Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins
Author: Darren Elliott-Smith
Date: 2016-09-30 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Performing Arts; Television; History & Criticism; General; Film
Description: In recent years, the representation of alternative sexuality in the horror film and television has "outed" itself from the shadows from which it once lurked, via the embrace of an outrageously queer horror aesthetic where homosexuality is often unequivocally referenced. In this book, Darren Elliott-Smith departs from the analysis of the monster as a symbol of heterosexual anxiety and fear, and moves to focus instead on queer fears and anxieties within gay male subcultures. Furthermore, he examines the works of significant queer horror film, television producers, and directors to reveal gay men
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Darren Elliott-Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire. His research focuses on queerness, gender
and the body in horror film and television. He completed his PhD at Royal

Holloway.

‘Darren Elliot-Smith’s well researched volume takes horror cinema’s long
held interest in the sexual “Other” as its starting point, before fully exploring how the concept of queer horror has moved from subtext to centre
stage in a range of mainstream and indie film and TV representations. By
drawing on relevant film studies, queer theory and psychoanalytic meth-
odologies, Queer Horror Film and Television remains a rigorous study of the changing status of sexuality in the genre. Equally, by drawing in a
wide selection of case-studies from body horror classics such as Carrie and experimental film traditions, to more recent “Gaysploitation” slasher film
parodies and cult TV hits such as American Horror Story, this volume will appeal to scholars, students and fans alike.’

Xavier Mendik, Professor of Cult Cinema Studies,

Birmingham City University

‘Queer readings of horror films have been around since the camp excesses
of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein but Elliot-Smith takes the study of Queer Horror in startling new directions, stepping beyond the metaphor and into a world where horror is overtly used as a creative means of
questioning, expressing, and exploring queer sexuality in the twenty-first
century. Rigorously researched and offering rich textual and cultural analysis of a diverse, and eye-opening, range of horror films and TV series’, this book offers a transformative understanding of horror.’

Stacey Abbott, Reader in Film and Television Studies, Roehampton

University and author of Celluloid Vampires (2007) and

Undead Apocalypse (forthcoming)

Library of Gender and Popular Culture

From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steam-punk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This new series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture engaging with a variety of texts – drawn primarily from Art, fashion TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies – as a way of considering various models for understanding the complimentary relationship between ‘gender identities’ and ‘popular culture’. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series will adopt a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural ‘products’.

For further information or enquiries, please
contact the library series editors:

Claire Nally: claire.nally@northumbria.ac.uk

Angela Smith: angela.smith@sunderland.ac.uk

Advisory Board:

Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia

Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA

Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK

Prof Åsa Kroon, Örebro University, Sweden

Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK

Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK

Published and forthcoming titles:

Ageing Femininity on Film: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema

Niall Richardson

All-American TV Crime Drama: Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Gender
and Citizenship

Lisa Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti

Beyoncé, Feminism and Popular Culture

Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs

Female Bodies and Performance in Film: Queer Encounters with Embodiment
and Affect

Katharina Lindner

Framing the Single Mother: Gender, Politics and Family Values in Contemporary

Popular Cinema

Louise Fitzgerald

Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity

John Mercer

Gender and Economics in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and

Austerity in Film and TV

Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan (Eds)

The Gendered Motorcycle: Representations in Society, Media and Popular

Culture

Esperanza Miyake

Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films

Julia Erhart

Girls Like This, Boys Like

That: The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures

Victoria Cann

Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy

Mary Irwin

Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema : Cyborgs, Troopers and

Other Men of the Future

Marianne Kac-Vergne

Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction

Anna Watz

Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Popular Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’

Dion Kagan

Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins

Darren Elliott-Smith

Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy

Shane Brown

Shaping Gym Cultures: Body Image and Social Media

Nicholas Chare

Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-Victorian

Claire Nally

Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender

Rosie White

Television, Technology and Gender: New Platforms and New Audiences

Sarah Arnold

Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture

Melanie Kennedy

Queer Horror

FILM AND

TELEVISION

Sexuality and

Masculinity at the

Margins

DARREN ELLIOTT-SMITH

Published in 2016 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London • New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright © 2016 Darren Elliott-Smith

The right of Darren Elliott-Smith to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the
images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Library of Gender and Popular Culture 11

ISBN: 978 1 78453 686 2
eISBN: 978 1 78672 137 2
ePDF: 978 1 78673 137 1

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

List of Illustrations
ix

Acknowledgements
xi

Introduction

1

1 ‘Queering

Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

22

2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

56

3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and

Gaysploitation Horror

89

4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

111

5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

136

6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

164

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

192

Notes

199

Bibliography

220

Selected Filmography

232

Index

238
vii

List of Illustrations

1.1 The Sick and Twisted Player’s Carrie (1996)

47

1.2 Scarrie – the Musical promotional stills (2005)

49

1.3 Theater Couture’s Carrie (2006)

50

2.1 Freezing the flow in Lum’s Indelible (2004,

Charles Lum, USA)

60

2.2 Gay porn digitally bleeds into the domestic in Lum’s

Indelible (2004, Charles Lum, USA)

72

2.3 Chris’s ecstatic pleasure in Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma, Red Bank Films, USA)

75

2.4 Juxtaposed ecstatic oral pleasure in Indelible (2004,

Charles Lum, USA)

76

2.5 Queer fusion of Jesus/St. Sebastian from Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma, Red Bank Films, USA)

84

2.6 Carrie’s explosive return of gaze in The Fury (1978,

Brian De Palma, Frank Yablans Presentations/

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, USA)

86

3.1 Chris ‘fellates’ devon in The Brotherhood (2001,

David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures/Regent

Entertainment, USA)

105

4.1 Jake and Corin from October Moon (2005, Jason Paul

Collum, B+BOY Productions/Red Films Inc., USA)

117

4.2 Socket’ s body modifications (2007 Sean Abley, Dark Blue Films/Velvet Candy Entertainment, USA)

120

4.3 Kayle and Lane in backwoods queer horror A Far Cry

From Home (Alan Rowe Kelly, 2013)

133

5.1 Hellbent’ s 70s cop parody (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, MJR Films/Sneak Preview Entertainment, USA)

140
ix

List of Figures

5.2 Hellbent’ s erotic cowboy (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, MJR Films/Sneak Preview Entertainment, USA)

141

5.3 In drag Tobey poses narcissistically in front of his macho
alter ego in Hellbent (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, MJR

Films/Sneak Preview Entertainment, USA)

143

5.4 Devil Daddy in Hellbent (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts,

MJR Films/Sneak Preview Entertainment, USA)

148

5.5 Eddie’s glass eye in Hellbent (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, MJR Films/Sneak Preview Entertainment, USA)

157

6.1 Francois Sagat in LA Zombie (2010, Bruce LaBruce, PPV

Networks/Dark Alley Media/Wurstfilm, USA/Germany)

167

6.2 The

AHS poster for season 1 Murder House (2011,

FX Network, USA)

184

6.3 Velasquez’

Las Meninas (1686)

185

6.4 The Name Game performance from AHS: Asylum

(2011, FX Network, USA)

189
x
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

A work of this length owes a debt of gratitude to many people. Firstly,
thanks to Mandy Merck, for her support, her exemplary knowledge in the
field, her support of my academic career, and for her ability to challenge
me at every turn. I am also very indebted to those in my wider academic
support network. These include Alison Peirse, Ruth O’Donnell and Stacey

Abbott, who all have offered much help, moral support, inspiration and
good advice along the way.

Of vital importance to this study are those filmmakers and artists who
have been kind enough to grant permission to reference their works and,
in many cases, offer up their time in interviews to allow for invaluable
insights into their creative thought-processes. These include Charles Lum,

David Cerda, David DeCoteau, Bruce LaBruce, Jurgen Brüning, Jason Paul

Collum, Sean Abley, Paul Etheredge, Alan Rowe Kelly, Tony Vaguely, and

Erik Jackson.

Very special thanks to those of my friends and family who have shown
interest and encouragements over the years and have given me plenty
of opportunities for debate – apologies to those of you for enduring the
darker recesses of trash-horror. From an early age my initiation into hor-
ror came courtesy of some particularly sadistic babysitters, and to them

(whose names shall remain unknown) I remain eternally grateful.

More than anything, immeasurable thanks go to my husband John;

‘thank you’ does not seem enough for all the years of suffering the ‘delights’

of Queer Horror. Without his patience, eye for detail and loving moral sup-
port through the ups and down, I could not have managed it. Only he can
truly say, ‘I walked with a zombie…’ and it is to him, and our fractious
feline Martha, I dedicate this book.

xi

Introduction

The horror film’s representation of the ‘Other’ has long been understood
to be a symbolic representation of social ills, anxieties and unease. Non-
normative sexuality (bisexuality and homosexuality) is often chief among
these concerns. Scholars including Robin Wood, Carol J. Clover, Richard

Dyer, Ellis Hanson, Judith Halberstam and Harry M. Benshoff1 have covered significant ground in their respective analyses of homosexuality in the history of the horror genre. Their findings suggest that much of its representation has been symbolic or implicit, whereby homosexuality must be
teased out of its place in the shadows via queer interpretation. Academic
studies of male homosexuality in horror have been focused on gay mas-
culinity as sub-textual and symbolic in relation to the genre’s presumed
adolescent heterosexual male target audience, which Carol J. Clover sug-

gests is made up of ‘a preponderance of young males’. 2 These considerations have often discussed the threat that queer, gay and lesbian sexualities pose to the assumed heterosexual spectator. 3 Traditionally attributed to the monstrous, whether connoted, displayed or alluded to, homosexuality is
traditionally presented as abnormal, predatory and evil, leading Benshoff
to conclude that:

until society at large begins to realize and understand the signs
and signifying practices of the horror movie contribute to the

1

Queer Horror Film and Television
social understanding of homosexuality, the construct of the
monster queer […] will continue to oppress many members of

society. 4

Conversely, the study of monstrous homosexuality in the horror film has
also revealed the celebratory pleasures offered to queer, gay and lesbian
viewers’ oppositional identification with the very same monsters that
threaten the norm. Yet, the vast majority of such studies have to first make the leap of reading the symbolic homosexual potential of the films’ monsters; few consider the explicit presentation of gay villains and victims alike.

The aim of this book is not to reiterate the argument that homosexuality is a key element in the study of the horror genre; rather, it seeks to highlight the limits of a metaphorical understanding of homosexuality in the
horror film in an age where its presence has become more explicit. I want
to extend on Benshoff’s substantive work in Monsters in the Closet (1997) beyond his study’s conclusion, which proves that while homosexuality may
indeed be symbolically present in horror film, it still ‘dare not speak its name’. Homosexuality either bleeds into the film extra-textually via the
authorial expressivity of their gay and lesbian directors, writers or producers (such as F.W. Murnau, James Whale, Joel Schumacher or Stephanie

Rothman) or it is read into the film via subversive, ironic reading strat-
egies or a camp appreciation of the films themselves. Though this book
acknowledges both the continuing appropriation of the 1976 classic horror
film Carrie (Brian De Palma) by the gay community as a key reclaimed queer text, its main focus rests on representations of masculinity and gay male spectatorship in queer horror film and television post-2000. In titling this sub-genre ‘queer horror’, I am designating horror that is crafted by
male directors/producers who self-identify as gay, bi, queer or transgen-
dered and whose work features homoerotic, or explicitly homosexual, nar-
ratives with ‘out’ gay characters. As a means of study, this book considers a variety of genres and forms from: video art horror ( Indelible (Charles Lum, 2004)); independently distributed exploitation films (such as those
directed by David DeCoteau); queer Gothic soap operas ( Dante’s Cove

(Here! TV 2005–7)); satirical queer horror comedies (such as The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (Jaymes Thompson, 2007)); direct-to-video (DTV) low-budget slashers ( Hellbent (Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, 2004)); and 2

Introduction
contemporary representations of gay zombies in film and television from
the pornographic LA Zombie (Bruce LaBruce, 2010) to the melodramatic In the Flesh (BBC Three 2013–15).

This book’s close study of queer horror and its representations of gay
masculinity (whether it be via their monsters, victims or victim-hero
figures) reveals more about gay male anxieties in the early twenty-first
century than heterosexual ones. More specifically, I argue that queer
appropriations of horror conventions foreground gay men’s anxieties about
their judgement by heteronormative standards. These anxieties encourage
a homonormative apeing of heterosexual culture which, in turn, feeds fur-
ther anxieties surrounding the cultural conflation of gay masculinity with
a shameful femininity. In departing from the analysis of the queer monster
as a symbol of heterosexual anxiety and fear, I want to move the discussion forward to focus instead on the anxieties within gay subcultures. Via close textual analysis and the application of key psychoanalytic theories to particular examples, I will reinterpret the conceptual language of horror film theory to highlight certain pervasive gay male anxieties. Furthermore, this book investigates the effects of contemporary queer horror’s foregrounding
of sexual difference in its ‘out’, but not necessarily proud, portrayal of gay and bisexual masculinity. It asks the central question – when monstrousness as a metaphor for the threat homosexuality poses to heteronormativ-
ity ceases to be coded and instead becomes open, then what does it mean?

Approaching Queer Horror

Previous studies of the history of homosexuality in the horror film have
often followed gay and lesbian studies’ rhetorically restorative approach.

Whitney Davis (1992) suggests that, as a project, gay and lesbian stud-
ies endeavours ‘[to present and rectify] important but little known or

new evidence’5 of gay and lesbian visibility which investigates artistic and cultural texts and imagery in order to amend a historical account
which has largely excluded homosexuality from study. While gay and
lesbian studies seek to restore the visibility of a gay and lesbian social
group to culture and is inclusive and reparative in its intent, queer the-
ory takes an alternative path. Focusing instead on the stigmatisation
of non-normative sexualities (including, but not exclusive to, same sex

3

Queer Horror Film and Television
desire), queer theory views the project of their integration and inclusion
into the mainstream as a process of cultural normalisation or assimila-
tion. I want to define queer along the same lines as Harry Benshoff, in
that it represents:

an oxymoronic community of difference […] unified only by a
shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gen-
der […] homosexuality should be understood as part of a con-
tinuum of human behaviours, not as a monolithic, preformed,

static identity.6

Queer theory then, seeks to investigate, and therefore trouble, the ways
in which the structures of heteronormativity pervade culture. Instead of
attempting only to address the imbalance of scholarly attention through
revisionist acknowledgement of gay and lesbian artists and filmmakers,
queer theory questions the broader regulation of sex and gender. Taking
this approach, my study of queer horror firstly aims to engender an under-
standing of the visual field and themes of typical heteronormative horror
film and, with it, the assumptions through which compulsory heterosexuality is re-secured. Compulsory heterosexuality is understood by Adrienne Rich in ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980) as the
assumption of heterosexuality as the innate and natural form of human
desire. This assumption compounds the inequality of power that is per-
petuated between the sexes and, further still, between heterosexuality and
non-heterosexuality. A queer approach allows for an investigation into
the role that the stigmatised gay male subject plays in the construction of this heteronormativity and, more specifically, the ways in which homosexuality’s stigmatisation is visualised both from within and without its
sub-culture. Admittedly, the central focus on gay men in this book is more
identarian than the term ‘queer’ might suggest; however, the texts under consideration extend beyond gay cultural identity to represent their protagonists as, variously, ‘men’, ‘bisexual men’ and ‘gay men’ and present their sexuality as fittingly fluid. My use of queer theory emphasises that the use of horror by queer directors and spectators alike allows for a fluid experience where viewers are able to take up positions of desire and undergo
identificatory processes which are either unavailable or denied to them in
heteronormative cinema.

4

Introduction

The adoption of the term heteronormativity (and later homonormativ-
ity), which occurs frequently throughout this study, refers to the regulat-
ing effect of the assumption that biological sex dictates gender roles and
sexual desire. Robert Corber and Stephen Valocchi (2003) define heter-
onormativity as ‘the set of norms that make heterosexuality seem natural

or right and that organise homosexuality as its binary opposite’. 7 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) suggest further that heteronormativity can be understood as ‘the institutions, structures of understanding
and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent –

that is organised as a sexuality – but also privileged’. 8 Traditional gender traits feed into heteronormative structures, ensuring the continuance of
heterosexuality along binary oppositions of active-male/passive-female.

Heteronormativity positions the gay man as feminine, as the ‘abnormal-
ity’ of his gender (perceived as feminine-masculine) seems to uphold the
assumed deviancy of his sexuality and gives credence to the heterosexual
man’s performance of masculinity.

In ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’ (1978), Robin Wood’s com-
ments on the conditional acceptance of homosexuality into mainstream
culture are relevant for an understanding of the concept of homonormativ-
ity. He maintains that the norms of Western culture in relation to hetero-
sexual love are marriage (legal, heterosexual monogamy) and the nuclear
family and that ‘the possibility that people might relate freely to each other on a non-pairing basis’ is determined as ‘promiscuity’. He goes on to state that the choices offered to homosexuals as ‘acceptable’ are ‘the apeing of
heterosexual marriage and family (with poodles instead of children) or
l’amour fou, preferably culminating in suicide or alcoholism’. Yet Wood continues that ‘acceptance of the homosexual by society has it obvious cor-ollary and condition: acceptance of society by the homosexual’. 9 In Homos (1995), Leo Bersani also considers the effects of homosexuality’s increased visibility and cultural acceptance in more recent years and the impact this has had upon gay male representation in Western society. The exultant

claim of gay protest groups that ‘We are everywhere’10 has been contradicted by cultural assimilation, resulting in a destruction of gay identity: ‘We are nowhere’. In acquiring social acceptance, homosexuals are argued to have

‘degayed’ their culture, risking a form of ‘self-erasure [that] reconfirms

the inferior position within a homophobic system of difference’.11 Bersani’s 5

Queer Horror Film and Television
consideration of this ‘gay absence’ is useful for an analysis of the queer use of horror in recent years, together with Lisa Duggan’s (2003) critique of the recent rise of a more assimilative homonormativity, which she defines as:

a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them,
while promising the possibility of a […] gay culture anchored

in domesticity and consumption.12

Duggan argues that this process constitutes to the ‘good gay subject’, whose relationships are built upon ‘monogamy, devotion, maintaining privacy and

propriety’. 13 The consequence is a hierarchy of ‘worthiness’ with those that identify as transgender, transsexual, bisexual or non-gendered deemed less
entitled to legal rights than those in relationships that mirror heterosexual marriage. According to Duggan, within the male homosexual community,
homonormativity idealises homogenous ‘straight acting’ stable relation-
ships founded on shared property. In relation to this, I will argue that the representation of gay masculinity, in what I term ‘Gaysploitation horror’, is curiously chaste, non-confrontational and assimilative, where homosexuality remains incidental to plot, and where characters’ sexualities are secondary to genre conventions. This is also achieved by the same gay characters’

adoption of macho performance (coded heterosexual), which replaces
stereo typical femininity with an equally stereotyped gay masculinity.

Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘performative’ nature of gender is entirely
relevant to a consideration of the excessively theatricalised gay masculinity present in queer horror. Butler argues that the supposed biology of binary
gender is constructed via the repetition of acts and behaviours where social performance creates gender, a performance which imitates culturally prescribed and impossible ideals. In Gender Trouble (1990), she exemplifies this performativity in:

acts, gestures and desire [that] produce the effect of an internal
core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body

[…] such acts, gestures, enactments generally construed, are
performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they
otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured
and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive

means. 14

6

Introduction

Focusing on the fragility of gender performance, she asserts that the pos-
sibilities for a transformation of gender are found in a ‘failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition’.15 In queer horror, the fragmented and parodic16 qualities of gay masculine and feminine performance clearly highlight gender’s imitative elements. Queer horror’s gender play can challenge supposedly natural gender binaries but can also function to repress
and cover up anxieties about failed masculinity and the stigma attached to homosexual desire.

Cinematic masculinity is conventionally impenetrable in a physical and sexual sense, as opposed to the patriarchal view of the feminine subject as penetrable. Heteronormative culture demands the gay man’s penetrability
in order to place him within the symbolic phallic order. Yet the associa-
tion of femininity with homosexuality need not be bound to penetration
since many gay men choose not to partake in it. Merely desiring other men opens up the male subject to a shameful conflation with femininity
regardless of sexual practice. Furthermore, gay men may also dis-identify
with femininity and resist association with the cultural denigration of
passivity and powerlessness that women are made to bear. As such, gay
masculinity is situated somewhere along a socially-constructed binary
of femininity and masculinity, with anal receptivity marking an extreme

submission, which Leo Bersani remarks as akin to ‘being a woman’.17 In

Disidentifications (1999), Jose Muñoz explores the practice by which subjects outside of a racial or sexual majority negotiate with dominant culture by transforming, reworking and appropriating ideological impositions
from the mainstream:

Disidentification is a performative mode of tactical recognition
that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist
the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology

[...] It is a reformatting of self within the social, a third term that

resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. 18

In terms of gay male identification, the subject simultaneously recognises
himself in the image of an unattainable phallic masculine ideal (symbolised in the heterosexual male) but also acknowledges that it is different from his homosexual self. Of particular interest are the anxieties that arise from gay men’s negotiation with the phallus as a symbol of idealised masculinity.

7

Queer Horror Film and Television

Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (2004) define the phallus in
psychoanalytic terms as that ‘which underlines the symbolic function of
the penis in the intra – and inter-subjective dialectic, the term “penis” itself tending to be reserved for the organ thought of in its anatomical reality’.19

I wish to define the phallus in Lacanian terms as an ever-elusive signifier of authority within the symbolic patriarchal order that defines language,
society and subjectivity.

According to Leo Bersani, 20 in the adoption of the gay-macho style, the gay man aspires to an idealised image of masculinity which, in its purest
sense, is symbolised in phallic masculinity that is coded macho and het-
erosexual. I want to define this as hypermasculinity, that is, the exaggerated performance of manliness or machismo. Across this study, examples of
such gay masculine parade include: the exaggeration of macho traits (this
can be seen in chapter 3’s focus on the Gage Men from appropriated pornographic films like LA Tool And Die (1979)) as referenced in Charles Lum’s Indelible (2004); in chapter 5’s examination of Hellbent’s (2004) parody of Tom of Finland stereotypes; and in chapter 6’s consideration of queer zombie performance in film and television and the appropriation of horror genre conventions as seen in American Horror Story (2011–ongoing).

In reply to Jeffrey Weeks’ claim that the adoption of the gay-macho style

‘gnaws at the roots of a male heterosexual identity’21, Bersani argues that the gay male who adopts this demeanour ‘intends to pay worshipful tribute
to the style and behaviour he defiles’. He continues that if ‘gay men gnaw
at the roots of male heterosexual identity’, it is not because of the parodic distance that they take from that identity, but rather that, from ‘their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violatedʼ. 22 Bersani’s consideration of the gay obsessive worship of masculinity, so often represented in the form of straight machismo, together with the disavowal of femininity, is useful for an analysis of the gender anxieties evident in the queer horror film.

Despite my focus on the representation of homosexuality in queer hor-
ror that is, for the most part, explicitly declared, this is not to suggest that the type of gay male subjectivity depicted here is unapologetic, confident
and proud. Here! TV’s gay Gothic horror soaps, Dante’s Cove and The Lair (2007–09) and gay slasher Hellbent (2004), for example, present gay protagonists who are unmistakeably queer, yet their dialogue often shies away

8

Introduction
from explicitly announcing itself as ‘gay’ or ‘queer’, and straight-acting performance styles pervade these texts. This would seem to support Bersani’s
acknowledgement of a parodic, worshipful tribute to a macho masculinity
that, he argues, is defiled. However, closer analysis shows that the satirical potential of the macho performance in queer horror is often overwhelmed
by the erotic potency of its portrayal of machismo, which seems to func-
tion as a masquerade-like disavowal of shameful feminine association. In
queer horror, gay subjectivity is often fashioned by dis-identifications with both female and male subjectivity.

Psychoanalysis and Queer Horror

Psychoanalysis can shed light on the aesthetic experience that queer
horror offers the gay spectator. I wish to do this via a re-reading of the
psychoanalytic concepts of trauma, masochism and the primal fanta-
sies alongside two of Sigmund Freud’s case studies (The Wolf Man in

‘ A History of Infantile Neurosis’ [1918] and Little Hans in ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy’ [1909]) while also taking in Julia

Kristeva’s (1982) concepts of abjection. The subject and object of anal-
ysis are constructed through these psychoanalytic theories; Laplanche
and Bersani’s own critical and cultural commentaries on these works
will be investigated later alongside the application of psychoanalytic
concepts such as masochism by horror film theorists Carol J. Clover,

Peter Hutchings and Barbara Creed. 23 But here it is important to acknowledge the difficulties of interpreting unconscious investments
in gender and sexuality, where homosexuality does not remain at
the margins of symbolism and metaphor but is rendered explicit. As
such, this book is not bound to an uncritical reliance on psychoana-
lytic readings of the films and their representations of gay masculin-
ity. Though part of my analysis will utilise psychoanalytic readings to
assist in offering an explanation as to the symbolic function of the hor-
rors and anxieties at work within the complex symbolism of the film
text, these readings will also rely on close textual analysis and inter-
views with the directors and producers of these films, who themselves

invest24, to a varying degree, Freudian theory in relation to the horror film into their work.

9

Queer Horror Film and Television

There is little doubting the wealth of existing academic materials that
contemplate the symbolic representation of homosexuality in horror, and the overview of the theorists that follows will situate the relevant works’

comprehension of coded homosexuality within the genre. In ‘Introduction
to the American Horror Film’ (1979), Robin Wood offers a reading of the
monstrous metaphors that represent the cultural repression of alterna-
tive sexualities. Borrowing from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man

(1964), Wood defines basic repression as that which is ‘universal, necessary and inescapable’ to construct a civilised society. Wood continues that surplus repression provides a means by which a culture conditions its people
into taking up ‘predetermined roles’ that eventually demand assimilation
and, ‘ If it works [...] makes us into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists’. If it does not, those maladjusted individuals become neurotics or revolutionaries, or both. Wood goes on to question exactly
what is repressed within Western culture. Whereas oppression indicates
subjugation from an external, tangible force, repression, he suggests, is ‘not accessible to the conscious mind’ since it is ‘fully internalized’. Conversely, in relation to the cultural oppression of homosexuality, ‘what escapes

repression has to be dealt with by oppression’. 25

Wood’s discussion of sexuality (himself a gay film critic) strongly influ-
ences his analysis of horror’s preoccupation with issues of non-normative
sexuality. Initially, Wood focuses on the surplus sexuality that does not

fulfil the procreative demands of ‘monogamous heterosexual union’26 that reproduces labour for capital. Further examples of this non-procreative
desire include: bisexuality as an ‘affront to the principle of monogamy’ and a ‘threat to the ideal of family’; female sexuality that does not adhere to archetypes of passivity, subordination and reproduction; and lastly, sexuality in children. Wood argues that horror offers the most ‘clear-cut and

direct’27 example of the depiction of ‘the Other’ in the figure of the monster: ‘One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses’. 28 The monstrous ‘Other’ represents ‘that which bourgeois ideology cannot rec-ognize or accept but must deal with in one of two ways: either by rejecting and, if possible, annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself’. The ‘Other’ serves not only to symbolise that which either the individual or culture determines as 10

Introduction
different, it also represents ‘that which is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self’ and, subsequently, is then ‘projected outwards in order to be

hated or destroyed’. 29

Of the types of ‘Otherness’ represented in the horror, Wood argues
that homosexuality and bisexuality are clearly evident in F.W. Murnau’s

Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (1922) and in James Whale’s

Frankenstein (1931), both of which suggest the repressed homosexuality of their monsters. 30 Focusing mainly on this implied homosexuality as representative of heteronormative anxieties, Wood’s analysis of homosexual anxieties is fleeting. His discussion of homosexuality in the horror film, like that of many film scholars, remains limited to a critique of the monstrous metaphor for homosexuality. This limits gay spectatorship
to a simplistic negotiation of identification between normative (straight)

protagonists and the non-normative (queer) monster, overlooking the rel-
evance of protagonists or peripheral characters that may be coded, or even
explicitly represented, as gay.

Wood’s analysis of monstrous metaphors in the horror genre in the

1960s and 1970s can be understood to provide three variables: ‘normality,
the Monster and, crucially, the relationship between the two’. His under-
standing of ‘normality’, however, is limited to heterosexual monogamy,
to the nuclear family and social institutions such as religion, law, educa-
tion and the military. For Wood, the Monster operates as a ‘return of the
repressed’, reflecting societal contradictions and hypocrisies. However,

Wood points out that the Monster is a ‘protean’ symbol that changes from

‘period to period as society’s basic fears clothe themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments’31, thus paving the way for this book’s discussion of more contemporary horror films that depict homosexuality
explicitly and do not limit its representation to monstrosity alone.

Richard Dyer considers the metaphorical representations of the vam-
pire as homosexual within literature and film in ‘Children of the Night:

Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ (1988) and
in his analysis of Anne Rice’s series of homoerotic vampire novels in

‘Vampires in the (Old) New World: Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles’

(1994). He argues that gothic literature and film since reflect social attitudes towards nineteenth and twentieth-century gay and lesbian identities.

For Dyer, the figure of the vampire allows for a symbolic projection of ‘how 11

Queer Horror Film and Television
people thought and felt about lesbians and gay men – how others have

thought about us, and how we have thought and felt about ourselves’.32 His reading of the vampire identifies ‘tell-tale signs’ or ‘gay resonances’ that point to symbolic queerness rather than explicit homosexuality. These
signs include the vampire’s private double life, the concealing of a mon-
strous secret and night stalking. On the one hand, vampirism (sexual ori-
entation) ‘doesn’t show, you can’t tell who is and who isn’t by just looking, but on the other hand there […] are tell-tale signs that someone “is” and
usually this leads to the vampire’s/homosexual’s painful outing and even-

tual destruction’. 33

In ‘Undead’ (1991), Ellis Hanson underscores the vampire’s longstand-

ing affinity with homosexuality and its provocation of ‘homosexual panic’.34

He argues that the potency of the figure was rearticulated with the onset
of the AIDS crisis and in the search for symbolic indications of infectious queerness (such as wasting and pallor). According to Hanson, these are but
new additions to a taxonomy of gay men ‘as sexually exotic, alien, unnatu-
ral, oral, anal, compulsive, violent, protean, polymorphic, polyvocal, poly-semous, invisible, soulless, transient, superhumanly mobile, infectious,

murderous, suicidal, and a threat to wife, children, home and phallus’.35

Hanson’s list of queer tropes clearly fix the vampire as a liminal, ambigu-
ous and elusive creature that simultaneously presents a recognisable set of behaviour traits. Due to the associations between queer monstrosity and

AIDS, it is understandable that the potential for positive counter identi-
fication with such infectious and traumatised Otherness in Hanson’s dis-
cussion remains limited. Hanson also discusses the lack of identification
offered to the gay male spectator in vampire horror. The softcore lesbian
vampire cycle produced by Hammer and Tigon Pictures in the 1970s, such
as Virgin Witch (1972) and Twins of Evil (1971), is said to provide a ‘hetero-sexualised’ space in which the male ‘revenant as sexual deviant is neither to be identified with nor desired.’36

In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Judith Halberstam considers monstrosity in the post-modern horror and
in Gothic fiction as a technology of subjectivity in which the queer threat of ‘meaning itself runs riot’. In her analysis of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), she argues that that they clearly show ‘the making of deviant sexualities and gendering’37: 12

Introduction
the queer tendency of horror film […] lies in its ability to recon-
figure gender not simply through inversion but by literally cre-

ating new categories.38

Like Halberstam, I understand the monster in horror as ‘the product of and
the symbol for the transformation of identity into sexual identity through

the means of failed repression’. 39 Her study highlights the horror film’s obsession with skin (torn, broken, penetrated, rotting) as a metonym for
the human, and thus also as a symbol of sexual identity within monstrosity.

But despite her call for feminist and queer readings of horror in order to

make a ‘claim for the positivity’40 of the genre, her study remains bound to a deciphering of its coded homosexuality.41

More centrally, Harry Benshoff’s work considers several ways in which

(mainly male) homosexuality ‘intersects with the horror film’ whereby

‘monster is to “normality” as homosexuality is to heterosexual’. 42 Monsters in the Closet (1997) includes an analysis of gay and lesbian representation within the genre that, yet again, centres on the monster figure as a
queer metaphor. The study offers a consideration of whether the queer
auteur (with James Whale as his prime example) infuses his/her sexual-
ity into the text explicitly or implicitly and, perhaps most importantly for Benshoff, explores the associational function that homosexuality adopts
within the ‘closeted text’ (the text in which homosexuality does not make
itself explicitly known but can be read or alluded to). It is this last function that Benshoff’s study seems to dwell upon, in that the representation
of homosexuality in horror is historically ‘allusive […] it lurks around the edges of texts and characters rather than announcing itself forthrightly’.43

Benshoff’s work again is largely confined to the problematic of the sym-
bolic and connotative ‘representation’ of alternative sexuality and draws on Alexander Doty’s (1993) reservations that:

connotation has been the representational and interpreta-
tive closet of mass culture queerness for far too long […] this
shadowy realm […] allows straight culture to use queerness for

pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it. 44

Benshoff’s argument builds on Dyer’s and Wood’s understanding of the
pleasures that oppositional identification with monster figures can offer

13

Queer Horror Film and Television
the gay spectator. Benshoff’s analysis extends from the mere recognition of the negative portrayal of a homosexuality that is bound up with monstrosity, to the potential that such monstrous icons such as Nosferatu’ s (1922) Count Orlok (Max Shreck) and James Whale’s creature in Frankenstein

(1931) offer for positive queer identification. Yet while Benshoff’s study
makes pains to celebrate these moments of oppositional identification for
the gay spectator, this same powerful connection with the Other never
emerges from the symbolic realm of suggestion. Such identifications with
coded homosexuality could be argued to run the risk of perpetuating the
exchange of non-normative sexual representations that remain implicit
according to heteronormative standards.

