Who's your favorite final boy/male horror survivor?
It’s gotta be Jesse from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
There aren’t a lot of examples of this trope but he’s the one that always springs to mind for me. I’m pretty big on that movie in general, honestly! It gets a lot of hate because people suck but I think it’s low-key one of the better, and certainly one of the most unique, Freddy films. It has incredible practical effects, a dark tone more in line with the original film than any other entry in the series, and a lovable cast - and Jesse, played by Mark Patton, is at the center of it all.
I like that he’s not another gratuitously macho stock character and that he reacts to the absolutely fucked up prospect of dealing with Fred Krueger with the degree of terror that any real human being, regardless of gender, would. Male horror protagonists are rarely painted with the same realistic strokes as survival girls and it’s refreshing to see, even thirty odd years after the fact. If you disqualify characters that basically exist as macho man wish fulfillment avatars like Ash from The Evil Dead or El Wray from Planet Terror, awesome though they both are, how many male horror protagonists can you even think of? That’s why I like Jesse so much! He’s far more like a real person and I really dig that.
I also think it’s fantastic that Mark Patton himself has re-emerged in the horror scene in recent years and become an LGBT+ rights activist in the process. He’s been working for years now on Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, a documentary about his experience as a gay actor trying to make it in the ‘80s, and I can’t wait to finally see it because it looks like a really important film.
But yeah. If any of y’all are still sleeping on Elm Street 2 because of its unjust reputation online as a “lesser” Freddy movie - don’t. It’s awesome.
turnnoffyourmind
2087
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
titsay
izzy806
