Friday the 13th: Queer for Fear
Season's greetings, dears!
My heart belongs to the summer, but my soul belongs to spooky season. So a Friday the 13th in June—Pride month, no less!—is pretty much this moody bisexual’s version of a Christmas miracle. My horror group chat is celebrating the occasion by watching some queer horror classics tonight. If you’d like to join in the spooky spirit, here are some of my favourite queer horror movies to get you going. (And if spookiness is not your thing, here’s my Live. Laugh. Lesbian playlist to get that vibe going.)
How many of these movies made me say “this is the gayest movie I’ve ever seen”? Let’s! Find! Out!
Rope (1948)
Rope was one of Hitchcock’s many formal experimentations—it was filmed to look like one continuous take, though Matt Remmick probably has thoughts about the hidden stitches. And it opens with the two leads, Brandon and Philip, strangling their friend to death for no real reason. They then hide the body in a trunk in the center of the room, and proceed to host a dinner party. It’s the 1940s, and the Hays Code is in full swing, so queerness and villainy are essentially synonymous. The question of whether anyone will discover the victim’s body, hidden in plain sight, is essentially synonymous with the question of anyone will discover the murderers’ queerness, also hidden in plain sight. Jimmy Stewart plays their pompous former schoolteacher, whose Randian worldview and implicit bi-curiosity originally set these boys off on their path of sin and destruction. All in all, this movie belongs squarely in the “Hitchcock was a lil freak” category, and it’s the gayest movie I’ve ever seen.
The Hunger (1983)
Maybe not the gayest movie I’ve ever seen, but certainly one of the most stylish. The vibes are undeniable. Catherine Deneuve, whose face is so beautiful you just want to cry, plays a vampire who is tiring of the companion she’s had for the past 200 years. (Said companion is played by David Bowie, and like…imagine getting tired of 1983 David Bowie.) As he starts fading, Deneuve turns her attention to a hot young doctor played by Susan Sarandon, who’s sporting an iconic “I’m about to have a queer awakening” haircut.
This movie is gorgeous and cool and pretentious, and horny as all get out. Somehow, it was Tony Scott’s first movie, and probably his most relaxed. Anwyay, the idea of eternal life horrifies me, but I’d consider it for ~200 years with Catherine Deneuve. I bet I could fix her.
A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)
Okay, THIS is the gayest movie I’ve ever seen. The unfairly maligned sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy’s Revenge swaps out our beloved Nancy Thompson for Jesse, a totally normal high-schooler who has blood-curdling nightmares about becoming a disgusting, murderous monster, and can only be saved by the love of a good woman. It’s fine. He’s tormented by his gym teacher, who bumps into him at a leather bar and immediately takes him back to the school gym to punish him. It’s all fine.
Jesse has the following panicked exchange with his bully-turned-bestie, Grady, while begging him to spend the night in his room:
Jesse: I’m scared, Grady. Something is trying to get inside my body!
Grady: Yeah, and she’s female, and she’s waiting for you in the cabana. And you want to sleep with me!
The 80s were fine, everybody. Nobody was afraid of their bodies becoming unrecognizable to them, and even if they were, that fear wasn’t intimately linked with sexuality at all. It’s literally fine.
Hellraiser (1987)
Speaking of perfectly fine, this movie. I’d argue that the final girl, played with perfect 80s spunk by Ashley Laurence, is not the protagonist. That role belongs to her stepmother Julia, played unnecessarily well by Clare Higgins. Julia is married to the most Just Some Guy you can imagine, but is in love with his hedonistic brother Frank. And I say “in love with,” but I honestly mean dickmatized. Howevuh, in Frank’s pursuit of otherworldly pleasures, he accidentally gets himself dragged to hell by these fine fellows:
Frank is a little outmatched by these freaks (non-derogatory), because their capacity for pain and pleasure is way beyond his own. And the only way he can come back is if Julia brings him enough victims to kill and subsume. The whole thing is a fascinating, grotesque, and ultimately very human look at how fear and desire get tangled up with each other, the lengths a person will go to for the first person who fucked them right, and what happens if you cross an undead leather daddy.
The Perfection (2018)
Oh, Allison Williams. One of my favourite nepo babies, largely because she is so self-aware. Aware of how good she is at playing brittle, pampered white women; and aware of how her indelible role in Get Out cemented her—at least, in Black audiences’ eyes—as The White Woman You Should Not Trust. She leans heavily into that persona in this psychological horror from back when Netflix was still making interesting original content.
Williams plays a cello prodigy who becomes fixated on the hot new bombshell in the villa (Dear White People’s Logan Browning). I don’t want to say too much about how the plot unfolds, because it is twisty and turny, and goes in some delightfully gnarly directions. But I will say that it plays with the villainous queer trope well, and makes a beautiful opening argument for Allison Williams being a horror queer icon. (The M3GAN franchise is the closing argument. The prosecution rests, bitch!)
Suspiria (2018)
I’ve discussed this movie with y’all before, as one of my go-to depression/comfort movies, and as a cautionary tale of how our warnings about Trump’s political violence would be dismissed as hysterical. (Boy, do I hate being right all the time.) I don’t know what to tell y’all—this is a rich enough text to warrant all of these discussions, and so much more. The more in today’s case is the vividly realized, but still very sublimated, queerness. Dakota Johnson’s Susie Bannion arrives at the Tanz Akademie, a dance academy/coven, and has her sweet, innocent first love with Mia Goth’s Sara.
In any other movie, Sara and her beautiful outerwear would be the most sophisticated person, and the two would live happily ever after. Unfortunately for her, this movie also contains Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc1, and Susie was always fated to fall in love with Madame Blanc. During a one-on-one dinner in Blanc’s bedroom, eating fried chicken and talking about how dancing feels like fucking, Susie casually mentions being punished in her youth for stealing money to go to New York, just so she could see Blanc perform. Her unspoken admission, communicated only with a smirk, is that the punishment was worth it. In under a week, Susie has left Sara utterly behind. This movie is full of horrors, but maybe the most intimate one is the horror of inevitable heartbreak.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Abrupt vibe shift here, from the somber neutrals of Suspiria2 to the chaotic neons of Bodies Bodies Bodies. This Zillennial spin on a “the killer is one of us” story is hilarious, catty, and not remotely scary. Every character is untrustworthy and insufferable in their own way; though as the innocent weirdo who was brought to this house party by her extremely untrustworthy and insufferable girlfriend, Maria Bakalova is the most straightforwardly likable. This is the movie that introduced me to Rachel Sennott, whose every line delivery is a fucking poem.
This is how I feel whenever someone asks me to do a podcast again, by the way.
It’s also one of the first movies where I most identified with the old person in the crew—Lee Pace, who seems weird and creepy to the young people for having a go bag, needing sensory deprivation to go to sleep, and calling their little game “werewolf” instead of “bodies bodies bodies.” I can’t tell the youth what to do, but I hope they embrace this movie the way Xennials embraced Scream3.
Add your queer horror recommendations in the comments below, and happy Summer Spooky Season!
And, uncredited, Dr. Jozef Klemperer, a psychiatrist who first dismisses and then tries to help the women at this dance academy/coven.
the 2018 version, that is. The 1977 original is famously, luridly Technicolor.
the 1996 one, that is. Not SCREAM; totally different installment in the franchise that I also love a lot!
And I say “in love with,” but I honestly mean dickmatized. lmfao. what an accurate description. she's so horny she must bring him back to mortal status!!