Benshoff’s line of analysis is also indebted to Linda Williams’ article

‘When the Woman Looks’ (1984), which considers the woman as a sym-
biotic double for the horror monster, as victim, object of spectacle, and

‘Other’ in her difference from the uncastrated male. Discussing early hor-
ror cinema such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and later Universal horror films like Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Williams maintains that the female gaze is punished via narrative dynamics that transform curiosity,
the desire to see, into masochistic fantasy. The woman’s look of horror at
the spectacular image of the monster temporarily paralyses her, momen-
tarily shifting attention away from her own body as object of spectacle. The monster’s power is related to an Otherness that resembles sexual difference in the eyes of the traumatised male. The woman is, like the monster, ‘a

biological freak’. 45 Williams argues that the frightened woman recognises the sense in which the monster’s potent freakishness is similar to her own

in its exclusion from the phallic world. 46 These moments of monstrous display, such as the Phantom’s (Lon Chaney) revealing of his mutilated face
to Christine (Mary Philbin), are compared to the moment when the male
child first sees, as he later understands it, the ‘mutilated’ body of his ‘castrated’ mother. For the female spectator, the annihilation of the monster
produces sympathetic identification with his plight and also ‘a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power’.47

Adapting Williams’ theory of sympathetic identification with the Other,

Benshoff applies it to the gay spectator’s recognition of his own ‘sexual difference’ from the heterosexual male and his identification with the cinematic

monster’s subject position ‘outside a patriarchal heterosexist order’.48 He

14

Introduction
argues that this identification provides a source of joyful self-recognition, a

‘powerful pleasure [and] wish-fulfillment fantasy for some queer viewers’.49

The viewer may consciously recognise tropes of homosexual behaviour

that may be coded in such a way as to conceal themselves. 50 Benshoff also recognises that, gay and lesbian authorship aside, immense pleasure is also available in offering a queer reading of seemingly ‘normative’ horror texts,

‘which have no openly homosexual input or context’.51 In such examples, the gay male spectator re-reads the text’s intricacies by way of an already present historical conflation of monstrousness with homosexuality.

Yet Benshoff recognises that horror film, in itself, also holds similar
appeal for the heterosexual viewer as a joyously grotesque experience,
whereby ‘ “normal” people [indulge in] the pleasures of drag or monstros-
ity, for a brief but exhilarating experience’. Yet he goes on to understand that the thrill is rendered safe via the narrative trajectory of the horror film, which demands the ejection and destruction of the monster and a realignment of identification with non-monstrous subjects. On the other hand,
the gay and lesbian spectator are eventually encouraged to ‘suffer with’ the monster in its destruction or have to realign themselves with a heteronormative object (usually depicted as the survivor/s). Despite the potentially radical pleasures that the horror film may offer to its queer spectators, he concludes that, ‘both the monster and the homosexual are permanent residents of shadowy spaces’.52

Benshoff’s study provides a significant discussion of important clas-
sic and cult horror films that are both infused with homosexuality at the
site of production (where meaning is encoded) and from the perspective
of audience reception (where meanings are decoded). Despite his initial
understanding of the potentially progressive utilisation of countercultural reading and identification strategies, his concluding argument quickly
returns to a rather cautious standpoint. Notwithstanding the pleasures of
queer appropriation, the perpetual revering of queer monstrosity simply

reinforces the ‘ongoing monsterization of homosexuality’53; Benshoff then calls for a critical understanding, and perhaps rejection, of the symbolism of the ‘monster queer’ in order to obviate the negative representation of
homosexuality. Due to the time of its publication, his study is limited by
the absence of more recent depictions of the ‘monster queer’ (or indeed
any other homosexuals) in films that foreground overtly queer, gay and

15

Queer Horror Film and Television
lesbian identity and do so with a critical awareness. Such films exhibit an understanding of a cinematic discourse that demonises homosexuality as
monstrous, instead offering up a parody of traditional horror conventions
or transposing gay male identities and anxieties onto existing generic character types and narrative forms.

Despite the closing chapter’s discussion of more recent queer-oriented
titles such as The Curse of the Queerwolf (1988), Benshoff’s study of 1997 is time-limited to the metaphoric homosexual monsters of A Nightmare on

Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990).

His projection of how homosexuality will be treated in future horror film
remains bound up with a reading of evocative gayness. With so few films
that feature explicit male homosexuality produced at the time, it is telling that Benshoff’s prediction for the future remains inconclusive:

since there are so few ‘normal’ homosexuals on screen in any of
these horror films […] The exploration of how homosexuality
might be figured within the genre (or how ‘real life’ homosexu-

als might look and behave) remains a closeted topic. 54

In addition to this seminal work Benshoff has recently published a piece
that revisits his analysis of queer horror production and aesthetics. In ‘Way too Gay To Be Ignored: The Production and Reception of Queer Horror in
the Twenty-First Century’ (2015), Benshoff updates his work briefly con-
sidering the work of David DeCoteau before ending with a more focused
discussion of the works of Victor Salva (namely Jeepers Creepers (2011) and Jeepers Creepers 2 (2013). Benshoff’s short piece considers the increasing visibility of queer horror directors, writers and of queer characters within horror film texts and discussed ‘how the monster queer continues to come
out of the closet, and how recent horror films and fan bases have frequently been forced to acknowledge his or her presence’. 55

Designating a sub-genre as queer horror raises a problem of definition.

As American director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts asks on the official website to

Hellbent (www.hellbent-movie.com/index.php):

What is Gay Horror? Is it any different to straight horror, what
is straight horror? Why do we need gay horror? What does

Gay Horror do to straight horror? Does it queer it? Isn’t horror
queer enough?

16

Introduction

Most recently Benshoff (2015) notes that there is a wealth of online sites, blogs and forums that are dedicated to the review, cataloguing and celebration of all things queer horror (these include: QueerHorror.com,
deadguyscinema.com, campblood.org and unspeakablehorror.com).

Sites such as QueerHorror.com suggest that the sub-genre is a ‘difficult
area to pin down’ and offers its own attempt to explain horror’s appeal
for queer audiences:

Horror deals with fear and the overcoming or succumbing to it.

Queers are people who do not have a traditional ‘straight’ ori-
entation of identity. This site is not dedicated to understanding
what is and isn’t queer horror, rather, it is a place to explore any
connection between these two fields that people can think of.

(QueerHorror.com, 2012)

In my own attempt to answer these questions in regard to films released
post-2000, I have identified specific subsets of the queer presentation of
horror tropes. These include texts that foreground the erotic and sado-
masochistic treatment of the male body, and texts whereby this male
eroticisation appends the explicit or implicit discussion of queerness.

There are queer horror texts that also represent the queer male body as

‘de-gayed’, though often not in any transgressive move towards sexual dif-
ference, but rather in a homosexual masculinity that is often de-politicised and straight-acting. Finally, there are queer horror texts that draw attention to camp performance and appropriation as a means of outlining the
constructed-ness of gendered, sexual and cultural identities.

Chapter 1 sets out to simultaneously identify the gay anxieties symbolised in the horror film, whilst also recognising the appeal for gay spectators.

It does so via the textual, psychoanalytic and cultural analysis of a classic horror feature that continues to engage gay men, namely Carrie (1976).

A key text in the analysis of gay male anxiety, I argue that Carrie’s depiction of a shameful and abject femininity captures moments of deep trauma
that, for gay spectators, resonates with feelings of conspicuous difference, physical ugliness and social exclusion from an assumed heteronormative
culture. Read by gay men as a variation on the ‘coming-out’ tale, Carrie’s
plight as a ridiculed, bullied and self-hating adolescent offers a strong focus of identification for gay spectators.

17

Queer Horror Film and Television

The Grand Guignol excesses of Carrie, that extend from the prom scene’s grotesque reference to abject bodily fluids and its use of canted
camera angles, saturated colours and split-screen editing to its excessive
female performance, have stimulated an explosion of queer appropriations
of the film in theatre, film and video art. The stylistic excesses of Carrie are celebrated and intensified in cross-dressing theatrical parodies of the film, in which the female parts are played by male actors in drag and vice versa.

Carrie’s depiction of a monstrous femininity presents a potent ‘Other’

with which the gay male spectator dis-identifies in order to disavow the
possession of shameful femininity. He achieves this via structures of the

‘masquerade’56 already evident in De Palma’s film. The chapter reads across from Stephen King’s original novel Carrie (1974) to De Palma’s film version and, finally, to a collection of theatre productions ranging from the
mainstream, Carrie – The Musical (1988, and recently revived in 2012), to drag-parodies such as Scarrie – The Musical (2005) and Carrie – A Period Piece (2006–7). These queer reworkings of Carrie exploit the excesses of De Palma’s film to create ironic readings and reinterpretations in which the cultural stigma of male homosexuality’s association with feminine masochism is confronted.

Chapter 2 continues the queer appropriation of De Palma’s Carrie with a deconstruction of the film in a piece of experimental video art
by Charles Lum. Indelible (2004), which shatters the text (via its editing process) and fuses it with hardcore gay pornography. The result is
a rumination on the appeal of eroticism and death for the gay horror
fan. Julia Kristeva (1982) has commented on the abjection of particu-
lar body fluids – pus, spit, urine, menstrual blood and semen – in the
subject’s maturation from infant maternal departure. Lum’s work draws
parallels between Carrie’s shameful menstrual blood and with gay pornography’s own body fluid, semen; his video works through an erotic
fascination with semen and its abjection as a potential transmitter of

AIDS. As an HIV positive filmmaker, Lum combines Carrie with various other horror hardcore gay porn films to consider the trauma and anxiety
experienced by gay men in an era defined by AIDS. Indelible explores the generic conventions of horror and gay pornography and discovers
a shared eroticism, imagery and experiences of desire, shame, humili-
ation and trauma. Indelible’ s eroticisation of horror provides a means 18

Introduction
of revisiting, recollecting and replaying cultural notions of trauma and
enables a clearer understanding of emerging queer horror aesthetics and
their appeal for gay men.

Chapter 3 begins to outline the textual, aesthetic and thematic qualities of queer horror via a sub-genre which I term Gaysploitation horror.

This title derives from the term ‘exploitation cinema’ which Ephraim Katz

(2001) defines as ‘films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye for quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the

product’. 57 Gaysploitation horror flaunts the eroticised male body, while almost completely excluding the woman’s. Yet further investigation reveals
this particular derivation of the exploitation film as curiously chaste in its presentation of nudity, violence and, above all, horror. Largely satirical in nature and leaning towards softcore erotica, Gaysploitation horror eludes
defined horror conventions. Furthermore, its representation of its protag-
onists as straight-acting and macho ‘men who sleep with men’, troubles
the identification of easily recognisable gay characters and often suggests a contingent practice of bisexuality rather than homosexuality. Evading
definition as either gay or horror, Gaysploitation horror is thus a sub-genre that paradoxically can be defined, not by those conventions it (ironically) possesses, but by those it eludes. The sub-genre arguably emerges via the
clichéd and low budget genre work of director David DeCoteau whose pro-
ductions (such as The Brotherhood (2001) and Voodoo Academy (2000)) begin to outline the developing trend toward queer horror aesthetics in the early 2000s.

Chapter 4 builds upon DeCoteau’s contribution to queer horror, providing clear proof of both the existence of a queer horror sub-genre and
the evolution of the form in its extensive overview and analysis of key directors in the field and of significant queer horror titles. Moving from queer Gothic television soaps such as Dante’s Cove and The Lair, both of which embolden DeCoteau’s conservative formula with softcore pornography, to
the work of queer auteurs such as Jason Paul Collum ( October Moon, 2004), Sean Abley ( Socket, 2007) and Tim Sullivan ( I Was a Teenage Werebear! , 2011), the sub-genre can be seen to flourish and mature during the decade
offering its own playful yet allegorical interpretations of sub-cultural gay masculine anxieties.

19

Queer Horror Film and Television

Chapter 5 focuses specifically on a gay variation of the slasher horror film, Hellbent (2004). Ouzts’ film trades in the same stereotypically

‘straight-acting’ gay masculinities, taken to the extreme in their adoption of macho masquerade in performance and costume, here seen in their appropriation of gay comic-artist Tom of Finland’s erotic archetypes: the Cop,
the Biker, the Cowboy and the Leather Daddy. This parodic trade in gay
macho dress and the eroticisation of the Gay Daddy type (seen through-
out queer horror) again highlights macho homosexuality and renders
invisible those ‘shameful’ feminine associations. The chapter investigates
the lure of macho performance for the gay man, which simultaneously
encourages a powerful, and shameful, erotic dis-identification with gender
while also highlighting its ‘performative’ qualities. The chapter questions whether Hellbent’s satirical depiction of gay machismo works to subvert the assumed authenticity of masculinity via parodic distance or whether it
simply reasserts the same oppressive structures. The analysis also extends
to a reconsideration of Clover’s (1992) formulation of the Final Girl sur-
vivor in slasher horror, here replaced by the Final Boy, and asks whether

Clover’s conventions are still applicable when the gender, and sexuality, of the survivor figure is switched.

Chapter 6 considers a particular trend in queer horror for gay men’s performative adoption and borrowing of the horror genre’s
self-referential tropes and conventions. Beginning with an overview of

Bruce LaBruce’s self-reflexive gay zombie films Otto; or, Up With Dead

People (2008) and LA Zombie (2010), the figure is shown to act as another agent of parody. Zombie drag (like Carrie drag, Tom of Finland parody and the ‘straight-acting’ performance of Gaysploitation horror) becomes
yet another example of gender performance that highlights the gay male
subject’s humorous, if anxious, negotiation with femininity and hyper-
masculinity. Extending on LaBruce’s work and upon critical studies
done by LaBruce and Leo Bersani into gay men’s desire to appropriate
and ‘steal’ identity, this chapter concludes by analysing two recent queer
horror television serials, In the Flesh (2013–15) and American Horror Story (2011–ongoing) both of which demonstrate queer appropriation.

I argue here that, for the gay man, the lure of cultural borrowing and
performative dress-up that queer horror affords takes centre stage. The
pleasures offered to the gay male spectator in such texts operate around a

20

Introduction
collapse of identification and desire and an oscillation between a strong
sense of celebration or pride taken in foregrounding one’s sexual differ-
ence but also masks a deep shame that is demanded both by hetero – and
homo-normativity. Employing psychoanalysis as well as close readings of
classic and cult horror, this book argues that queer horror projects con-
temporary anxieties within gay male subcultures onto its characters and into its narratives, building upon the figurative role of gay monstrosity.

Furthermore, it concludes that queer horror turns the focus of fear upon
itself, its own communities and subcultures.

21

1

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations
of a Horror Icon

As an inspiration for charting the emergent trends in queer horror film and television, Carrie (1976) seems an atypical choice. Yet the cult of Carrie, from its origins in Stephen King’s novel (1974) through to De Palma’s initial cinematic interpretation, has accumulated a wealth of queer appropria-
tions in both cinema and the theatre. Given Carrie’s simultaneous status as both victim and monster, alongside the narrative concerning her burgeoning sexuality and attraction to boys, she is situated as a powerful figure of identification for gay male spectators. However, I would argue that the gay male subject’s understandable empathy with the horror genre’s paradoxical passive/aggressive ingénue masks a wealth of unease and anxiety that
ultimately longs for her death.

I want to build on Carrie’s current reception (prior to the release of queer-director Kimberly Pierce’s 2013 film remake, which has been considered by

Gary Bettinson) as a film that is enjoyed retrospectively. 1 Its spectatorial pleasure is derived from: its excessive style and form, its prom-based narrative, the film’s canonical history and cultish influence, its ironic incorporation into queer and mainstream culture as a seventies-based ‘guilty pleasure’, and its extra-cinematic (and intra-cinematic) life post-De Palma, across varied cinematic and theatrical homage and adaptations of various queer involvement.

The cultural reception of Carrie as a re-viewed text from a contemporary 22

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
perspective perhaps differs considerably from the original audience and critical responses to De Palma’s stylistically excessive and reputedly misogynistic film. Queer interpretations of Carrie read the source text as a malleable, satirical, critically acclaimed and now seminal work with a fragmentary template
that invites ironic reading, re-assemblage and reinterpretation.

