It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Web Exclusive)
Edited by Joe Vallese. NY: The Feminist Press, 2022. 312 pp., illus. Paperback: $25.95.

Reviewed by Steve Erickson

Shudder’s recent docu-series Queer for Fear showcased the horror genre’s roots in queer writers like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker and filmmakers like James Whale and F. W. Murnau. During the Hays Code, the necessity of subtext led audiences to dig for coding and to identify with villains. Part of the appeal of horror to queer audiences is that at best, it challenges facile notions of the monstrous. While a breakthrough for explicitly queer-themed horror movies akin to Get Out (2017) has yet to take place, an increasing number of out directors are drawn to the genre. Yet a transphobic demonization of gender nonconformity has also been a running theme in several landmark horror films, running through Psycho (1960), Dressed to Kill (1980), and The Silence of the Lambs (1981).  

It Came from the Closet, an anthology of personal essays about horror films by queer writers, places itself at the intersection of two recent trends—increasing attention to horror’s queerness and the combination of memoir and film criticism. The Website Bright Wall/Dark Room specializes in such essays, while books like Kier-la Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women and Michael Koresky’s Films of Endearment have used their author’s own experience as a springboard for larger analysis of cinema.

The essay collection sidelines films made by openly queer directors or featuring explicitly queer characters. Of course, digging for subtext in classic films can be insightful, but it can also lead to vacuous statements like Ryan Dzelkalns’s claim (in his essay on the 1954 Godzilla) that radiation is queer. For that matter, only a few essays venture beyond an established canon of classics. The Cuban film Is That You? (2018), which Sarah Fonseca’s essay weaves into her reminisces of growing up with an abusive Cuban-American father, is the book’s only major surprise. The focus on personal experience still leaves out certain ones. It would be great to read an asexual writing about their perceptions of the heroic, virginal Final Girl, alternately celebrated as revealing the slasher movie’s feminist potential or written off as an affirmation of prudishness.

Personally, I’m a gay man who has been a horror fan since I stumbled into my hometown video store’s horror section as a teenager. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Re-Animator (1985), and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987) clicked with me immediately; I liked Videodrome (1983) so much that it’s the only film I’ve watched two days in a row. In my high school, classmates were interested in horror as macho gross-out. While I never watched it, the pseudo-snuff 1987 movie Faces of Death (comprised of images of real violence taken from news footage and faked gore) made the rounds, and I overheard eager descriptions of every scene. As deeply closeted as I was then, even to myself, I could tell that my interest stemmed from a different identification, something relating to an unease with desires I couldn’t put into words. It may also have been as simple as attraction to some of the male stars of these films. But the association of queerness with monstrosity, even as something to reclaim, never quite rang true to me. As I’ve aged, body horror seems more and more like a lingua franca, usually in ways which have nothing to do with my sexuality. However, many other LGBTQ people feel differently, and an entire section of It Came from the Closet is devoted to monsters—blobs, Godzilla, werewolves, vampires. [Spoiler Alert: The endings of Sleepaway Camp and Society are revealed below] 

Carrow Narby’s “Indescribable” takes on the indeterminate monsters of The Blob (1958) and Society (1989). The latter film seems progressive and reactionary simultaneously. Much like Eyes Wide Shut (1999), its allegory about class has been taken up as truth by QAnon conspiracy theories in the last few years. It rages against the power of the rich, especially when it leads to the sexual abuse of young people. It also Others the upper class, however, as a threat to heterosexual men, turning them into an alien species given to incest and orgies in which they reveal their bodies’ fluidity. To lift one of the central ideas of Videodrome, Society is terrified of the New Flesh.  

Narby writes “I, for one, find blobs to be eminently relatable.” They begin their essay by describing a trip to the emergency room due to their gallstones. Narby grounds body horror in a very concrete, personal sensation before theorizing about it. They do justice to Society director Brian Yuzna’s prodigious imagination before pointing out that “there is something rather more fascistic than Marxist about the film’s equation of affluence with sexual decadence and depravity.” Yet as much as they object to its politics, they’re fascinated by its world-building, wondering about the customs of its alien species. The blob promises a degree of queer intimacy alien to human experience, dissolving social and sexual boundaries.

Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, in which marginalized audiences find sustenance in works which seem hostile to them on the surface, lurks behind several essays. On the surface, The Exorcist (1973) might be barren ground for reclamation: a deeply conservative celebration of the Catholic church’s power to save young girls from their budding sexuality. S. Trimble writes “the film’s depiction of a white girl corrupted by evil tapped into white America’s idea of nightmare futures.” But she also describes herself watching The Exorcist at several points of her life. As a newly out teenager from a repressive Christian background, she identified with Regan’s rebellion, but as an adult, she starts to see Father Karras as a queer figure, “the one giving up his future to ensure the other has one.”  

