Within the pop cultural imagination horror is often positioned as a low-brow, counter-cultural genre that screams in the face of bourgeois tastes. Yet even though the genre may define itself against mainstream or normative aesthetics, its typical fan communities nevertheless replicate the very restrictive structures the genre espouses to critique. Seemingly dominated by cis- heteronormative, white men who consider themselves gatekeepers of generic knowledge, fan communities – at least on the surface – carve out little space to actually challenge normative social values, including those that organize acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality.
Of course, the risk of normalizing this characterization of horror fandoms in the public sphere is that it erases all others who may participate and indeed help to build these communities. Additionally, the assumed alignment between horror and a very privileged fan community creates conditions whereby more marginalized participants feel the need to justify their engagement. Queer or trans fans who take pleasure in remediating horror characters or media may be confronted with backlash from others who are outwardly hostile toward their interpretations and their need to ‘politicize’ horror via their identities (see Vena and Burgess, 2022). As a result, queer and trans fans are left to defend not only their engagements with horror but their very existence in fandoms and society at large.
Although some may consider the above description to be a generalization, it is arguably the perception of who is involved in horror fan communities that is important rather than the anthropological descriptions of actual fan identities. The damage is already done if queer or trans fans perceive horror communities to be hostile and invalidating. This was my own perception of physical and online fan spaces as a trans-queer graduate student completing his doctoral work on the genre, and it gravely prohibited me from reaching out to others to share my insights and research. However, this attitude began to change when I encountered the homegrown Canadian magazine, Rue Morgue and their allied Faculty of Horror Podcast, both of which blend generic criticism with political commentary. Read more