Why Carrie? What is it about this specific horror text that holds such strong appeal for the gay male spectator and for artists and performers who have assimilated it into queer culture? Carrie solicits cross-gender identification for the gay male spectator and does so via its basic coming-of-
age narrative. The film can be read by gay male subjects allegorically as a variation on the ‘coming out’ tale, both sexually and socially, and revolves around the awkwardness of revealing one’s own sexuality to one’s parents

(especially one’s mother). The film has also engendered a camp allure for the gay male spectator deriving mainly from its use of excess: in the overblown style and form of De Palma’s direction in terms of lighting, colour-coding, melodramatic use of music and score and in its exaggerated acting from
the, largely female, cast. There is also a considerable empathetic appeal for gay men in identifying with the bullied Carrie (Sissy Spacek). The adolescent ridicule at the hands of her peers, in regard to ‘Creepy Carrie’s’

menstruation and her oppressive family background, can be transposed
by the gay male spectator into memories of being marginalised because of
his homosexuality. The gay male subject finds pleasure in identifying with

Carrie in the recognition of feminine traits or desires seen in her character, particularly in her emerging attraction towards boys. The film also provides for multiple identifications with a cast of strong female characters
including Mrs. White (Piper Laurie), Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), Carrie,

Sue Snell (Amy Irving) and Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen).

These problematic structures of identification between gay male spec-
tators (and fans of Carrie) and the film’s female characters provide the basis for a study of its appeal as a text with potential queer readings. Yet this strong pull of identification implies a similarity between femininity and
gay male sexuality and, in a sense, also provides the main source of tension for gay men. This close proximity also produces a need for distance born
out of the dominant ideology’s shameful association with the (equally con-
structed) negative connotations of femininity, which, in Carrie, are offered as monstrous.

23

Queer Horror Film and Television

Narratives Working Forwards: Carrie’s

Mutable Origins

Although the appeal of Carrie for the gay male spectator centres upon Brian De Palma’s 1976 film version, Carrie as a cultural text does not originate with De Palma. This book considers the three main incarnations of Carrie that have been produced by three men: Stephen King, De Palma and, in
chapter two, experimental filmmaker Charles Lum’s appropriation of De Palma’s film in Indelible (2004), each of whom place their own auteurist stamp upon it. In this chapter, it is necessary to chart the treatment of

Carrie, from King as a highly successful writer in a popular genre largely read by male consumers, through to De Palma, a director with a controlling, voyeuristic, and cinematically referential style, and finally to the many queer appropriations of Carrie (theatrical and cinematic), to reveal why its narrative seems to invite parody and, in the most extreme sense, to invite
the reader/spectator to review and reconstruct it. A brief structural analysis of the narrative’s origins in King’s novel will better inform an under-
standing of Carrie’s continued metamorphosis within popular culture.

The inherent mutability and availability for appropriation of Carrie
lies in the fragmentary nature of Stephen King’s novel which is divided

into three defined sections of narrative. PART ONE: Blood Sport2 sets up the story of Carrie White: her torment at the hands of her fellow classmates after her very public and first menstruation; an introduction to her
religiously oppressive home life with mother Margaret; the subsequent
punishment of the high school girls’ bullying by Ms. Desjardin, their

P.E. teacher (renamed Miss Collins in De Palma’s film). PART TWO: Prom

Night3 contains most of the book’s main narrative thrust: the rigging of the prom King and Queen voting; Carrie’s humiliation on stage in a shower of
pig’s blood; and her furious telekinetic revenge upon the school, her classmates, the entire town and, finally, her mother. PART THREE: Wreckage4
mulls over the events in a largely formal presentation of quotations from

Carrie’s death certificate, news reports and the graffiti on the Whites’ house in a brief conclusion which removes us from the first person narrative that provides much of the emotional identification with Carrie and Sue. This
textual ‘wreckage’ is offered as evidence (albeit fictional) of the events that occurred on that prom night in Maine.

24

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

The narrative style that is so intense, brief and abrupt in PART THREE
is not new to the reader at this point. King’s entire story is a kind of

pseudo-epistolary5 novel made up of first and third person narrative, told from Carrie’s, Ms. Desjardin’s, Margaret White’s, Susan Snell’s, Chris Hargensen’s, and Billy Nolan’s (amongst others) points of view intermixed
with various fictional extracts from journals, books and interviews which
offer a sense of veracity to Carrie’s experience. King presents the narra-
tive via extracts from fictional news items (from The Enterprise Weekly, The Lewiston Daily Sun, and reports from the All Points Bulletin Ticker Tape), dictionaries of psychic phenomena and other fictional autobiographical and investigative texts ( The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White by David Congress; Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath by Dean K. L. McGuffin; My Name is Susan Snell by Susan Snell) and via post-prom night police interviews and scientific papers.

King’s multi-perspective narrative fragments the events in Chamber-
laine, Maine. Not only is the tale told from various characters’ disorient-
ing and disjointed points of view, but it is presented to us via a variety of forms of explanation. The horror tale then becomes insidiously relentless.

When the writing style changes to factual documentary and transcription
the reader expects the horror to cease due to a change in genre. However,
its presentation continues in a realistic style; therefore, it appears to ring true and the reader finds no relief. We could argue that from its literary
origins to the inspired appropriations, Carrie makes its ‘telling’ a terrifying, multi-textual, cross-referential tale of horror and offers multiple sites of identification. King’s reliance on a bricolage of styles, including journalistic and documentary sources, lends verisimilitude to an otherwise fantastical
tale. Carrie’s style references a literary history of such textual forms which stem from eighteenth and nineteenth century works. 6

Returning to King’s narrative, the protagonist Carrie, having been
showered with pig’s blood and humiliated at the prom, returns to enact
revenge by setting fire to the school with everyone trapped inside. The
perspective then shifts from Carrie’s first person inner monologue, to a
third person narrative of the prom night’s horrific events from within the
hall, to Susan Snell’s autobiographical first person account of events from within her family home as the school explodes. But then King sends us back, 25

Queer Horror Film and Television
revisiting the pig’s blood shower again for the reader, but this time from a different character’s point of view:

She was already on her way to the closet to get her coat when
the first dull, booming explosion shook the floor under her feet
and made her mother’s china rattle in the cupboards.

From We Survived the Black Prom, by Norma Watson

(Published in the August 1980 issue of The Reader’s Digest as a

‘Drama In the Real Life’ article):

…and it happened so quickly that no one really knew what
was happening. We were all standing and applauding and sing-
ing the school song. Then – I was at the usher’s table just inside
the main doors…

All at once there was a huge red splash in the air, some of it
hit the mural in long drips. I knew right away before it hit them,

that it was blood.7

The multi-narrative, multi-perspective, multi-generic style that King adopts is, for the most part, lost in De Palma’s retelling. His version of events is arguably told from his masculine, and therefore voyeuristic, view of how

Carrie’s life and the events that surround her are played out. De Palma’s film takes into consideration the shifting perspective of narrative from Carrie, to Sue to Miss Collins, Chris and Billy Nolan. By allowing them scenes that do not involve Carrie, they forward the narrative themselves and provide for
multiple point of view shots. However, King’s fragmentary and sudden shifts in perspective are not present in De Palma’s film. Fragmentation, shock and disorientation are presented to the spectator via audio-visual means alone.

De Palma makes use of subjective point of view shots, colour-filtered
frames, split-screen techniques, highly stylised slow motion and extreme
close-ups and high angle shots. His split-screen technique allows several
objects to fill the screen. Carrie is allowed to return the gaze in the scenes of revenge at the prom night in the film’s denouement but, as a consequence, is fixed in an even tighter frame within a frame and becomes doubly objectified.

The use of split-screen, rapidly paced editing and subjective framing offers the spectator a multiplicity of events, with each screen showing a different angle, a different series of actions or horrors, a different subjective point of view, and a different object of gaze. Yet, conversely, it also serves to contain the action.

26

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

Carrie as ‘Final Girl’ and the Heterosexual

Presumption

Carol J. Clover (1992) notes that the themes and concerns of De Palma’s

Carrie (as opposed to King’s novel’s) are decidedly ‘feminine’, referring to its dealings with menstruation, the mother-daughter relationship and
a cast that is largely female. Given this, she questions to whom the film
appeals concluding that, despite the film’s feminine themes and cast, its
place within the horror genre awards it a largely male spectatorship. She
goes on to discuss Stephen King’s explanation of his original narrative’s
popularity:

‘Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who has ever
had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys. Ed. or his glasses
thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of…’ Pulling gym
shorts down and thumb-rubbing glasses are things that boys do
to each other, not, by and large, things that girls do to each other
or that boys do to girls. They are oblique sexual gestures, the
one threatening sodomy or damage to the genitals or both – the

other threatening damage to the eyes – a castration of sorts. 8

Both King and Clover make reference to the film’s appeal to male specta-
tors. Despite its female protagonists and feminine themes, the forms of
humiliation noted by King open the film up to allow the male spectator
a cross-gender identification with the female protagonist which is even-
tually disavowed in Carrie’s revenge and eventual demise. The film’s and
the original text’s accessibility for gay male spectators lies in their potential malleability in terms of their formal structure and, more importantly, in the opportunities they provide for multiple, shifting identifications.

Here I specifically refer both to De Palma’s use of subjective framing and
his introduction of varying subjective points of view via split screen and
to King’s multi-perspective literary style. As a consequence, Carrie can be re-viewed from various perspectives and also offers a transformative
appeal. King’s suggestion and implication is that the (straight) male spectator finds the act of sodomy and the ‘threat’ of anal sex, with its inference of homosexuality, traumatic and shameful. Conversely, does the act of (or
the implication of) penetrative anal sex also provide similar anxiety for the gay male subject?

27

Queer Horror Film and Television

Clover and King both assume that the audience of the horror genre,
and in this case Carrie, is largely male and heterosexual. Indeed, this same heterosexist assumption complicates the male spectator’s identification with the recurring surviving female protagonist of the slasher horror
films, the ‘Final Girl’ that much of Clover’s study focuses on The hetero-
sexual assumption placed upon the horror spectator limits the possibil-
ity of the gay male spectator identifying with the female Final Girl figure in a non-heterosexual way. Clover sees this cross-gender identification
between the Final Girl and the (straight) male viewer as the slasher film’s chief subversive element9, but where does this place the gay male spectator within these supposedly transgressive identification processes?

Though Clover maintains the reactionary nature of the slasher film, she
also argues that it has radical potential. This is largely due to the adolescent male spectator’s shifting identification from the, albeit queerly coded, feminine masculine monster to the Final Girl figure, who is not without her
masculine traits. For Clover, the slasher film refuses to parallel male/female with masculinity/femininity, thus championing the heroine’s transgressive
gender fluidity over a binary opposition of gender affixed to biological
determinants, ‘a physical female and a characterological androgyne: like
her name, not masculine, but either/or, both ambiguous’. The slasher film’s countercultural potential lies in its break from mainstream narrative representations of gender, rather than demanding distance and rejection of
the threatening female character. Instead, it allows for a re-gendering of
the Final Girl, for ‘We are, as an audience, in the end “masculinized” by
and through the very figure by and through whom we were earlier “femin-

ized” ’. 10 Clover’s interpretation of the slasher film allows for the male spectator to temporarily experience cross-gender identification letting him feel

‘like a woman for a while’11, offering a transgressive queering of the (heterosexual) male viewer through cross-gender identification. For the gay
male spectator however, whose masculinity is perpetually conflated with
femininity within a heterosexist dominant ideology, the liberating and
transgressive identification processes become less subversive.

This temporary feminisation of the male spectator is associated with
feminine masochism, and it is this momentary experience of masochism
that is often considered by theorists such as Peter Hutchings (1993) as the primary pleasure for the horror film spectator, which he again presumes

28

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
to be male. Hutchings suggests that men who view horror experience
it as a temporarily disempowering occurrence, in their shifting identifi-
cation from female characters and Final Girls to male victims and their
struggle against an equally feminised, yet very male monster: ‘the male spectator experiences horror cinema as a series of pleasurable subjections, as multiple fantasies of disempowerment’.12 For Hutchings, horror film is simultaneously both alluring and repellent in its representation of death.

It proffers a fantastic visual representation, whereby masochistic view-
ers can indulge their ultimate masochistic fantasy in safe images of sym-
bolic death: ‘death functions as the ultimate passivity of subjection: death becomes the fantasy solution to masochistic desire. ’13

To reiterate, masochism is defined as pleasure taken from the subject’s
own pain, humiliation or submission. Laplanche and Pontalis summarise
the Freudian perspective on masochism as ‘a sexual perversion in which
the satisfaction is tied to the suffering or humiliation undergone by the

subject’14 Hutchings sees (heterosexual) male spectators’ temporary masochistic experience of horror as an opportunity to reaffirm their masculine
identity and the power structures available to them in a patriarchal soci-
ety. These momentary incidences of willing subjection and of uncomfort-
able yet arousing fantasies of the ‘castration’ of their power only serve to reconfirm their own status within a culturally gendered hierarchy. Thus,
the return of power becomes another source of jouissance for the male
spectator as a kind of re-tumescence of the phallus and the power it signi-
fies after the temporary masochistic and flaccid moment:

Men who watch and enjoy horror are always already subjects of
the patriarchy […] it could be argued that male submission to
disempowerment, that is a willing subjection made by someone
who already has power is merely a way of confirming posses-
sion of that power. In other words by temporarily ‘feminising’

the male spectator, horror emphasizes the ‘normality’ of mascu-

linity, thereby reassuring a male spectator. 15

How then does this work for the gay male spectator? Hutchings suggests
that the idea of passivity, if taken to its sexual and horrific extreme of penetration itself (by extension from knife to penis), is not necessarily erotic for the heterosexual male subject. It is the return to this subject’s perceived 29

Queer Horror Film and Television
activity in displaying his control over his own submission that provides
the jouissance and the ‘re-engorgement’ of power. For the gay man, how-
ever, it may be precisely the willing submission or penetration (in sexual
terms) that can provide erotic excitement. The gay male subject can be
simultaneously aroused by his own penetrability; contrary to the maso-
chistic fantasies of heterosexist male disempowerment, he may not experi-
ence the flaccidity of a supposed submission of power and a re-erection of
power after the event. Instead, he may experience pleasure or stimulation throughout such an ‘ordeal’.

What is the pleasure gained from a temporary disempowerment fantasy
in the horror film within a heteronormative society that determines the gay (anal) sexual act as disempowering? In this sense, the only ‘normal’ masculinity that is returned and offered to the gay spectator is a heterosexual masculinity. Hutchings also finds this approach problematic, arguing that:

In as much as the man is the subject of patriarchy, then he has
power [it] appertains to those institutional and ideological
positions which the male individual occupies and through
which he finds an identity. In this respect power takes on an
alienating quality; it can be used but it can never be owned […]

for male spectators, horror necessarily operates in this gap, this
space between what might be termed the unrealizable ideal or
symbolic ideal of masculinity and the real [it] serves to cover
over the fact that this spectator’s hold on power is structural and

provisional rather than personal. 16 (92)

Admittedly Hutchings’ ‘male subject of patriarchy’ here is one without a
defined sexual orientation – his consideration of the male spectator of horror is a general one which refers to the male spectator but implies hetero-
sexuality. What I want to suggest is that the gay male spectator experiences both pleasure and jouissance in his disempowerment and also in the
re-establishment of phallic power after the masochistic moment. However,
many gay men may also experience (un)pleasure in penetrability, and in
the masochistic moment and disempowerment it supposes. Is this where
the tension lies, not only in association with shameful feminine masochism
and a parallel identification with the sadistic position in terms of the gay man’s committing of illicit corporeal penetration? If so, how does the gay male subject and horror spectator rationalise this?

