Angela, a bullied and miserable girl, is positioned as the victim until the final scene, in which she’s revealed to be the killer-and shown to have a penis, right before the screen turns black. For Viet Dinh, 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, in which teenage campers are mysteriously murdered one by one, is one such film. “Coming into my queerness,” Ragosta writes, “was an agreement to no longer borrow someone else’s skin to hide myself.”Įven horror narratives with more difficult or unsavory story lines can help people see themselves. In the character’s plight, Ragosta recognized their own childhood cover-ups-for instance, wearing dresses and bras in grade school to look more like a “girl”-and their struggle to accept that they were nonbinary. The writer Sachiko Ragosta speaks to this enduring image in the essay “On Beauty and Necrosis,” about the 1960 horror film Eyes Without a Face, which centers on a young woman whose father attempts to cover up her scarred face with a beautiful synthetic mask. Queer writers often mark the tendency of horror-movie villains to wear masks, by force or by choice, as a way of concealing who they are from a terrified and unaccepting public. ![]() Read: 25 of the best horror movies you can watch, ranked by scariness The new anthology It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horrormines this vein its contributors suggest, in various ways, that the monster’s perspective isn’t just legitimate, but maybe even morally superior. By intentionally mapping themselves onto well-known monster roles, they force a closer reading of what these works actually demonize-whether that’s free gender expression, pleasurable sex beyond the nuclear family, or other ways of living outside of societal norms. If monsters typically function as a mirror for society’s deepest anxieties, writers such as Stryker go a step further. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.” (The latter, if you need a refresher, follows a young couple’s desperate bid to escape the home of the infamous “Sweet Transvestite” Frank-N-Furter, who, among other things, has created a muscle man named Rocky in his laboratory to be his companion.) In a 1994 essay, the transgender writer and theorist Susan Stryker described identifying with the bloody origin story of Frankenstein’s monster: “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. Take Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, which has inspired countless explicitly queer retellings, including Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 Frankissstein and the 1975 camp classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Think of films such as The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, with their suggestion that the gender confusion of their “cross-dressing” villain is the impetus for their violent desires.ĭespite such one-dimensional portrayals, queer and trans people have long found camaraderie in horror. ![]() They also “make one’s skin creep,” the philosopher Noël Carroll wrote: “Characters regard them not only with fear but with loathing, with a combination of terror and disgust.” It’s no coincidence, then, that horror is strewn with characters who are openly, or coded as, queer and transgender-and that they’re almost always the dirty, lecherous, bloodthirsty villains, seldom the victims. Monsters in horror films aren’t just scary, or dangerous.
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