In his closing essay, “Notes on Sleepaway Camp,” Viet Dinh writes, “While horror movies may provide many things, moral instruction isn’t usually one of them.” However, we’re going through a period where moral instruction has in fact come to be one of our expectations from cinema. Especially as expressed by young people on social media, much current queer culture places an emphasis on authenticity and yearns for optimism and “good representation.” It tends to look to YA novels rather than independent film movements like New German Cinema and New Queer Cinema as models. These demands have led to controversies over the “bury your gays” trope and a widespread assumption that only openly queer actors should be cast as characters sharing their sexuality. Carmen Maria Machado’s essay “Both Ways,” inspired by Jennifer’s Body (2009), critiques the concept of queerbaiting. Originally directed at TV shows like Sherlock (2010–17) that hinted at gay relationships but always danced away from having their characters live out such desires, it’s increasingly directed at actors and musicians who seem adjacent to queerness without labeling their sexuality, such as pop star Harry Styles camping it up in dresses and waving Pride flags onstage.

Machado’s essay lets some nuance into these discussions. Upon release, Jennifer’s Body was pilloried by film critics, most of them straight men who thought it was a failed piece of titillation. Over the last decade, it’s been reclaimed as a tale about sexual abuse—Megan Fox’s title character is kidnapped by an all-male rock band who try to sacrifice her to Satan—and women’s revenge. But according to Machado, “the charge of queerbaiting…seems on some level to have survived, even intensified.” Machado writes about the ways that female bisexuality is seen by lesbians as a transitory state and by heterosexuals as fodder for the male gaze. Instead, she argues for a rejection of the “born this way” narrative and a recognition that “bisexuality is inherently resistant to heteronormative frameworks. ” She proclaims “the project of identifying ‘false’ or ‘performative’ queerness is dead in the water.” But even one of the book’s best essays shows its limitations: Jennifer’s Body is mostly used as an example to illustrate Machado’s far more general points.

In fact, one of the book’s strengths is that most of its essays avoid separating films into examples of good and bad representation. Trimble rejects the politics of The Exorcist, but they can’t deny its impact or allegorical insight. Zeyfr Lisowki’s “The Girl, the Well and the Ring” is one of the most critical pieces in the book, describing Ring (1998) and Pet Sematary (1989) as ableist but wondering “instead of challenging these films, maybe the way forward is to acknowledge the gift they give, oblivious in their own framing.”  

Sleepaway Camp (1983) is crucial to the book, which opens with editor Joe Vallese recalling his memories of being asked “What are you queer or somethin’?” while watching the film as an eight-year-old. The book ends with Dinh’s essay on it. In most respects, it’s a middling slasher movie, indifferently acted and directed and even devoid of memorable gore. If not for its twist ending, in which Angela (Felissa Rose) is revealed as a boy forced to present herself as a girl by her aunt following her father and sister’s death, it would go unremembered except by hardcore slasher fans. The image of Angela’s penis is used as a gotcha trick. The film does not feel the need to go any further, closing on a freeze frame of her nude body. Once again, gender noncomformity is associated with violence; Sleepaway Camp suggests it was natural after all for Angela to commit murder with phallic objects like knives and arrows.  

So, it’s an open-and-shut case of transphobia? Not necessarily. The film could’ve gone in a much more sympathetic direction. A pedophile cook leers at Angela and her brother and attempts to sexually assault her; her murder of him is basically self-defense. Even her other killings are responses to the normalization of bullying at the camp. Viet Dinh’s essay “Notes on Sleepaway Camp” brings out the “camp” in the film’s title, paying homage to Susan Sontag. Director Robert Hiltzik’s gaze focuses on men’s bodies. In the opening scene, Angela and her brother Peter’s father is killed in an accident while sunning himself on his boat, nearly naked. In a later scene, we learn that their father is gay, shown cuddling tenderly with a man in bed. The film sexualizes men far more than women, lingering on crotches bulging through tight jeans and skimpy swimming trunks. Desiree Gold’s garish makeup and over-the-top performance as Angela’s aunt makes her look like a drag queen in a John Waters movie.  

Dinh lays out his own experience as a budding gay teenager who attended summer camps at the peak of the slasher movie’s popularity. He points out the ambiguity of Sleepaway Camp; where the slasher movie’s Final Girl shares Angela’s resistance to sexualizing herself and, often, her androgyny, he writes “we’re left with the possibility that Angela—with her intense stare, her literal embodiment of masculine traits—serves as both Final Girl and killer.” He emphasizes its homoeroticism. Sleepaway Camp throws away its sympathy for Angela, who has good reason to fear violence if she reveals her body, for the sake of its ending, but up to that point, it’s quite empathetic toward her plight.  

While several essays refer to academic theorists Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, and, of course, Carol Clover (who coined the concept of the Final Girl), the book draws ideas from feminist and queer theory without delving too far. It was written for a general audience, intended to be accessible to horror fans. In fact, much of it is kin to the queer media critique of YouTube video essayists such as James Somerton and Jessie Gender. For the most part, that’s fine, but its idea of what both memoir and film analysis can mean is unimaginative: untouched by auto-theory or any incorporation of fiction into criticism and autobiography can be. One hopes it will turn out to be a starting point for further queer analysis of horror films.  

Steve Erickson is a New York-based writer and music producer who writes for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, Artfuse, and The Nashville Scene.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2