30

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

Klaus Rieser (2001) discusses Clover’s theories on slasher horror and
the Final Girl and argues that the sub-genre, rather than challenging main-
stream representations of gender, eventually reinstates them:

the slashers’ gender disruption is folded back in to the hege-
monic mold [sic] it serves to reinforce the heterosexist matrix,
despite – or even by way of – its break with mainstream gender

forms.17

Rieser further states that the identification between male viewer and Final Girl is essentially more complex and counter-productive than Clover argues: I posit that the male spectator does neither straightforwardly
nor entirely positively identify with the female victim-hero and
thus does not necessarily embrace an antipatriarchal and/or

passive position. 18

I would argue that this is also the case for the gay male spectator. Identification with passive female characters on screen may not imply his accept-
ance of his own passivity; by contrast, it may offer a chance for a distancing and re-masculinisation of his own gay male subjectivity. Indeed, Rieser
too falls prey to the heterosexual assumption in his otherwise queer-aware
consideration of the gay male spectator’s identification practices in slasher horror:

the identification patterns offered to male adolescent viewers [is
that the] Final Girl is served up less as a stand-in for the male
viewer than as an imaginary potential partner (‘my girl’). And
indeed the Final Girl does not so much embody what a male
adolescent would want to be himself, but how he would like his
girl to be: not passive but not too active, and above all, turning
down (indeed against) that other man who desires her, while at
the same time fighting her way out of a somewhat too restrictive

(read: parental) definition of girlhood (now we don’t want her

too chaste do we?). 19

In describing the appeal of horror for adolescent males, Hutchings and

Clover also assume the heterosexuality of their male subjects. But the

‘fraught and problematic’20 relation to masculinity they describe (in this 31

Queer Horror Film and Television
case for all male spectators) is also experienced by gay men during puberty and, as the queer appropriations of Carrie will show, for all genders during such a turbulent time of hormonal/bodily change and the development of
sexual identity. It could be argued that such turmoil persists beyond ado-
lescence for the gay male subject. The gay man is forced to take up con-
tradictory patriarchal and heteronormative ideals of masculinity that he
both identifies with and rejects, making his attempts at identification with masculinity particularly prolonged and uneasy. Horror film, and particularly Carrie, offers gay spectators the (un)pleasurable and transformative experience of cross-gender identification which serves to underline the
fragility of masculine identity, particularly in relation to sexual, political and power structures.

Rieser’s article raises a valuable point in the study of horror film and
one that is pertinent to the understanding of queer reception, readings and interpretations of Carrie as simultaneously subversive and reactionary.21

While the queer embrace of Carrie may signify a challenge to the dominant ideological representation of gender, Rieser argues it can also assert conservative, masculinist values:

While these films may accommodate female or queer pleasure
or thrills, their tendency to punish non-hegemonic masculin-
ity and to expulse [sic] femininity ultimately serves to reinforce

heterosexual and homophobic masculinity.22

Ultimately, Rieser suggests that (straight) masculine subjectivities are not so much challenged by the shifting identifications within slasher horror,
from monster to Final Girl, but are re-confirmed and re-masculinised via
an ‘Othering’ and eventual destruction or disavowal of difference. The

Final Girl and monster alike are considered queer entities that fight to
emerge into the symbolic order, to find their place in the hegemonically
gendered binary. The gay male spectator is identified by Rieser, but only in terms of his pleasure in masochistic identification and development of the
problematic in the narrative’s resolution, whereby the Final Girl is allowed to survive and emerge as an ideologically condoned feminine woman. This assumes that the gay male subject too identifies with either the monster
or Final Girl. Although Rieser’s heterosexual male spectator is pleased
to destroy the monster and to find the Final Girl eschewing any threat to

32

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
masculinity she may pose in becoming ‘his girl’, what restorative mascu-
linity is there for the gay male spectator? Indeed, what happens earlier in the narrative, when the gay male subject finds (un)pleasurable tensions
in his imposed temporary identification with the Final Girl, much as the
assumed (straight) male spectator does?

‘You’re a Woman now…!’: Femininity
and Masquerade

In this text that is arguably ‘about women’ (Stephen King considers

Carrie to be ‘a feminist tale’23), the gay male subject, in his assumed passivity, appears to have been aligned and associated with female disem-
powerment within patriarchal society. In this he recognises a similar
display of torment, oppression, suffering and a culturally imposed set
of incongruous and excessive gender traits. But what is revealed in the
queer adaptations of Carrie is more of a subjective oscillation between a rejection of this shameful feminine association and a powerful identification with the female subject in terms of her repressed cultural
place within heteronormative structures. In De Palma’s Carrie’s excessive performances of femininity, the gay male subject seeks indica-
tions of his own socially created, performed and gendered subjectivity
which are read as constructed against the natural-but-constructed-ness
of others. The presentations of deliberately ironicised femininity and of
phallically-charged women in queer appropriations of Carrie are valorised and revered, sometimes to the point of over-identification. De

Palma’s Carrie has been appropriated into numerous queer film and
camp stage adaptations, many of which feature explicit yet problematic
impersonations of the film’s women.

Arguably, monstrous femininity has, until now, been figured as the
main focus of cultural anxiety in both King’s and De Palma’s Carrie, with the spectre of ‘Othered’ femininity remaining central to many critical

interpretations.24 Before fully considering the implications of conflating femininity and gay male sexuality in queer re-readings of Carrie, it is necessary to grasp the presentation of femininity as presented both in King’s
original novel and De Palma’s film. King’s Carrie is a dumpy adolescent
with poor hygiene and bad skin who is not overtly feminine; whereas Sissy

33

Queer Horror Film and Television

Spacek’s Carrie in De Palma’s film, has a waiflike, ethereal quality and a
slender, pale prettiness. In the following extract from the novel we can
clearly distinguish King’s girl from De Palma’s:

Carrie stood swaying between the showers and the sanitary-
napkin dispenser, slumped over, breasts pointing to the floor,
her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were
shiny and blank.

She was thick through the waist only because sometimes she
felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gap-

ing, whistling hole was to eat and eat and eat. 25

Despite their differences, in both texts femininity is clearly presented as a masquerade. Carrie moves towards a culturally-imposed idea of femininity
via a masquerade of it: in dressing up, making clothes, fixing her hair and wearing make-up. In performing femininity, the masquerading women of Carrie are described by the narrative’s abusive and somewhat misogynistic men, represented by Billy Nolan, as ‘painted pigs’. In De Palma’s film, Carrie is actively encouraged to masquerade, both by Sue Snell and Miss

Collins, as a means of attracting men and improving her self-esteem. It is
the allure of the feminine masquerade that appeals to the gay male specta-
tor as a method of both highlighting and subverting gender impositions
enforced by patriarchal hegemony.

In her article, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929), Joan Riviere
reveals the psychoanalytic processes at work in the behaviour of women
who display both typically masculine and feminine characteristics in vary-
ing social contexts. Curiously, this apparently very feminine concept of
masquerade is influenced by Sandor Ferenczi’s (1916) discussion of homo-
sexual men who exaggerate their heterosexual traits (that is, masculine

ideals and machismo) in order to disavow their homosexuality. 26 Riviere maintains that this exaggeration is done as a means of defence against heterosexual male reprisals towards their assumed effeminacy. She then sug-
gests this as the same reason that women, ‘who wish for masculinity, put
on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from

men’.27 She demonstrates this in her discussion of the case of a prominent female speaker who successfully delivers papers in a decidedly masculine
environment. Afterwards, the speaker mingles in the audience, flirting

34

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
coquettishly with her male peers. Riviere concludes the same purpose as

Ferenczi, that this masquerade (in this case of femininity and flirtation) is done as a means of averting tensions produced by her intellectual challenge to male colleagues:

Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask,
both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the
reprisals expected if she was found to be in possession of it,
much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched
to prove that he has not stolen goods. The reader may ask now
how I define womanliness or draw the line between genuine
womanliness and ‘the masquerade’. My suggestion is not how-
ever that there is any such difference, whether radical or super-

ficial, they are the same thing.28

Initially, it is understandable, given the reprisals towards women who pose a threat to patriarchal order, that the female subject would negate this
threat with the assurance that she is merely ‘a woman’. Yet, in the masquerade, this assertion of a supposedly ‘authentic’ womanliness, is declared to be mimicry. For Riviere, no true womanliness exists. Instead, it is a means of proclaiming difference from an assumed masculinity via performance.

Mary Ann Doane (1992) takes Riviere’s work and applies it to the field
of cinema spectatorship to reconsider the idea of trans-sex identification

discussed in Laura Mulvey’s ‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure’ (1989).29

Initially, Doane examines Freud’s essay ‘Femininity’ (1933), which he states is an inquiry into the ‘riddle of the nature of femininity’, but which she
reveals is, in fact, a study of what it means to be masculine via a discussion of its binary opposite. Describing how Freud sees woman as an ‘enigma’

and a ‘hieroglyph’30, Doane points out the paradoxical nature of the hieroglyph as simultaneously alien and indecipherable yet also legible because
of its pictorial nature Freud seems to assign this paradox to the female
subject. Yet, in attempting to decipher the puzzle of femininity, he excludes woman herself from an informed discussion, proclaiming that the female
subject is too close to her own image to offer an objective opinion. While

Doane agrees that the relationship between woman and her iconic image
is a close one, she criticises Freud for his exclusion of his female audience from this discussion because they cannot ‘achieve the necessary distance of 35

Queer Horror Film and Television

a second look’. 31 Doane argues that it is this very eviction that perpetuates the patriarchally defined voyeuristic gaze that defines cinematic language
as argued by Mulvey.

What perturbs Doane (and what is also present in Riviere’s inquiry) is,

‘why woman might flaunt her femininity, produce an excess of femininity,

in other words foreground the masquerade?’.32 She continues that: The masquerade in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.

Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The
masquerade’s resistance to a patriarchal positioning would
therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as
closeness, as presence to itself, as precisely imagistic […] the
woman becomes the man in order to attain the necessary dis-
tance from the image. Masquerade on the other hand involves
a realignment of femininity, the recovery or more accurately
simulation of the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to
manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between

oneself and one’s image.33

Masquerading provides the means by which the female subject can seemingly
maintain the patriarchal status quo, while simultaneously obtaining a dis-
tance from which to view her own feminine subjectivity. While it appears to deny her a gaze of her own, this ironic performance, if consciously used and competently read by other women, offers a distancing effect for the female
spectator and is seen as preferable to trans-sex identification. According to Doane, such identification only locks the female subject into patriarchally limiting gender oppositions by seeking access to a male controlling gaze.

Conversely, the ironic performance of an apparently innocent, yet excessive femininity veils its radical potential. The masquerade challenges the status quo by providing an alternative means by which the female subject ‘simulates […] the missing gap or distance’. 34 By ironically performing an excessive femininity, the masquerading woman creates a distance between a supposedly ‘true’ femininity and a performed femininity while appearing not to.

Doane argues that femininity is the more mutable gender identity:

Thus while the male is locked into sexual identity, the female
can at least pretend that she is other – in fact sexual mobility
would seem to be a distinguishing feature of femininity in its

cultural construction.35

36

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

The concept of masquerade generally, and specifically as seen in the rele-
vant scenes in Carrie, holds interest for the gay male spectator as it highlights the socially constructed and performed (whether volitionally or not) nature of gender and sexuality. The progression from trans-sex identification to cross-gender impersonation may allow the gay male subject an
opportunity to reassess and reconfigure his own gendered and sexual iden-
tity via an ironic, excessive, mimetic performance of those varied char-
acteristics imposed upon it from dominant heterosexist ideology. Yet the
radical and liberating potential of such ironic performance may also be
made at the expense of those genders being performed.

In one scene from De Palma’s film, gym teacher Miss Collins encour-
ages Carrie to perform a culturally-defined femininity (to masquerade) in
anticipation of prom night. Making her stand in front of the mirror in the
girls’ locker room, Miss Collins actively fragments and objectifies Carrie:

‘Would you look at that, that’s a pretty girl…look at your eyes, a
little mascara…your lips – try some lipstick, nice pretty lips…

and your cheek bones, your hair, it’s beautiful hair – just put it
up a little…’

Doing so, she both establishes the distance via which Carrie can view her-
self objectively and closes the gap between Carrie’s idea of her own femi-
ninity and its normative image. The makeover scene from De Palma’s film
takes Carrie’s ugly duckling and transforms her with horrific consequences.

Shelley Stamp Lindsey (1996) criticises the encouragement of masquerade
by other female characters in the film. Challenging its subversive potential, she argues that the feminine masquerade sustains the repression suffered
by women in a patriarchal culture. Indeed, she claims that the masquer-
ade can be just as controlling and constraining to women as Mrs. White’s

(Piper Laurie) religious prohibitions:

The bodily repression demanded by Mrs. White is ultimately
analogous to the physical makeover promoted by Miss Collins.

The culturally sanctioned femininity proffered by the girl’s

teacher is as repressive as her mother’s fundamentalism. 36

The masquerade may allow for self-consciousness in regard to female sub-
jectivity, yet it can also perpetuate patriarchal oppression. The masquerade 37

Queer Horror Film and Television
as sanctioned by Miss Collins is a suspect one as it is directed by an ideologically feminine (and biologically female) subject. At various points
in De Palma’s narrative, Miss Collins physically punishes, controls and
restrains the girls in her charge as their gym teacher. She physically holds down and slaps both Carrie and Chris, submitting the girls to arduous and
humiliating punishments for their bullying. Doing so, she appears to facilitate the film’s objectification and fragmentation of the girls’ images, as they are framed in close-ups and split screens and, with each exercise, pushed
lower in the frame.

Stamp Lindsey summarises De Palma’s voyeuristic sadism pointing
out that Miss Collins’ transformation of Carrie satisfies ‘the needs of the masculine voyeur who initially glimpsed the horrific sight of sexual difference in the opening shower sequence’.37 Linda Williams (1990) also critiques Doane’s work on the masquerade in her discussion of King

Vidor’s 1937 adaptation of Stella Dallas. Employing the concept of the masquerade, Williams discusses Stella Dallas’ (Barbara Stanwyck) crav-ing for a subject position that allows the woman to be ‘something else
besides a mother’, the erotic, feminine sexuality that is denied by patri-
archal forces. Williams sees melodrama as a genre which provides a
context whereby female spectators can take up multiple positions of iden-

tification simultaneously. 38 Unlike Laura Mulvey, whose article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) demands a ‘radical destruction of

the major forms of [patriarchally defined] narrative pleasure’39, Williams offers a counter solution, emphasising the methods by which women do
achieve a look and a position of enunciation within patriarchal structures.

Williams argues that melodramas ask for ‘reading competence’ from their
female spectators, whereby women can recognise and acknowledge pro-
cesses of masquerade and trans-sex identification and thereby oscillate
between them.

Discussing Stella’s femininity as defined by excess – in her ‘stacks of
style’, layering of clothing, make-up and jewellery – Williams argues that
here the masquerade is performed for other women, as well as for men, both diegetically and extra-diegetically. The fetishistic disavowal of female masculinity, identified by Mulvey, seems out of place in the melodrama.

This is clearly demonstrated in both the mother’s and the daughter’s looks
at each other’s performances. For the sake of her daughter Laurel’s social

38

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
advancement, Stella deliberately masquerades passing for a gaudily dressed
and ill-mannered working class woman. Her punishment within the narra-
tive appears to adhere to the patriarchal insistence that ‘it is not possible to combine womanly desire with motherly duty’. 40 Her performance is deliberate, obvious and clear to both diegetic and extra-diegetic spectators; so much so, that it is almost parodic. Williams goes on to state that the female subject is capable of multiple identifications and of coming to terms with
contradictions within roles that are imposed upon her:

The female spectator tends to identify with contradiction
itself – with contradictions located at the heart of the socially
constructed roles of daughter, wife and mother – rather than

with the single person of the mother. 41

Williams’ critique of the masquerade is based around Doane’s claim that the female spectator tends to occupy one of two subject positions. For Doane,
the female spectator tends to over-identify with the female image on screen narcissistically, or identify with the position of the masculine subject as voyeur, and it is these two subject positions that inform her concept of the masquerade. Whichever way she chooses, Doane intimates that the female
subject loses herself. Her solution to over-identification, being too close to one’s image, is for the female subject to read the masquerade or image as a sign which manufactures a distance. Through this means, the masquerade can ‘generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable,

producible and readable by women’.42 Williams offers an alternative view: Rather than adopting either the distance and mastery of the
masculine voyeur or the over-identification of Doane’s woman
who loses herself in the image, the female spectator is in a con-

stant position of juggling all positions at once. 43

Though concerned with the melodrama genre, Williams’ article offers an
insightful look at viewing processes and identification more generally.

Why should the female spectator be the only subject capable of multiple
identifications? The male subject (regardless of sexuality) may be already
privileged with access to the phallocentric cinematic gaze, but what of the gay male spectator? Williams considers how Freud’s theory of psychosexual development differs between boys and girls whereby:

39

Queer Horror Film and Television
boys define themselves as males negatively, by differentiation
from their primary caretaker who […] is female […] This
means that the boy develops his masculine gender identifica-
tion in the absence of a continuous and ongoing relationship
with his father, while a girl develops her feminine gender iden-
tity in the presence of an ongoing relationship with the […]

mother.44

She further concludes:

Unlike the male who must constantly differentiate himself from
his original object of identification [his mother] in order to take
on male identity, the woman’s ability to identify with a variety
of different subject positions makes her a very different kind of

spectator.45

Indeed it does, but the gay male spectator is a very different one also. In Williams’ argument, adapted from Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of

Mother, Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978), the masculine subject position is based upon a rejection of the connection to the mother
and the adoption of a socially constructed masculine gender stereotype,
which is represented by the father. The gay masculine subject, on the other hand, is caught between identifying with his mother (in terms of her passive and receptive nature in a sexual sense) and disidentifying with her in order to form a male identity. The gay male subject faces the further issue of his father, with whom he erotically disidentifies. In effect, his subjectivity is fashioned by disidentifications with both female and male subjectivity.

