‘Scream, Queen!’ New Doc Explores Actor Mark Patton’s Encounter with Queer Fear & HIV
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A new documentary called Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street features actor Mark Patton, who made his debut in the second entry into The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and subsequently found himself blacklisted because according to IndieWire, “as he puts it: “I wake up in the middle of the first movie that I’m the lead actor in, and realize that there’s a gay subtext in it.”
Patton’s wild ride provides the backbone of Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street, a fascinating and entertaining documentary that explores Patton’s rise to fame, subsequent disappearance from the public eye, and eventual reclamation of his queer cult figure legacy.
“In the mid-1980s, Patton contracted HIV from his then-boyfriend, Dallas star Timothy Patrick Murphy, who passed away shortly thereafter. Patton almost didn’t make it, but he held on long enough for the introduction of “the AIDS cocktail,” otherwise known as combination antiretroviral therapy. The fallout from Nightmare 2 combined with the horrors of AIDS and his own diagnosis led his mental health to deteriorate. He abandoned Hollywood altogether and hightailed it to Mexico, earning him the title “the Greta Garbo of horror.” It wasn’t until years later, with the dawn of the internet, that he realized he had become retroactively famous to horror fans the world over.”
Nightmare 2 has since become a cult classic, often called the gayest horror film ever made.
Photo above, Patton in Nightmare 2.
