On the first and only Friday the 13th of 2022, I sat down with my brother to marathon the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Apparently, he had only seen the first film prior to this day, which seems almost impossible to me knowing how many times I rewatched film after film in the series during my high school years. Our childhood home isn’t very big—in fact, Nancy’s home is practically a mansion in comparison—yet he managed to miss all four years of my Freddymania while under the same small roof?

In contrast to some of my friends who had parents that did things like show them Darkness Falls when they lost their first tooth, my family was more conservative in their media choices—no video games with guns and no movies with slashing allowed! And so I went through the world ignorant of the sights horror had to show me, until the perfect storm of circumstances.

Three things happened in 2009—Johnny Depp won his 2nd sexiest man alive award, Tim Burton was at his peak popularity amongst teens, and my mom subscribed to Blockbuster’s DVD-by-mail subscription service. Suddenly I had access to any film I wanted through the mail, and as much as I don’t like to talk about him now, the fact of the time was I wanted Johnny Depp movies. Enter teenaged me’s new favorite trivia fact: What was Johnny Depp’s debut film? A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Yes, A Nightmare on Elm Street was unquestionably the film that got me into horror movies. Soon after watching it for the first time, our Blockbuster rental list was filled with every horror movie title I had ever heard mentioned. However A Nightmare on Elm Street was more than just a gateway into other horror films, it became a way of life for me and my friends throughout high school. We watched every movie in the franchise repeatedly. My nickname soon became Nancy. My first Facebook account was made under the name Nancy Krueger. My friend named her cat Grady in honor of Jessie’s perfectly delivered line “Shut up, Grady!”. The 2010 remake was our first horror movie in theaters. Our humor was based almost entirely on inside jokes about the films. It was a devotion that continues to be unparalleled in my life’s history.

Twenty years before Freddy Krueger hit the entertainment scene, a phenomenon called Beatlemania swept the nation. In their 1992 book chapter, “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, authors Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jocabs theorize about what lead teen girls to riot in the name of idol worship. The answer is one of the usual suspects: Sex (and society's pushback against it). Teen girls were expected to be the gatekeepers of sexual propriety. They had to learn to offer enough of themselves to maintain popularity with boys, while always stopping short of anything that could ruin their reputation as pure.

Their sexual morality, and ability to abandon it, was seen as their main social currency. Their decisions to allow teen boys certain liberties with their bodies while always drawing a line at intercourse was seen as both a way to gain social status and achieve the ultimate goal of marriage. Eventually giving her husband her virginity was seen as a gift the young woman would exchange for his gift of a nice house and children. The burden of this sexual repression caused young women to seek a safe outlet for their sexual expression. Their distance from the Beatles, along with the band's more androgynous nature, allowed them to explore their sexual energy without the fears and weight of real intercourse.

Although Freddymania didn’t sweep the nation at the same volume as Beatlemania, my friends and I were far from the only people to experience it. In his 1985 New York Times review of Freddy’s Revenge, Aljean Harmetz mentioned that Robert Englund received love notes addressed to Freddy from adolescent girls. In a separate New York Times review of the same film, writer Janet Malsin likens Freddy to Indiana Jones– perhaps because of his hat… or perhaps because she recognized they’re both some of cinema's greatest sex symbols. Past Fangoria articles used phrases like “beloved” and “all-American” to describe Krueger.

What compels teen girls to write love notes in honor of a monstrous child-molesting killer? While my friends and I never sent Robert Englund a letter, we were enamored with the eroticism of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Almost all of our rhetoric surrounding the films was sexual innuendo. Our most consistent running joke involved telling each other that Freddy was ready to take one of us to his secret cave for sexual relations. (Why it was a cave instead of a boiler room I honestly have no idea at this point. Perhaps because caves can be an innuendo in their own right.) Most explicit of all was the notebook we titled Nancy’s Diary, where we wrote sexual scenes from the perspective of a Nancy who accepted—and enjoyed—her fate as Freddy’s girlfriend.

Horror and its monsters are often linked to interpretations of both oppression and repression in society. With a culture that can’t even get on the same page regarding teenagers’ rights to be taught their own sexual anatomy, teenage sexuality is without a doubt something repressed in our country. That repression only becomes more stringent when looking at members of marginalized groups. While a lot has changed from the days of Beatlemania and even the debut of Freddy Krueger, teen girls and LGBT+ youth continue to be more punished for sexual exploration than their straight, cisgender male counterparts through higher levels of ostracization, and even violence, after sexual expression. It is easy to feel like one’s sexual awakening is dirty, grimy, and monstrous if you belong to a marginalized group or were brought up in a family that surrounds sex with shame. In these situations giving in to the gritty, forbiddenness of the charming Freddy’s sexual undertones can feel like a release from guilt and a celebration of one’s own unclean sexuality.

I’ve mentioned Nancy a lot, but it wasn’t her story that truly held the attention of my friends and me. The golden child of the franchise for us was always A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. We said it was because of the quotable lines, Jessie’s fantastic scream, and that extra something special in the line delivery, but we always knew exactly what made those elements interesting—they were all so gay.

All of us naive, bible belt teens were like straight-laced Brad and Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Freddy was our Dr. Frankenfurter and Jessie our Rocky, opening us up to the possibilities of queerness. Similar to Brad and Janet’s journey from first meeting the good people of Transexual Transylvania to experiencing their own sexual perversions, the queerness of Freddy’s Revenge started as something for us to gawk at but ended up being what we related to the most. Just as the Beatles’ androgyny made teen girls of the 60s feel safe, the campiness of the film and the perverse nature of the Freddy Kreuger character made Freddy’s Revenge a safe place to explore a way of being that our community wanted to hide from us.