He too desires to be ‘something else’, and this is where the contradiction lies – he wishes to be something else besides feminine (which, via
his penetrability and masochism, patriarchy shamefully deems him) and
something else besides masculine (which, in turn, both oppresses him and
yet demands impenetrability from him). I would argue that the gay male
spectator of queer horror, like the female spectator of melodrama, finds
himself simultaneously identifying with a number of subject positions,
all of which offer both varying degrees of guilt and shame and moments
of liberation and jouissance. Like her, he too ‘tends to identify with con-
tradiction itself’. The gay male spectator of queer horror and, indeed, of

Carrie, like the female spectator of Williams’ women’s films, is also capable 40

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
of multiple identifications but via a means of differentiation and of multiple dis-identifications. He too establishes subjectivity negatively. Yet, in his case, it is achieved in the oscillation between the processes of differentiation or distancing awarded by parodic performance and an (at times
erotic) over-identification with both the masculine and feminine image.

The gay male spectator also experiences the jouissance of over-

identification and, as a consequence, guilt and shame. He may over-identify both with the masculinity of the male subject and with femininity of the female.

Over-identifying with normative masculinity (the impenetrable male) offers
social mastery and a psychic ‘wholeness’ and thus differentiation from the
female subject, who is associated with lack. Such an over-identification with masculinity encourages a fantastical parade of hypermasculinity, whereby the subject appears to have the phallus. In this sense, it is necessary to differentiate between a previous theoretical comprehension of both a masquerade and a
parade of gender, and transvestitism or female impersonation.

The Masculine Masquerade

To ‘masquerade’ or ‘parade’ is to exaggerate or perform one’s feminin-
ity or masculinity as a signifier of the subject’s own biological sex. The
male subject ‘parades’ his socially constructed gender – masculinity, and
the female subject ‘masquerades’ hers – femininity. Yet if masquerade,
as argued by Doane, is the performance of an exaggerated femininity,
then is parade also an equivalent exaggeration of masculinity? I want
to suggest that parade is not strictly gender performance ‘straight up’;
for the male subject, the parade exaggerates the culturally determined gender traits that would seemingly confirm a biologically determined
gender. In parading an exaggerated masculinity, the gay male subject
idealises what he both worships and aspires to be (an impenetrable,
masculine ideal) and yet, conversely, disidentifies with what he is not as symbolically deemed by the patriarchal (heterosexual) hegemony.

Effectively, both parade and masquerade achieve the same purpose.

Interestingly, there is potential for the perpetuation of binaried language around gender oppositions given that masquerade is used to
describe the performance of femininity by a female, and parade is the
performance of masculinity by a male subject. I wish to avoid this and

41

Queer Horror Film and Television
so will refer to this performance or exaggeration of gender as a masquer-
ade for reasons outlined below. The understanding of the term parade,
relates to Lacan’s (1978) concept of the ‘parade of signifiers’, whereby the speaking subject makes his or her unconscious desires known by way of
the ‘parade of signifiers’ in language and the flow of speech; these in turn are governed by Lacan’s concept of ‘The Name of The Father’ and thereby
implicated into a patriarchy and gendered male Indeed, as Lacan states
in reference to the masculine parade, ‘virile display in the human being

itself seems feminine’46, and even the parade of masculinity is associated with femininity. If Lacan’s concept of parade represents the male subject’s excessive performance of machismo, it is a performance of gender
that he ultimately considers feminising. Taking this into consideration,
is the term parade really so different from masquerade? Indeed, is there
such a concept as the ‘masculine masquerade’ that does not imply such
a cross-gender movement?

Harry Brod (1995) considers the masculine masquerade – but instead of
referring to the act of masquerade as an essentially feminine one, he attempts to reveal masculinity as a masquerade also. Brod maintains not only that masculinity may be a masquerade in its heteronormative performance, but that

‘masculinity itself in any and all of its forms, is a masquerade’.47 In order to distance his concept from the traditionalist view (more specifically the work of Doane and Stephen Heath) of the masculine masquerade existing in essentialist and singular terms, he advises referring to ‘masculine masquerades…

the pluralized masculinities, coined to reflect the significance of difference’.48

This opens up the concept to my consideration of a gay masculine masquerade.

Brod looks at the historical view of masculinity as ‘inherently opposed

to the kind of deceit and dissembling characteristic of the masquerade’.49

According to this traditionalist understanding, ‘the masculine masquerade

is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms’. 50 Indeed, if the masquerade’s purpose is ultimately to provide the ‘simulation of a missing gap or distance between the subject and their image’ and if the masculine subject is
competently aware of his ‘true’ subjectivity, why then should the male sub-
ject have a need to masquerade in a patriarchal culture as the female subject does? The gay male subject, however, despite being only partially implicated into the patriarchal culture, masquerades/parades because he has to, to achieve similar yet contrasting ends to Brod’s masquerading idealised

42

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
heterosexual male subject, this time in order to ‘pass as straight’ to avoid reprisals within a heterosexist ideology.

As Williams states of Stella Dallas, ‘Stella’s real offence…is to have attempted to play both roles [of both mother and erotic woman] at once’.51 In
the queer appropriations of Carrie, playing both roles at once, here in terms of feminine and masculine, becomes more significantly gendered and theatrically realised. What happens then in queer appropriations of Carrie where playing both gender roles at once (i.e. transvestite performance) is literalised on stage and cross-gender identification ‘crosses over’ into cross-gender performance?

Carrie’s Trans-Sex (Dis)Identifications

Existing somewhere between the socially constructed binary of a sym-
bolic femininity (as indicated by his anal receptivity) and his biological
masculinity, the gay male subject seems initially drawn to the concept of
masquerade or parade as a means of revealing the fragility of his cultur-
ally prescribed and gendered subjectivity. It provides a means with which
to negotiate the symbolic possession of masculine and feminine identity
traits and it also draws attention to the accessibility of the masquerade for both sexes. I want to suggest that a man can perform both an excess of
masculinity in hypermasculine parade or masquerade and, further still, via female impersonation or a camp parody of it.

If to masquerade is to deliberately perform an excess of gender, the
masquerade of femininity in Carrie is intensified, from wearing pretty clothes to the excess of faked menstrual blood worn by Carrie in her
humiliation on prom night which is imposed upon Carrie. This bodily fluid, which symbolises Carrie’s femininity and threatening potency,
adorns her in the blood showers of De Palma’s film (and prefigures the
shower of male bodily fluids in Indelible (2004) discussed in the following
chapter). What I want to elaborate upon here is this idea of bodily fluids as the representation of biological identity being externalised. Blood (in
this case menses) becomes implicated into a culture of clothing and ‘per-
formative’ layering.

Addressing the concept of excess, Doane quotes Michele Montrelay’s

‘Inquiry into Femininity’:

43

Queer Horror Film and Television

From now on, anxiety tied to the presence of the body can only
be insistent, continuous. This body, so close, which she has to
occupy, is an object in excess which must be lost, that is to say

repressed in order to be symbolized.52

These ideas of continuity and insistence, in other words flow, alongside that of excess, saturate De Palma’s and queer variations of Carrie. They are presented in terms of cinematic excess (in form, editing and style): the excess of bodily fluids, an excess of performance in layers, and in an excess of gender.

Such excessive performance of femininity and masculinity informs the mas-
querade, but how does it influence the transsexual performance of gender?

Female impersonation would seem to offer a utopian ideal of sexual fluidity to the gay male subject, yet, as I will argue, the potentially subversive nature of this performance fails, only serving to reinstate patriarchal hegemony.

While there may be an obvious reason for the gay male subject’s mascu-
line masquerade of machismo in gay macho stereotypes, what is the appeal of cross-gender or trans-sex masquerade or, more specifically, female impersonation for the gay man? It is entirely understandable, given the cultural reprisals directed towards feminised gay men or gay male sexuality, that
exaggerating the subject’s masculine traits is used as a defence against such punishments, but to what purpose does the gay male subject adopt a feminine gender masquerade? Doane argues that female transvestism is considered potentially subversive, while male cross-dressing is often regarded as comic or ridiculous:

Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter, female transves-
tism is only another occasion for desire. Thus while the male is
locked into sexual identity, the female can at least pretend that

she is other. 53

Is there any hope for the subversive potential of male transvestism as a
means of providing freedom from the constraints of cultural prescriptions
of gender? One answer is suggested by Stamp Lindsey in pointing out that
in Carrie, telekinesis (the willed movement of objects) is presented as a distancing metaphor:

Telekinesis severs the body from physical action, displacing the
violence associated with Carrie’s desire onto external objects,

44

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
masquerade separates body from image, interior from exterior.

Both strategies attempt to substitute the monstrous female body

with a void.54

Similarly, Stephen Koch’s (1985) discussion of Paul Morrissey and Andy

Warhol’s use of transvestite performers as purportedly ‘real girls’ throughout their films55, identifies transvestites as an act of willed ‘pretence’. He considers the transvestite to possess a ‘sense of control over his/her flesh so they can temporarily ‘delude’ themselves into ‘becoming female’:

The transvestite on one hand builds a life upon the denial of his
anatomical reality [on the other] the transvestite puts complete
credence in the dominant efficacy of the so-called masculine
property of will […] the transvestite absolutely links will and

behaviour thereby denying the flesh.56

Telekinesis, operating as a representation of ‘mind over matter’, could offer a metaphor for the gay male subject’s fusion of femininity and masculinity, one that is denied by his own male physicality. The gay male subject in this sense can ‘pretend that [he] is other’57 – but to what purpose? Already configured as ‘Other’ in the heteronormative symbolic, it would seem that
this simply underlines the subject’s ‘Othered’ status. One could deduce that the adoption of cross-gender masquerade or, indeed, female impersonation in the queer appropriations of De Palma’s Carrie, goes some way to subvert traditional gender stereotyping of the female as passive, masochistic object of spectacle and the voyeuristic, sadistic male subject. Yet both the transvestite and the masquerading female subject may indeed be guilty
of perpetuating traditional patriarchal ideals of femininity and, in some
extreme cases, of disavowing femininity and encouraging misogyny and
gynophobia. When the gay male subject appears to over-identify with the
female subject and willingly adopts drag, identification processes – as in

Stella Dallas – become exaggerated and obvious. We must therefore take into account the contexts in which these performances are being staged and with what intentions. Commenting on female impersonation, Judith

Butler states that, ‘parody by itself is not subversive […] a typology of
actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed, parodic laughter, depends on a context and reception’. 58 Much of the drag and theatrical parody of De Palma’s Carrie appears to have been staged with 45

Queer Horror Film and Television
acerbic, camp, comic intentions centred around ridicule and humiliation.

It is comedy, not horror, which informs them and in uncovering the layers
of comedy that shroud camp- Carrie performance, a wealth of anxiety and unease is revealed.

The cult of Carrie even inspired an ill-fated Broadway musical in the late 1980’s. Carrie – The Musical was briefly staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988 and became notorious in theatre circles for being a leg-endary financial disaster and is one of the subjects of study in a book on
theatrical failures entitled Not Since Carrie (1998) by Ken Mandelbaum. At the time of its reviews, it was already being heralded in The Monitor as a

‘cult musical’59 and clearly figured as a camp oddity. Critics were astounded by the outrageously overblown kitsch of much of the musical’s staging
claiming that it ‘ranks as one of the most misconceived in theatre history, often wildly off in tone and unintentionally comic’.60

At one point in its short run, Carrie – The Musical became a hot ticket for the ‘flop connoisseur’. The musical’s cult status was also enhanced by its failure, suggesting that a lack of success may itself be pleasurable for the gay male spectator. Its short-lived notoriety lay in its presentation of ‘flawless failure’; Mandelbaum even refers to one of its songs as ‘perfectly awful’.61

In a similar sense, the gay male subject is associated with an unsuccessful or a failed masculinity within the dominant heteronormative patriarchal
culture. The same valorising of failure may appear to be at work here, and
one that he recognises in his identifications with the female protagonists of Carrie. However, in celebrating failure in a display of excessive femininity by ironically embracing his ‘failed’ masculinity in the effeminate performance of feminine masquerade, the gay male subject similarly encourages its derision.62

Subsequent theatrical versions of Carrie all attempt similarly to ‘perfect failure’ but, according to Mandelbaum, none will ever reach Carrie – The Musical’s iconic status for ‘there’s never been a musical like her’.63 The gay male subject’s trans-sex identification with the arguably empowered female
protagonists of Carrie is taken to its logical extreme in various stage performances that display increasingly explicit queer references and in which
various female characters are performed by (in many cases) gay men.

Now disbanded, a San Francisco based group of ad-hoc performance art-
ists known as The Sick and Twisted Players, led by Tony Vaguely, produced

46

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

Figure 1.1 The Sick and Twisted Player’s Carrie (1996).

underground queer theatre that would fuse cult feature films (often hor-
ror) with television serials and soaps to present cross-breed variations.

The company, largely made up of male actors, drag up as the female leads
and often reinterpret scenes word-for-word from their source inspira-
tions. Productions staged in the early to mid 1990s include: The Brady Bunch: Friday the 13th; Texas Chainsaw: 90210; The Exorcist: A Dance Macabre and a version of Carrie (1996) that, alongside their other productions, encouraged audience participation in the action on stage. Vaguely’s
production of Carrie included:

Carrie Kits [which] armed audience members with lunch bags
containing plastic crucifixes and tampons to throw at the title
character, played by [Tony] Vaguely, while shouting ‘Plug it up!’

during the pivotal shower scene.64

Vaguely states that his version of Carrie is heavily influenced by the De Palma film, ‘as it is so embedded in mainstream culture through its
visually powerful telling in cinematic terms, that indeed I believe to have 47

Queer Horror Film and Television

more resonance with audiences, and specifically for me…’ .65 The Sick and Twisted Players’ appropriation not only featured female impersonation but
also female male impersonation and, as Vaguely puts it, ‘straight drag’ (see
figure 1.1) whereby characters’ genders are performed ‘straight-up’ but in a histrionic, campy and excessive style:

The mother was a real woman, though with her over the top
acting and make-up many assumed she was in drag. Not so.

But I was Carrie in drag, Miss Collins was in drag, and pos-
sibly some of the extras at the prom…the rest of the cast played

“straight drag” so to speak, women were women, and men

were men. 66

One review states of the gender play and jibing of performed menstruation:

Vaguely perfectly captures […] the role of Carrie. His/her com-
pressed body language and long straggly hair wrap him/her up
into a flawless introvert. Actually we’d better stop attempting to
identify genders in this review since S&TP love to switch sexes
and keep you guessing […] the audience members dip into
their complimentary Carrie souvenir bags and hurl feminine

hygiene products at the menstruating mess onstage.67

In 2005, Hell in a Handbag Productions staged a run of Scarrie – The

Musical in Chicago (see figure 1.2). Their version of De Palma’s film also involved drag performances of the triptych of female leads, Carrie, Mrs.

White and Miss Collins. Written by David Cerda, the play is an unauthor-
ised parody of Carrie which features ‘a rockin’ 70s influenced score and lots of pig’s blood.’ Cerda professes that:

This story just resonates with me, it’s the ultimate revenge fan-
tasy. I also truly love the film, Sissy Spacek is the embodiment
of what I and so many others I know felt on the inside […] the

film is just ripe for parody. 68

Erik Jackson’s production of Carrie (2006), (initially sub-headed A Period Piece), for Theatre Couture, was staged at New York’s PS 122 Theatre. Jackson’s version features only one drag performance, that of Carrie herself, by performance artist Sherry Vine (Keith Levy, see figure 1.3). Despite playing the narrative relatively straight, and being touted as the only theatrical version (other 48

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

Figure 1.2 Scarrie – the Musical (2005) promotional stills.

than the musical) to be sanctioned by Stephen King himself, the production
draws many of its comic moments from the references to female sexuality
and menstruation. The central blood shower sequence is played for laughs
and implicates the audience in the prom night glee, by dumping buckets and
buckets of ‘blood’ over Carrie and most of the audience in the front rows. Yet Jackson’s version, despite these uneasy moments of pointed comedy at the
expense of women’s bodies, is one of the only productions that highlights the narrative’s radical potential in identifying with the ‘outsider’, ‘the freak’ and the

‘Other’. Jackson’s final scenes clearly state the play’s queer subtext:

49

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 1.3 Theater Couture’s Carrie (2006).

