ABOVE: “Queer for Fear.” Photo courtesy Shudder.
We all know the LGBTQ community loves horror – that’s why we sometimes call Halloween “Gay Christmas.”
The appeal of stories about monsters and other creatures of the night should be obvious for a community of people whose very existence has been considered a threat for as long as they can remember. Yet, until recently, the genre has been notably short on outwardly LGBTQ subject matter, leaving us to assume that our love for horror has been a one-sided affair all along.
Or has it? According to the minds behind “Queer for Fear,” a new docuseries streaming on Shudder just in time for Halloween, the genre has been actively shaped by queer sensibilities from the very start – and they’re prepared to show the receipts.
The series, which drops new episodes each Friday through October, employs an array of experts – from creators to scholars to celebrities who just happen to be fans – to peel back the surface of the genre and reveal the queer heart beating within. It maintains a fun tone, making for an enjoyable-yet-informative seasonal distraction; nevertheless, it takes the subject matter seriously, making clear from the very first episode that its goal is to make a thoroughly researched case for the notion that queer subtext is deliberately built into the genre from the foundation up.
Though the show’s focus is ultimately on movies, it must first pave the way by delving into the origins of horror fiction. In Episode 1, “Queer for Fear” does some sleuthing into the private lives of the 19th century authors whose contributions loom the largest: Mary Shelley, who arguably spawned both the horror and science fiction genres with her hastily written “Frankenstein,” and Bram Stoker, who reinvented the image of the vampire in his only successful book, “Dracula.”
Typically interpreted as a cautionary fable about the reckless pursuit of science and technology without concern for consequences, Shelley’s audaciously transgressive 1818 novel also serves as a philosophical rumination on society’s conception of what is “unnatural.” Unlike the hulking monster in most versions of the story disseminated through film and other media later, in the original book Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is intelligent and eloquent, even refined, and seeks only to exist without persecution. Needless to say, the “good doctor” not only refuses to help, but devotes himself to the creature’s destruction, leading readers inevitably to question which of them is actually the monster.
It’s that question that lies at the heart of every good horror story since; by evoking our “sympathy for the devil,” so to speak, classic monsters from King Kong to Hannibal Lecter become the heroes while their oppressors – no matter how well-intentioned – mostly elicit our disdain. It’s not hard to recognize how that dynamic resonates with queer identity.
Striking perhaps even closer to home was Stoker’s 1897 “Dracula,” which took the already sexually charged archetype of the vampire out of the distant hinterlands of Central Europe and transported him to London. Now the symbolic associations with queer experience became even more apparent; deviant eroticism, a certain fluidity of gender in the vampire’s choice of victims, a need to secret himself away from the world during daylight – all these things and more make the vampire into a quintessentially queer monster, and Stoker’s novel burned them into the cultural imagination.
Mainstream literary scholars and historians (and by mainstream, we mean “straight”) have always been quick to caution against reading too much into such parallels, assuring us that they rise from themes with a generalized application to anyone deemed by society to be “other” and should not be interpreted as an expression of any actual queerness on the author’s part; indeed, these authorities remind us, they would presumably have been as blind to such subtext as most of their readers, especially in the 19th century. In short, queer observers who pointed to such a perspective in these works – or any other art or fiction produced before Stonewall, essentially, and most of those produced since – have usually been told we were imagining things.
“Queer for Fear” challenges that dismissive assumption. Turning to the personal papers of Shelley and Stoker and the obvious inferences that can be drawn from the biographical details of their lives, the series asserts that these authors – whose works have cast a more wide-reaching influence over the evolution of horror than perhaps any other writer – were not only aware of the queer subtext dripping from every page of their books but were actually queer themselves. To those unused to thinking beyond the heteronormative edges of our cultural narrative, that might seem a bold statement – especially regarding Stoker, who in later life was known for his strident opposition to “indecency” (sexual and otherwise) in society.
The show’s second episode, which moves into the 20th century and examines the beginnings of horror on film, covers more generally accepted territory as it explores the career of gay director James Whale, whose classic queer-coded fright films of the 1930s forged a permanent connection between horror and camp, and goes on to examine the life of famously closeted actor Anthony Perkins before and after his iconic role as a cross-dressing murderer in “Psycho.” It treads on shakier ground, however, when it implies the possibility of queer tendencies in the latter film’s director, Alfred Hitchcock – something that might seem a bit of a reach in light of his well-documented obsessions with his leading ladies, even considering that his work frequently displayed such blatant examples of queer subtext that even straight film scholars have long acknowledged them.
Unsurprisingly, one can scroll through the viewer comments about the series on Shudder’s website and see the vehemence with which obvious homophobes have objected to the show’s conclusions; many of these cite a lack of definitive proof – which is, admittedly, a fair point. It’s hard to produce a “smoking gun” establishing the queerness of someone who lived in a time when keeping it hidden could easily be a matter of life or death.
When the facts are laid out plainly, however, as “Queer for Fear” endeavors to do, they speak volumes in support of a secret LGBTQ thread running through the history of horror since its earliest inception – a concept that has, in fact, become widely accepted in academic circles since the advent of Queer Theory in the ‘90s – which was intentionally put there by artists who created a coded storytelling language that would allow them to express their queerness in a way that would be obvious to those “in the know” but invisible to everybody else. Later, of course, some of those coded elements would be twisted into problematic tropes by filmmakers who had caught on and endeavored to turn them against us (something the series will doubtless explore in upcoming episodes) – but hurtful or not, they were put there on purpose, and despite the grousing of uneducated internet trolls, horror has always been queer.
Still, people can’t be blamed for being oblivious to what they were never intended to notice in the first place. Now, thanks to Shudder, straight horror fans can finally school themselves about something that’s been right under their noses all along.
