Visibly horrified: the coming out of queer terror cinema

Australian director Jennifer Kent didn’t set out to make a queer classic when she wrote and shot The Babadook, a clever, sneakily terrifying independent film about a single mother and son terrorised by a strange supernatural entity sprung from the pages of a shabby children’s picture book. Certainly no critics read it as such as the film made its way round the festival circuit in 2014, scooping acclaim and awards aplenty.

However, the internet had other ideas. Over the next few years, various wags of Tumblr began to insist that the film’s eponymous monster – a towering charcoal-sketched ghoul with a stovepipe hat, icepick fingers and an inordinate number of sharply rectangular teeth – was in fact a gay icon. Gradually, what began as a joke became a meme, and eventually an insistent theory: LGBTQ+ fans of the film, declaring themselves “babashook”, likened the onscreen family’s fear of the weird, fangy beast to the panic and hostility that often greets the presence of queerness in predominantly straight households. Sure enough, Babadook images and costumes began to appear at Pride events; in 2019, the film’s US distributor IFC Films even issued a limited Pride edition of the film on Blu-ray. “I feel it’s really quite beautiful, but I still have no idea why,” Kent said of the film’s queer appropriation. “I guess he’s an outsider of sorts. It’s funny.”

Horror fans can debate among themselves whether The Babadook indeed falls under the banner of queer horror cinema: sticklers for genre definitions will probably declare it does not. But the film’s trajectory is a perfect example of what an aptly fluid concept “queer horror” can be: one that covers films made by queer and straight artists alike, on expressly queer subjects or intricately coded ones, either intended for queer audiences or playfully adopted by them. In a sense, “queer horror” is a near-tautological term. Virtually all horror cinema hinges on a fear of the other, the unknown, any threat to stable society – for many an LGBTQ+ person, that’s the same terror with which they’ve been regarded by many an onlooker.

That parallel makes it easy enough to place a queer reading into many a horror film that ostensibly plays it straight: everything from The Shining to The Ring has been scrutinised through that lens, with both critics and casual viewers speculating about the unspoken alternative identities hovering in the films’ shadows. In promoting his new documentary series Queer for Fear, a history of queer horror cinema currently streaming on the chiller-themed platform service Shudder, gay TV writer Bryan Fuller (creator of the TV series Hannibal) argued that an education in the genre can begin early in life, with something as innocuous as The Wizard of Oz. A profoundly frightening film for children, certainly, and as for its queerness? Well, just look at it.

More searching queer subtext in horror texts dates back, however, to the gothic novels of the 19th century, sometimes not even that subtextually. Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, about a female vampire preying on a young woman, effectively coined the lesbian vampirism trope familiar in later horror storytelling; long believed to have been a closeted homosexual, Bram Stoker loaded Dracula with enough polysexual allusions to keep academics busy for over a century. In 1922, closeted German film-maker FW Murnau squeezed a good number of them into his unofficial, rampantly desire-fuelled adaptation, Nosferatu.

Mary Shelley’s similarly sinuously loaded Frankenstein, meanwhile, became the source of one of Hollywood’s first canonically queer horror films: gay English director James Whale’s definitive 1931 adaptation is marked by a distinctly queer empathy with Boris Karloff’s socially vilified monster, presented as more vulnerably human than the vengeful villagers baying for his blood.

The next year, Whale snuck a more comically queer sensibility into his haunted-mansion romp The Old Dark House, which sees an assortment of travellers seeking shelter with an eccentric family of outcasts during a storm. The residents of the house are described as “godless”, and coded as sexually free and deviant; one, the tellingly named Horace Femm, is camply played to the rafters by gay actor Ernest Thesiger. Small wonder the film was a direct inspiration for 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, still surely the most fabulously out-and-proud queer horror-comedy ever made.

The imposition of the stringently moralistic, conservative Hays Code on studio film-making in 1934, however, meant directors such as Whale had to get a little more subtle in queering up the genre. Undeterred, he proceeded with the sequel Bride of Frankenstein, in which the doctor’s attempt to create a wild-haired female mate for his lonesome monster doesn’t exactly culminate in blissful union: “She hate me, like others,” the poor queer creature sighs after she rejects his hand in friendship. Whale’s studio, Universal, also produced the foundational lesbian vampire film in Dracula’s Daughter, which somehow skated past the Code in its depiction of a glamorous blood-sucking countess as happy to seduce and feed off women as men – perhaps because at one point she submits to a psychiatrist to cure her of vampirism. It doesn’t work: chalk up an early victory against conversion therapy.

As the Hays Code gradually grew obsolete before its eventual abandonment in the late 1960s, film-makers got bolder and more literal in their presentation of queer characters in horror. The Haunting broke new ground in 1963 by making a principal character, Claire Bloom’s intrepid psychic Theodora (shortened to Theo), an out lesbian – and not even a villain, at that. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960, on the other hand, set a more prevalent trend with its cross-dressing, serial-killing Oedipal case Norman Bates. Psycho’s tone was a far cry from the gleefully rampant sexuality of a spate of Sapphic vampire B-movies from the 1970s – including Hammer Films’ own Carmilla adaptation The Vampire Lovers, not to mention Jesús Franco’s self-explanatory Vampyros Lesbos – and, of course, the Rocky Horror phenomenon.

As the Aids pandemic raged, more hostile queer representations became widespread: in horror films ranging from Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing to Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, serial killing was routinely linked to homosexuality, transgenderism and/or transvestism.

If this turnaround was in line with the Aids panic, allyship came from sources both highbrow and low. Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire glamour spread The Hunger positively feasted on the fluid sexual energy shared by Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and – who else? – David Bowie, while 1985’s lurid comedy Fright Night posed a suave pair of male suburban vampires as a gay couple challenging neighbourhood norms. Most unexpectedly, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge two years later made the barest of efforts to hide its homoerotic gaze, while its closeted gay teen protagonist Jesse (so-called male scream queen Mark Patton, who would himself later come out as gay) emerges as a heroic survivor in the mould of horror’s traditional Final Girl. And the leather-wrapped S&M genderqueerness of the demons in gay writer-director Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) spoke for itself.

This year’s Hellraiser remake, with transgender actor Jamie Clayton in the iconic Pinhead role, brings much of its forerunner’s LGBTQ+ subtext plainly to the surface – comparing the two is an object lesson in how much queer horror has transformed in the last few decades. At the turn of the 21st century, we were still dancing around symbolic representations of outsider sexual identity – see the implicitly queer outcast sisters of the delicious teen werewolf tale Ginger Snaps – or presenting homosexuality as an alluringly dangerous threat, as in Alexandre Aja’s thrillingly lurid but distinctly sex-negative High Tension.

Now, queer perspectives are centred, by queer film-makers, without shame or secrecy. Set in the world of gay porn, Yann Gonzalez’s gorgeously grisly Knife + Heart is so heavily populated with queer characters – cavorting, killing and being killed with equal abandon – that they don’t have to symbolise anything in relation to straight society. The moody 2017 ghost story Rift focuses on the haunting of a young gay couple by memories and trauma – that mainstay of modern art-horror – but you can imagine much the same film being fashioned around a pair of straights.

Both the recent Netflix phenomenon Fear Street and Halina Reijn’s grimly funny slasher comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies are built around the conscientious sexual fluidity of generation Z: their queer characters are warmly accepted, even when they are executed. Does that mean queer horror is losing its transgressive edge, or is it simply louder and prouder in challenging mainstream sexual politics? If The Babadook has taught us anything, it’s that the genre can surprise us – and sometimes even its makers – still.

Queer for Fear is streaming now on Shudder.