Slowly, painfully, and with many inaccurate representations, LGBTQ people have made it into almost all genres of mainstream movies. We’ve seen gay romance on the big screen with movies like Brokeback Mountain, drama with Philadelphia, and even rom-com with The Kids Are Alright– but one genre where gay people still haven’t seemed to enter the mainstream is horror.
A notable exception would be American Horror Story, which has included gay and lesbian relationships since season 1 of its show, but in regards to the big screen there have been no notable horror movies that included queer people. Many people credit the Nightmare on Elm Street series with being notoriously homoerotic, and other cult films such as Scream, or The Forsaken- but these have all been incredibly subversive representations that went over the heads of most straight viewers.
However, if you delve deep enough into Netflix or a host of illegal streaming sites you can find a few low-budget horror movies that never made it farther than a DVD release which feature openly queer characters as a part of their stories. Movies like Hellbent or Contracted may not be the best representations of gay people, but they do explicitly acknowledge the queerness of the main characters rather than queer-baiting with subtext.
But why do we have to dig through sketchy streaming websites and Netflix queues to find horror movies that feature queer people?
Why has the LGBTQ managed to make it to the theaters in every genre except horror? The answer has a lot to do with the history of the genre itself and the sexism and moral beliefs ingrained within it.
Horror films have long existed as a way to cater to distorted male fantasies of sex and femininity. They love to show scantily-clad women helpless to defend themselves from a masked killer, or tortured while wearing nothing more than a bikini. These scenes, and ultimately the films that employ them, are made for the enjoyment of straight men. They reinforce cultural stereotypes of women’s helplessness and feed into a sadistic desire to see women hurt. These situations encourage the hyper-masculinity of male viewers, making the horror film industry one that is heavily catered towards straight, hyper-masculine men, men who have no desire to see gay people in “their” movies.
Horror movies also often portray the murderous events that happen in their plots as a result of the immorality of their characters. In Halloween, each character killed is a sexually-active teenager, at the end only the “pure” virgin survives. While Nightmare on Elm Street may be know for its homoeroticism, Dustin Goltz argues in his book, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, that Freddy Kreuger serves as the stereotype of the “predatory and monstrous older gay man”. He attacks young boys in sexually suggestive way and feeds into the widespread perception that old gay men are pedophiles. As one Vice article pointed out, many horror films seem to serve as “Christian propaganda” in which those who defy God by lacking faith or experimenting with other religions are punished by a supernatural killer.
So what is a queer kid with an affinity for horror to do during this spooky month? Well you can check out this list of gay horror movies compiled by Philly Mag that feature (minus Nightmare on Elm Street) openly queer characters and lots of blood. You can also push for better representation in horror, all genres of film, because we all deserve to be scared!