SUE: Doesn’t it stand to reason that there are others? Hundreds,
maybe thousands. But these people won’t always be the Carrie

Whites, the oddballs, the freaks! They might blend in with the

rest of us! 69

Jackson’s version, he admits, was born out of an identification with Carrie as a tormented outsider. Its star, Sherry Vine, concurs in several interviews that he identifies with Carrie as a marginalised individual:

What gay can’t relate to the story of Carrie and all of the tor-
ment that the title character faces? I was the school sissy and
lived every day of my life in fear until college. I wish I had that
strength that I have now and said ‘Yes okay I’m a fag’, I think

that would’ve taken the air out of their balloons! 70

Jackson enlarges on this proclamation of his version of Carrie as the ‘ultimate outsider’ who is especially relevant to those with stigmatised sexual orientations: 50

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

Many who struggle with any non-hetero impulses or identi-
ties often feel similarly. And that Carrie is able to enact such an
impactful revenge certainly taps into the extreme fantasies of

the oppressed and shunned.71

Jackson rejects the criticism of female impersonation as misogynistic. He
describes his production’s comic highlighting of menstruation and female
sexuality as an affectionate critique of femininity:

There’s sometimes a knee-jerk reaction that a male writer who
writes a female part to be played by a man in drag must hate
women […] since I’m working in a comic milieu with this
material, there was no way that the part could be played by a
woman, since there is nothing funny about girls throwing tam-
pons at a real girl who’s having a fake period. But you switch out
the genders and something in the equation completely clicks.

You have to have that distance in this instance. The conceit for
me doesn’t comment on gender politics as much as it does on
the demonization of the outsider, which here is represented by

a man in a dress, which our society barely tolerates.72

Yet, once again, it is the female subject that is excluded from the performance of excessive femininity. It seems that, in terms of comic excess,

Jackson’s ‘man in a dress’ is more able to achieve ‘that distance’, which both formulates a critique of gender and differentiates male homosexuality from
femininity. The actors onstage are not simply simulating femininity, rather they are performing a comically unsuccessful masquerade of femininity.

What is being performed on stage is a failed woman, highlighted by the simulation of a highly exaggerated menstruation. This deliberately failed
gender performance offers a very strong point of identification for the gay male spectator. The ironic pleasure offered to the gay male subject in the

failed Carrie – The Musical influences Jackson’s work heavily73, and perhaps it is failure in general that remains the central lure for the playwright: ‘I’m attracted to spectacular failure. It’s compelling!’ Unlike other drag-Carrie performances, Jackson’s version never explicitly makes clear that it is a man in a dress performing excessive femininity onstage. Yet, there are occasions where traits of masculinity are revealed in dropping the drag. As Jackson
declares, ‘We never drop the drag per se, but it isn’t played totally straight, 51

Queer Horror Film and Television

if you’ll pardon the pun’. 74 What is indicated in these moments, where the fabricated performance of femininity is dropped and the layers reveal both
a constructed feminine and masculine subjectivity, remains to be seen.

Is there a difference between patriarchal representations of femininity

(associated with monstrousness or, at the very extreme, nothingness) and
the willing adoption of a camp parody of that representation? This is debatable and entirely dependent upon how volitional one views the irony to
be. For example, the post-failure celebration of Carrie the Musical’s camp overtones are perhaps not as pointed in their critique of gender identities as those which foreground the masquerade of camp and drag. It must be
noted that the parody of monstrous femininity, represented by the various
drag- Carries, is not undertaken by its objects (women) but notably by its subjects (men) and, as such, cannot be separated from patriarchal influence. There is an implicit misogyny in many of the drag appropriations of

Carrie. Gynophobia is evident in the disgust shown towards menstruation encouraged by The Sick and Twisted Player’s audience participation and in

Theatre Couture’s overblown gross-out explosion of blood onto audience

members. 75 In highlighting the monstrous Otherness of women’s bodies and, indeed, of femininity, the gay male transvestite performer seems to
ridicule femininity by performing an excessive and desperate plea to be
recognised as not woman. Do such performances, encouraged by a clear identification with both victimised femininity and phallic femininity, offer a chance for the gay female impersonator to highlight his difference from
femininity and thus disavow the phallic lack attributed to him by heter-

onormativity?76 In ‘Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’ (1991), Carole-Anne Tyler discusses the ‘phallically regressive nature’ of female
impersonation and its relation to camp and mimicry. Through a discussion
of drag performance, male and female impersonators and feminine icons,

Tyler points out the potentially oppressive connotations of camp mimicry:

Not too long ago camp languished, theorized as the shameful
sign of an unreconstructed, self-hating, and even woman-hating
homosexual by gay, feminist and lesbian feminist critics alike.

Now camp has been rehabilitated with a vengeance: not only
femininity but even macho masculinity is read as camp and,
therefore, radical […] [but] if all gender is an act and not the
direct expression of a biological essence, what counts as camp

52

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
and why? And if camp is a parodic distance from some identity
theorists once thought it too nearly imitated, what guarantees
are there that such a distance is not a difference complicit with

phallocentric hierarchies?77

The distance, which recalls Erik Jackson’s words, that is awarded to camp
parody and female impersonation is one that highlights, paradoxically,
not only the subject’s difference from patriarchal, heteronormative mas-
culinity, but also from the femininity it mimics. In effect, this propels
the performing subject back to a masculine subjectivity that is situated
alongside and within phallocentric patriarchy. This is perhaps because
the performance originates in a failure of a phallocentric scripting. Tyler argues that female impersonation by gay male subjects, while being used
as a weapon against the limiting heteronormative masculinity thrust upon
them, may in fact also exist as a defence mechanism against heterosexist
reprisals:

[…] camp and its interpretations participate in the reproduc-
tion of subjectivity and can be defensive as well as counter-

offensive. 78

Tyler separates masquerade from what she calls, ‘transvestic perfor-

mance’.79 She identifies a contradiction within the defense of camp and drag, which maintains that all identity is a cultural performance. What
then makes camp performance of gender ‘any more radical or indeed
achieving any more subversion than the masquerade or parade’ of gender
played ‘straight’? Her solution offers a productive insight into the various dragged performances of Carrie. She argues, like Williams in regard to the deliberately scripted female protagonists of melodrama, that the context of performance and the subject’s authorial intentions should be taken into account: ‘parody is legible in the drama of gender performance if someone

meant to script it, intending it to be there’. 80

Though the intentions of transvestite performance may well be sub-
versive, the performance may unconsciously uphold an oppressive phal-
locentric discourse. It seems that authorial intention only goes some way to influence the potential readings of a gendered performance. The grotesque
renditions of the tragi-comic femininity in drag acts seem to suggest that, despite the transvestite performer’s protestations of apparent identification, 53

Queer Horror Film and Television
there is a derision aimed at the female figures parodied. While this masquerade of feminine impersonation, present in the queer appropriations of Carrie, initially offers the gay male spectator identification with the character of Carrie and highlights the fragility of presupposed ‘natural’ masculinity, it also provides a means by which he can reject the shameful femininity associated with his sexual identity. The gay male subject mimics the female subject, performing an exaggerated version of a femininity attributed to
him, presenting it as unreal and ridiculous. Tyler concludes, via various
references from feminist critics all of whom maintain the negative, oppres-
sive functions of gay male drag for the female subject, that:

These feminists all assume that camp operates defensively to
hold femininity and the lack it signifies at a distance from
the man who seems to have adopted it. His femininity is a
put on, not the real thing, signaling that he has what women
lack: the phallus. The man in drag, they suggest, is the phallic

woman. 81

It appears that in drag- Carrie performances, the cross-gender masquerade, which at first appears to be an homage to femininity, may merely provide a
veil for the reaffirmation of masculinity. What occurs in the gay male spectator’s reception and appropriation of Carrie is a literalising of the same symbolic trans-gender identification of both Mulvey and Clover’s works.

Though Carrie is not a slasher horror in the strictest sense, I propose that a similar distanciation with femininity is enacted via simultaneous (dis)identifications with femininity via the film’s narratives and subjective framings.

Both Clover and Hutchings implicitly claim a heterosexual orientation for
the majority of male adolescent horror spectators who are re-masculinised
via their shifting identifications from monster to Final Girl. The gay male spectator also seeks a potent re-masculinisation, but from a more complex
hegemonic cultural imposition which places him, like the female subject, in the position of lack and thus alongside femininity. His re-masculinisation
is achieved via contradictory, multiple dis-identifications with both femi-
ninity and masculinity.

Klaus Rieser points out that the horror film is constructed and defined
by ‘improper fusions’, be it either in the figure of the monster/killer or the Final Girl herself. These fusions may prove the primary identification point 54

‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon
for the gay male spectator, but by virtue of his identification with such

‘improperly fused’ characters, he too fights for emergence and acceptance
into the symbolic. Rieser concludes that in the slasher film:

illegitimate (con)fusion is one of the prime threats […] the
feminine men, the masculine women, the male spectator
identifying with a woman – they are prime examples of such
improper fusions, who are defined as monstrous then punished
and expelled […] (confusions are resolved in slashers) […] In
other words, difference from hegemony (queerness) is othered
while heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it maintains

are reinstated. 82

Such contradictory and reactionary reinstatements of heteronormative
masculinity are present also in filmic appropriations of Carrie and throughout the queer horror film sub-genre. By presenting either extreme versions
of gay macho masculinity or excessive femininity via cross-gender per-
formance, queer horror presents an appearance of gendered fluidity while
simultaneously valorising fixed gendered subjectivities.

55

2

Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

Indelible (adj.)

• (of ink or a pen) making marks that cannot be removed.

• not able to be forgotten.1

Charles Lum’s experimental short Indelible (2004) shifts queer Carrie worship to more extreme and explicit levels. The concept of indelibility and
the impressionable or unforgettable event or image is at the centre of Lum’s fusional video. Certain impressionable images and events induce a traumatic effect upon Lum’s work and this extends to the traumatic discovery of his
own HIV positive status which feeds into his visual contemplation of pleasure and mortality. Indelible brashly combines borrowed original feature film footage in a clash of the horrific and the erotic. The video is chiefly made up of Lum’s own self-described favourite films: Carrie (1976) which is intercut with excerpts from The Fury (1978) and is further cross cut, dissolved and juxtaposed with images and sounds from hardcore gay pornographic films, most
notably, LA Tool & Die (1979). He describes it as:

an aborted narrative about emasculated machismo, femininity,
fear, shame, bloodlust, sexual desire, disease, retribution and
death in an American pop cultural spray of blood and semen

that builds to an explosive, cathartic climax. 2

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

Lum interprets Carrie’ s pain via his own subjective experience and socially constructed identity, and it is reworked to reflect both the trauma and
anxiety experienced by a gay male subculture in an era that is defined and
influenced by HIV and AIDS. Carrie, The Fury and LA Tool and Die were produced in the late 70s, a period in time just prior to the onset of a global epidemic of HIV and AIDS but which, retrospectively viewed, seems populated by a gay masculine culture that appears naïve and unconcerned with
such matters. This hedonistic time of louche gay male sexuality could be
viewed in retrospect as sustaining the definition of gay masculinity as paralleled with the penetrability associated with femininity and female sexuality, via a new understanding of the infectiousness of bodily fluids.

Lum’s works often favour the short form as digital videos that concern
themselves with ideas of gay sexuality in relation to his own HIV posi-
tive status. Indelible ‘borrows’ or ‘samples’ (it re-edits, re-configures and visually alters) scenes, images, shots and sounds from multiple films. In
this sense Indelible is an (un)original mashup or a piece of bricolage that appropriates scenes from original sources. Lum’s films are informed by
the conviction that HIV alters the subject’s personal experience on emo-
tional, political and sexual levels and Indelible passionately embraces these themes. Lum points out that Indelible is most frequently screened at ‘gal-lery shows, small art events, or lectures’. The only major festivals to screen were the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival
and Mix Brazil. Yet the short has been rejected from various independent
film festivals and galleries due to its controversial imagery and because of its explicit sexual content and the copyright issues that arise in borrowing clips and sounds without permission. Not only is Lum marginalised by
the mainstream artistic culture, his work is stigmatised somewhat within gay and lesbian artistic subcultures. One particularly vitriolic response to Indelible, from a critic at the Austin Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival in 2005, clearly highlights the potent and provocative content of

Lum’s short:

…when the MOST GODAWFUL AND HORRENDOUS

SHORT FILM I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE FUCKING

LIFE was shown…It is repulsive. To even discuss this piece of
shit gives one the impression that it is in fact a viable film when

it is no such thing. This isn’t even ‘art’. 3

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Queer Horror Film and Television

In Indelible Lum uses a bricolage of appropriated images in order to form a critique of the media used and the cultural impositions they bring. While
its interpretation of violence and sexuality in relation to gender is obvious, Indelible reconfigures these themes and images with the added influence of external forces such as the threat of HIV/ AIDS upon gay culture. Indelible particularly presents his own oscillating identification with both femininity and masculinity as a gay male subject. The video explicitly brings together the two genres of horror and pornography, to connect their conceptions of
the monstrous, the threatening, the violent, the dangerous and the erotic.

It fuses the generic, thematic and filmic conventions of each of the films by means of simple juxtaposition, superimposition4, cross-cutting, cutting on action, dissolving through imagery and soundtrack and, taking De Palma’s
now clichéd and overblown use of split-screen to an extra-diegetic level, it brings images from other films together in a frenzy of split-screen action.

Among the short’s various source texts, it is undoubtedly Carrie that provides the most potently indelible effect. Lum’s fascination with Carrie started at the age of 17, watching the film three days before his own senior prom. The film, according to the director, left an ‘indelible impression’ and revisiting it at the age of 45, in an editing exercise while at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, allowed Lum to experiment with the footage from

De Palma’s film:

I felt compelled to see how my two favourite films, Carrie and

LA Tool and Die, reflected upon each other in both hard (jump)

cut, juxtaposition, in superimposition and in split-screen

images. 5

The deconstructive aesthetic of Indelible allows us to explore the generic conventions of the horror film and gay male pornography and draws parallels between them: of a connected eroticism, shared anxieties, shared
imagery and notions of desire, shame, humiliation and trauma. By tak-
ing apart, reviewing and re-editing the horror film in this way, the genre
takes on a new resonance and cultural meaning. Erotic elements that may
have been implicit become foregrounded by association. The films become
eroticised by the penetration or insertion of explicit sexual imagery into their narrative and, conversely, horrific elements are attributed to explicit erotic scenes of sex.

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

This chapter investigates Lum’s eroticisation of horror as a means of
revisiting, recollecting and replaying cultural notions of trauma. His fusion of mainstream horror film with gay male pornography permits a clearer
understanding of an emerging queer horror aesthetic. Indelible allows for a contemplation of queer horror as a means through which the gay male
spectator revisits and replays cultural notions of trauma that are pertin-
ent for the gay male subculture. These include: the defining or cultural
imposition of subjectivity that is acknowledged by Lum and that is conse-
quently rejected; the paralleling of homosexuality with HIV and AIDS and
the effect this has upon homosexual culture and, finally, the conflation of a submissive and abject femininity with gay men within heteronormative
culture.

Lum’s paradoxical consideration of the potentially threatening and, for
him, liberating elements of gay male sexuality is shown in Indelible’ s uneasy and frenetic comedy of eroticism. The film’s presentation of a gay machismo as visually fascinated by the phallus, and the anxieties of heteronormative masculinity in light of the devastation caused by the AIDS virus, clearly

invites a comparison with Leo Bersani’s ‘ Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987).6

I want to discuss points with which they concur, using Lum’s Indelible as both a visual example of Bersani’s ideas and as providing moments of contradiction to Bersani’s polemic.

The fragmentary nature of Carrie’s original narrative is taken one
stage further in Indelible. Here the same fragmented, disorientating and repetitive presentation of both King’s and De Palma’s Carrie is forced back into a different narrative. Lum starts his re-presentation of Carrie out of sequence, beginning with a flash-forward to prom night and returning to

Carrie and her mother’s dinner discussion of the prom. Flashing forward
to the prom again, Lum displays the build up to Carrie’s blood shower,
which itself is stopped in mid-motion (fig. 2.1), showing her revenge, then returning to the gym shower torment and finally returning to the blood in
full flow upon Carrie and Tommy at the prom. He finishes the film with a
shot of her destroying the car carrying Chris and Billy, and then concludes with Carrie’s reaction to her humiliation in a silent scream. Lum interrupts the flow of an already disorganised series of events, with scenes from various other films, including gay porn films LA Tool and Die, The Final Link (2000) and The Fury, and fuses the scenes together. He restores the 59

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 2.1 Freezing the flow in Lum’s Indelible (2004).

fragmented narrative by mixing genres and including footage from dif-
ferent films. Lum re-reads Carrie by way of the enforced new ‘voices’ he introduces to the text and consequently enhances and restores the flow (of narrative and blood) with renewed vigour. Carrie is a narrative and cultural text that is susceptible to such ‘breakage’ or a ‘shattering’ in an already fragmentary narrative structure, made visually fragmentary and ‘fragile’ by De Palma. Here Lum merely takes the pliable text and alters it accordingly
by mixing horror narrative with porn narrative.

