and ratings were dropping. The show would finish its inaugural season on December 8th, 2015, with 2.53 million viewers, losing 1.51 million of its screaming queens along the way. Although Curtis garnered a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance in a Television Series by an Actress – Musical or Comedy (which she’d lose to newcomer Rachel Bloom), and the show won both a People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Comedy and a Critics’ Choice Television Award for Most Exciting New Series, cancellation seemed all but a certainty.

But Hollywood is a weird little machine that plays by its own set of rules – and Ryan Murphy clearly boasts some serious say-so around town. It was announced in January that SCREAM QUEENS would indeed be back for another go-round.

Five episodes into the show’s sophomore season, SCREAM QUEENS seems to be finding its tonal footing. MFB have opted to set the new season in a hospital for medical oddities, already seeming a more authentic match for the show’s Grand Guignol-style of madcap macabre. Curtis is back as Cathy Munsch – now an honorary PhD who buys the hospital for as-yet unknown reasons – and MFB, wisely, have made her more front and center (likely to do with the more Curtis-convenient Los Angeles set). Niecy Nash also returns as Denise Hemphill, now an FBI Special Agent, but no less crass and smart-alecky. Zayday, along with the surviving members of the Chanels, are all back as medical students, with the ageless John Stamos and (thoroughly unappealing) Taylor Lautner joining the ensemble as doctors. Lea Michelle, whose first season deeds have finally caught up to her, is also back as Hester, now hysterically Hannibal Lecter-like, as is Glen Powell’s even-funnier himbo scene-stealer Chad Radwell. Kirstie Alley rounds out the second season cast as Ingrid Hoffel, the stern hospital administrator.     

To differentiate between a first season that failed to meet expectations that the advance hype promised and the second season reboot, Murphy and company have wisely opted to visually distinguish SCREAM QUEENS, version 2.0, from its predecessor. While the highly-stylized aesthetic that made the first season such a visual treat to watch is maintained, the show has ditched the bubblegum pink and red hues that colored fictional Wallace University and the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority and adopted an alien-green and blue color palette to tint its dingy hospital interiors. The visuals pop amid the lurid, nightmarish colors.

More importantly, MFB have seemingly settled into a creative comfort zone with the writing, opting for ghoulish comedy versus humorous horror. It’s a small distinction some might dismiss as semantics, but it’s key here. It’s no longer horror trying to be edgy with the humor; it’s comedy trying to be edgy with the horror. The dialogue still snaps, and MFB continue to write deliciously sharp soliloquies for Curtis.

Unfortunately, it may be too little, too late for the millions of initial viewers who gave up on the series. Ratings for the second season premiere were down by almost 50%, with World Series and election night preemptions doing little to keep attention-deficit viewers in place and focused in subsequent weeks on the macabre mayhem at the CURE Institute.

Prediction: SCREAM QUEENS is headed for almost-certain cancellation following its sophomore run. Murphy will move Curtis over to AMERICAN HORROR STORY in a much-ballyhooed return to her roots or to one of his other properties, depending upon the themes of future installments of AMERICAN CRIME STORY and FEUD. I’m already squealing in anticipation of shared AHS scenes between Curtis and Kathy Bates, so I’m rooting firmly for the former scenario. Roberts will also return to the AHS fold, and it’s not the last of Powell or Michelle we’ll see in the Murphy universe either. SCREAM QUEENS, the concept and the show, will go down with a lackluster legacy of having more style than substance, likely being better remembered in the Curtis filmography versus television history itself.

Thinking of Tina...

Just learned today in doing research for Butcher Knives and Body Counts that actress Lar Park Lincoln, best known to Friday the 13th fans as Tina from the iconic film franchise’s seventh “New Blood” installment, is battling breast cancer. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy for the rare (1 in 10) form of breast cancer known as Lobular and is scheduled for a double mastectomy following treatment.

Lincoln has always been one of my personal favorites from the slasher genre’s “final girl” canon. In addition to her Friday the 13th role, she also starred as Kate in House II: The Second Story and as the delicious villainess Linda Fairgate on Knot’s Landing. It was on the latter that I really gained an appreciation for her work as an actress. I threatened to boycott the show when word of her exit made the rounds (alas, CBS did not heed my warning...) and I actually remember crying when her character’s throat was slit in comeuppance for her misdeeds(!). While she’s continued to act in small roles, Lincoln moved back to her native Texas to raise her two children (from late husband Michael Lincoln who died of cancer in 1995). Since then, she’s earned a reputation as one of Texas’ most elite career coaches for actors, models and pageants and launched her own line of QVC products.

What I especially like about Lincoln is that the Texas-born blue-eyed beauty has never renounced her humble horror roots, instead embracing her notoriety by participating in numerous Friday the 13th reunions and documentaries, including the new His Name Was Jason. Even now, battling this horrible disease, she exhibits an inspirational resolve and terrific sense of humor (from her website):

“Have you heard those rumors that "Lar has cancer?” Well, yes, they are true. Early October I got the dreaded Breast cancer call - not really a call more like a moan...Darn it…I have such great boobs!! I’m the only actress in the world left with real boobs. What a terrific claim to fame!! I have a rare form called Lobular - a version that is about 1 in 10 and doesn’t show up on mammograms! Go figure! At least they have named it after me – lobuLAR. LOL!”

Sending out love and positive vibes to you, Lar. Remember: you beat Jason Voorhees. You can – and will – beat this, too.