Browsing Tag

queer horror

Posted on May 8, 2023

Queers to the Front: On Creating Queer Horror Communities, a Conversation with Dani Bethea, Kay Lynch, and Andrea Subissati

Guest Post

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

a group of young people stand in defiance of people trying to oppress them
Posted on August 12, 2022

Rewriting the Slasher: Talking They/Them (2022)

Podcast

In this episode, we’re deep diving into John Logan’s highly polarizing They/Them (2022). A slasher film that takes place at a conversion camp, the film drew early criticism on social media with many wondering if there aren’t some topics that should be off limits. But what does that mean for a genre like horror that is predicated on exploring taboo and violating social norms? We’re spoiling the hell out of this movie, so stay tuned!

Look for this episode on your favorite podcast platform or listen via the link below.

Links to references in this podcast:

man looking at a rat
Posted on November 19, 2020

A Boy’s Best Friend: Willard’s coming out story

Guest Post

Bruce Davison’s turn as Willard Stiles, the vengeful misfit with an uncanny ability to commune with rodents in the 1971 horror-thriller Willard (Daniel Mann), bears obvious resemblance to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Blonde hair and hammy delivery aside, he possesses the same beakish face and boyish shyness pierced through occasionally by a seething rage. His character is likewise defined by what seems to be an Oedipal maldevelopment and a solitary existence in a decrepit house, except hidden within the home’s cellar-as-subconscious is not the rotted corpse of his overbearing mother but an army of rats he has befriended and trained to do his bidding.

What precisely those rats represent was a question of consternation for some contemporary critics, notably Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, who both panned the film while only ironically nudging toward a possible social critique. “A major urban problem,” suggests the former in his typically droll, conservative tone. Ebert comes down on a deep-seated need “to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by rats.” Given the legacy of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) however, and Willard’s own peculiar place within the horror canon, it seems just as likely that Willard’s rats have a thing or two to say about sexual pathology. Read more

man on beach watches man on water
Posted on August 22, 2020

Stranger by the Lake and Subtractive Spectatorship

Elizabeth Erwin

With its minimalistic storytelling and melancholy dissection of loneliness, Stranger by the Lake is a quiet film that sneaks up on you and wheedles its way into your psyche. I first watched Alain Guiraudie’s 2014 masterpiece at the beginning of quarantine and months later, it has yet to fully leave my subconscious. The story itself is a deceptively simple one. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), while frequenting a lake known to be a gay cruising site, befriends loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao) and falls in love with the murderous Michel (Christophe Paou). But this isn’t a film about plot. It’s a film about the horrific choices that can emerge from our extreme human need for connection.

Stranger by the Lake is marketed as an erotic film but that framing fails to celebrate how horror conventions, especially in relation to dread building, fuel the film’s atmosphere. Its deployment of Adam Lowenstein’s theory of “subtractive spectatorship,” in particular, is a fascinating reflection of how landscape can inform our readings of queer desire within the film. According to Lowenstein, “subtractive spectatorship” names “a desire to subtract or erase human beings from the landscape, to leave it empty,” and he adds that topographical camera shots of nature spur a desire in the audience to see the landscape depopulated. Lowenstein explored this paradigm in part through Mario Bava’s brilliant giallo Ecologia del delitto/A Bay of Blood (1971), and so the particular process of depopulation he described was the result of a killer systematically offing the human interlopers in clever and often aesthetically interesting ways. But that’s not the case in Stranger in the Lake. Read more

Posted on August 13, 2020

The Return of the Girl-Monster – Part 2

Sara McCartney

In his groundbreaking book on queerness and horror, Harry Benshoff looked to the star of Cat People (1942) as not only a particularly sympathetic monster but a rare example of lesbian subtext in the early horror film: “Irena’s monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men […] serves as an oft-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the films of this era.”[1] The early girl-monster is associated with sexuality that deviates from the strict heterosexual norm, whether by vampirically seducing and draining young women as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), or by a more complicated mix of frigidity and passion. Irena could be read as queer in her avoidance of heterosexual intimacy, or read as too attracted to men, such that she is prone to improper and violent explosions of passion. The modern girl-monster, who almost exclusively preys on men, has left behind the Countess’s predatory lesbianism for the more ambiguous waters of Irena’s fraught passions. How queer is it? That depends on the movie.

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