‘The things that boys do to each other’

Carol J. Clover points out the relation of the horror genre to that of por-
nography: ‘The ‘art’ of the horror film, like the ‘art’ of pornography is, to a very large extent, the art of rendition or performance, and it is understood as such by the competent audience’. 7 Lum’s work seems to take up the stereotypical notion of the formulaic, sequelised, repetitive, narratively and technically predictable horror film to explicitly reference its close ties 60

Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
with the technical structure of the pornographic film. Both tend towards
the repetition of a specific narrative structure (narrative exposition fol-
lowed by death scene/narrative exposition followed by sex scene), a ten-
dency for serialisation/sequelisation and a compulsion to both repeat and
enact parody. Via various editing techniques, Lum super-imposes and lay-
ers these numerous film sources creating one amorphous narrative which
is nevertheless always informed by the appropriation of its original visual materials. Lum’s decision to juxtapose Carrie with LA Tool & Die (with its representations of macho masculinity), and The Fury paves the way for his main thematic and visual opposition and his analogy of what a heteronormative ideology defines as abject femininity with abject masculinity.

Among other works of gay pornography used in Indelible, the main film which stands in opposition/juxtaposition to Carrie, is LA Tool and Die, the third and final film in director Joe Gage’s ‘Working Man’ trilogy of films
which begins with Kansas City Trucking Company (1976), followed by El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977). 8 Gage’s films are known for their unabashed display of Gage Men, supposedly ‘real’ working class, macho gay performers. In the ‘Working Man’ trilogy, male protagonists are often solitary loners whose main drive (other than a sexual one), is finding employment in blue
collar environs, as demolition men, policemen, delivery drivers, welders
and construction workers, all of whom are trying to survive and making
ends meet by taking work in harsh, physically demanding settings. Their
journey to find work or to secure a plot of land often mirrors their search for a companion or lover. The trilogy follows a basic road movie narrative, yet its romanticism sits incongruously alongside numerous promiscuous
and anonymous sexual encounters set on location in blue-collar locales
oozing with machismo. They often display alternative sexual activities such as glory-holing and cottaging. Favouring a more mature, middle-aged, hirsute and burly man, Gage’s works often focus on sequences which display
his main protagonists’ rough but, at times, romantic attitude to anonymous
sex (for example, the finale of LA Tool and Die hangs upon the decision faced by main protagonist Wylie (Will Seagers) of whether or not to join
his companion Hank (Richard Locke) in collecting his deeds for a plot of
land in a show of romantic commitment). Despite their macho masculin-
ity, Gage Men are sensitive too. The characters are stereotypically musta-
chioed bikers, lonely macho truckers, burly leather queens, lumberjacks

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Queer Horror Film and Television
and ‘bears’ (large, hairy men), yet they all pine for a nostalgic ideal of
companionship. Gage sees the clichéd and stereotyped elements of his
characters as indicative of their ‘ordinariness’ and he maintains that the
machismo of Gage Men is a true reflection of everyday gay masculinity: ‘I
never went out of my way to emphasise the butch or straight attributes of
my guys – I always sought to present them as representatives of the average, ordinary – for the most part – working-class citizen’. 9

However, in his re-appropriation of LA Tool and Die, Lum excludes
many of the images of hypermasculine men and indeed of anal penetration,
choosing instead to focus upon Jim (Michael Kearns), a transitory charac-
ter only encountered in the film’s opening ten minutes and one of the more
groomed, hairless (although mustachioed) and conventionally attractive of

Gage’s line up. This decidedly ambiguous figure of oral and aggressive pas-
sivity is more enigmatic than Gage’s typically macho protagonists.

The other films featured in Indelible include an untitled video directed by gay pornographer Paul Morris which features scenes of fellatio and
semen ingestion, and The Final Link, featuring an orgy scene set in a sadomasochistic dungeon-style room with performers dressed in leather
harnesses and studded dog-collars. Lum foregrounds scenes from gay por-
nography that involve unprotected sex either mainly of an oral or mastur-
batory nature. Indeed, alongside a nostalgic inclusion of scenes from more
antiquated pornography from an earlier era – prior to the trauma of AIDS

(such as the Gage film) – Indelible includes several scenes from more contemporary porn films from the late nineties from Treasure Island Media, a

studio famed for its unprotected sex films or ‘bareback porn’.10

Composed entirely of borrowed sources and footage ‘ripped’ from
other films and videos (apart from Lum’s superimposed titles), Indelible draws attention to editing as a process designed to create narrative cohe-sion and diegesis. In rupturing Indelible’s source films, only to juxtapose and over/underlay them to combine both their narrative and spectacular
scenes, Lum takes De Palma’s excessive and overblown editing style and
exaggerates it further to foreground the very ‘material’ elements of film
itself. Indelible, if taken as a text in its own right, does not include the entire narratives of the aforementioned films. Specific scenes, sequences, sounds, scores, still images and flash cuts are taken out of their original contexts and placed within new ones. If we are to understand and analyse it as an

62

Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
original filmic text it is helpful to have a working knowledge of these films’

narratives and structures, as they exist in their original forms, in order to understand what technical, symbolic and thematic elements they bring to

Indelible. Lum may have assumed that the spectators of Indelible would have some knowledge of his source texts, especially of Carrie and perhaps of LA Tool and Die, in order to appreciate the visual and narrative links and motifs. Although it is possible to understand Indelible without any prior knowledge of the film’s inter-textual references, the film has extra resonance in its sources and their importance as historically informed texts.

Indelible and its source texts can be read as socio-cultural texts which document the sexual practices and attitudes to sexuality in the mid to late 70s, but as ironically and nostalgically viewed from an AIDS-informed present.

By almost totally reworking the narratives of Carrie and LA Tool and Die to form an alternative one, Indelible’ s ‘excess’ allows the viewer to recognise filmic narrative, and the subjectivities it imposes, as created and
mutable. In his discussion of paracinematic texts (which arguably Indelible can be seen to belong to) Jeffrey Sconce outlines the importance of ‘excess’

as an element of film that, ‘provides a freedom from constraint (Sconce:

391). It is this concept of excess, arguably part of the allure of De Palma’s original, that continually resurfaces in Indelible and provides a means by which we can view the gay male spectators’ identification with excess in its many forms, as a way of disturbing subjectivities and identities that
are projected upon them. However, as much as Lum’s refashioning of the
films in Indelible draws attention to the artifice of narrative, it also leaves stretches of narrative intact (the narrative of Carrie’s prom night scene is shown in flash forward during the White’s discussion of events at the dinner table), narratives that may reveal a masculine essentialism.

Due to its inter and cross-textual nature, we may consider Indelible to exist as an open text, that is, one which invites multiple readings from its spectators. Indelible takes one or more ‘closed texts’ (complete and whole filmic narratives) and explodes, fragments and takes them apart only to
re-edit and replace specific scenes, sounds and imagery in amongst one
another to create a new narrative. Indelible’s success as an open text lies not in the finished result of it as a re-edited version of its source texts, but in the act of taking apart coherent mainstream narratives and reconsidering them as fragmentary and constructed fictions. The film exposes

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Queer Horror Film and Television
the way in which mainstream narratives, and allows the spectator to
reveal the, otherwise hidden, ways in which the dominant discourse
defines and interpellates its subjects. Experimental videos and films that
attempt this also work to expose dominant heterosexist structures which
construct identities. Yet their success is often limited when the individ-
ual fragments of narrative are reconstructed and juxtaposed to create a
new original narrative. Any newly reconstructed narrative, regardless
of its radical avant-garde incoherence, still posits a somewhat complete
and fixed narrative and this is the precise problem with Indelible.

Each source text is replaced in fragmented form into the finished short,
and each film’s themes, subtexts, characters and ideologies may indeed
contradict each other. Therefore the film may appear to be making contra-
dictory statements simultaneously, for example, abhorring explicit and
potentially dangerous unprotected sex yet, at the same time, valorising and championing it as subversive. The new found narrative then exists not as an open text, but more as an ambiguous text; not necessarily open to an end-less multiplicity of readings, but a finite number defined by its very form and source films.

Abjection, Blood and Semen

In Indelible, Lum presents sex en masse, where the multiplicity of images is turned into a hyperbole of split screen, replayed and repeated scenes.

This gradual increase of re-presentation and re-play suggests the almost
viral character of the image as a metaphor for the AIDS virus itself. It is via HIV and AIDS and their relation to the bodily fluids of blood and semen
that the concept of abjection is presented in Indelible. One of Carrie’s main areas of controversy and discussion is its treatment of feminine sexuality
as ‘abject’ yet in Indelible abject substances include menses and semen. The use of the term ‘abject’ here is taken from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982), where abjection is understood as the expulsion of a part of the self in the pursuit of identity and subjectivity:

The abject is not an object facing me, which I name or imagine

[…] The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being
opposed to the I […] What is abject […] the jettisoned object,

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
is radically excluded and draws me towards the place where

meaning collapses. 11

Kristeva, and subsequently Barbara Creed in The Monstrous Feminine

(1993), focuses upon the abjection of the body’s own fluids – waste, blood, urine, saliva and excrement. Kristeva defines menses, excrement, urine
and also sperm as abject bodily fluids. Outside of the body they represent
potential infection. It is the visibility of such fluids that indicate their status as expelled or wasted, as polluting or toxic. Visible sperm, rather than that which is located inside the male body or secreted into another’s in penetrative sex, would suggest its ‘abjection’ from the subject. But having defined sperm, among other bodily fluids, as that which symbolises a ‘pollutant’

in opposition to the body’s pure and ‘clean self’, Kristeva later retracts the polluting power that she earlier attributed to it: ‘neither tears nor sperm, for instance, although they belong to the borders of the body, have any polluting value’. 12 Confusingly then, sperm seems to represent abjectivity but without any polluting power. If Kristeva is correct, what makes sperm so explicitly abject in Indelible?

Semen is the bodily fluid that is most strangely absent from both

Kristeva’s and Creed’s discussions of the abject; generally Kristeva tends
to identify abjection with women and, more specifically, with the mater-
nal, with an opposition to patriarchal law. Creed offers a close study of the menstrual pollutant in relation to Carrie:

woman is specifically related to polluting objects which fall into
two categories: excremental and menstrual. [The Abject] is that

which crosses or threatens to cross the border.13

Creed observes that blood is of extreme symbolic importance in Carrie and takes the form of both menses and pig’s blood, identifying woman with two
religiously condemned fluids. This blood ties Carrie to her mother (who
describes her daughter’s first period as a ‘Curse of Blood’, women’s pun-
ishment by God for the ‘original sin of intercourse’) via the deadly blood
spilled in the film’s denouement. Blood is the central symbol of pain, femininity, infection and evil in Carrie and, to some extent, in The Fury. How then can semen be positioned as abject in terms of Kristeva and Creed’s
theories? Following Creed’s argument, semen ejaculated not in the act of

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Queer Horror Film and Television
reproduction but in masturbation, oral and anal sex becomes waste, and
therefore abject. Moreover, the onset of AIDS as referenced in Indelible would seem to suggest that semen, as the fluid medium of infection, is
not only ‘abject’ when wasted. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, semen can
become fatally infectious.

The threat of pollution is made explicit in Carrie’ s representation of excremental and menstrual emissions. Moreover, at one significant point,

Tommy Ross’s poem about (environmental) pollution is read aloud in

English class. The poem, which does not feature in Indelible or King’s novel, reads:

What are you going to leave for us, you people in your big cars?

Spewing pollution into the air. You people with heavy feet.

Tramping down the wilderness. You people who peer into
the back seats of cars, hours after you come
out of the back doors of your motels.

Soon all we’ll have is each other, and that could be enough.

Although the poem alludes to environmental pollution, it is given new
meaning in a film filled with allusions to religious views of sex as dirty
and unclean. Far from being limited to a metaphor, the issue is devel-
oped by De Palma (from environmental to bodily and psychical pollu-
tion, and the pollution of innocence) and expanded upon by Lum to
figure homosexuality as a potential pollutant with semen as its symbolic
referent.

Both Carrie and LA Tool and Die were made prior to the early 1980s hysteria surrounding the AIDS epidemic and before the promotion of safe
sex became widespread. Combining scenes from both, Lum clearly equates
menstrual blood with semen in Indelible. It is questionable, however, how he views semen. Does he see it as a cause for revelry in its potency or as
source of anxiety in its potential for lethal infection? Lum replies to this question with more questions:

After presenting my own rabid fear of anality through Carrie’s

Mom, I show all manner of spectacular alternatives: that amaz-
ing blowjob, and climaxes ad infinitum and all very, very visible.

I am asking whether it is the sight of semen what makes
it an abject, more humiliating than within fucking, where the

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
ejaculate is hidden, seeded, planted in a more natural, more
normal hidden place, (that ‘other’ – vagina, anus, condom).

Does the act of basking and bathing in semen represent a
contraceptive waste of the greatest magnitude? Does safe sex
itself indicate the greater more absolute rejection of infection?

Is eating the stuff even worse, a willful defiance of safety or the

sanctity of procreation? Is it just gross? 14

It is not the actual spermatozoa that Lum renders abject in Indelible but its visible, viscous flow (as paralleled with menses). It is the liquid medium of sperm (particularly in regard to HIV, where it becomes a carrier of the disease) that is deemed a source of abjection.

The tense build-up of shots and sequences leading to Carrie’s shower of
blood is paused in Indelible, for it is not a shower of blood that Lum wants as his spectacular release but showers of semen. By analogy then, these
torrents of semen, and their ingestion, temporarily replace the aforemen-
tioned ‘curse of blood’ associated with feminine sexuality, with a ‘curse of semen’ in a display of potentially infectious unprotected sex. In turn, the juxtaposition also highlights the potential infectiousness of blood as much as semen in the transmission of HIV. Lum juxtaposes pornographic images
from bareback porn studio Treasure Island Media. Run by Paul Morris
the studio documents an emerging subculture in gay male sexual prac-
tices allied to what Tim Dean (2008) refers to as a ‘breeding culture’, a gay subculture where unprotected sex is practised for the purposes of actively
seeking HIV infection from willing partners in the acts of anal or oral
insertion. Those who seek to be infected by the HIV virus are termed in the subculture as ‘bug chasers’ and those who willingly donate their ejaculate
as ‘gift givers’. Dean maintains that these films represent a shift in cultural attitudes towards AIDS and HIV, now seen as a less threatening virus. He goes on to state that in an era of subjective disenfranchisement in western masculinity, these works also provide a frisson of danger and excitement
that allows spectators or indeed participants to threaten and reassess their subjectivities, while also providing an opportunity to re-establish concepts of community and kinship networks based on exchanging the ‘gift’ of the

virus. 15

Although the HIV status of its stars is not explicitly disclosed, the
studio’s titles such as Breeding Season (2005) and Breed Me (2006) evoke 67

Queer Horror Film and Television
a subculture that eroticises the possible transmission of the HIV virus
between partners. Dean continues that the act of barebacking encourages
the breeding not only of a virus, but a breeding of a subculture with its own system of rules, iconography and norms. It is a subculture that is seemingly at odds with queer culture as well as heteronormativity. The subculture

‘reinscribes eroticism within the sphere of transgression’16, and reinstates the gay male in the position of the ‘outlaw’ in a wider culture of increasing social acceptance, civil unions and homosexual visibility. For Dean, the
act of barebacking is not as nihilistic as one may initially assume. What
is established then is a community of ‘outlaws’ in a further romanticis-
ing formulation of the Other. Dean claims that the act of gift-giving takes on a creative, rather than a destructive, element (strangely at odds with

Bersani’s earlier ideal of anonymous gay anal sex as ‘anti-communal’ and

‘anti-egalitarian’17) for there is indeed a clear element of cooperation and social bonding occurring here. Although Dean later maintains that the act
of unprotected bareback sex offers the individual access to social and com-
munal networks, it is a provisional closeness that he calls, ‘the paradox of unlimited intimacy, at a distance’. 18 For Lum too, unsafe sex seems paradoxical, combining nostalgic jouissance and traumatic anxiety.

The symbolically traumatic sex act is literalised in bareback or breed-
ing pornography, as the penetrated male is potentially infected with a
life-threatening virus and, as such, Dean recognises that ‘gay men have

discovered that they can in some sense reproduce without women’.19

A re-masculinising power is also awarded within the act of ‘breeding’. The
more danger the penetrated male willingly risks, the more potent a mascu-
linity he presents. Dean continues:

The presence of HIV has allowed gay men to transform the
practice of taking it up the butt from a sign of failed mascu-
linity into an index of hypermasculinity […] the more men
you’re penetrated by, the more of a man you become […] Being

HIV-positive is like having a war wound or a battle scar.

Dean elaborates offering a further reason for the motivations behind the
act of breeding:

the exchange of semen has become ritualised, as an initiation
into a fraternal community, yet the scar of initiation is one that

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
is marked on the inside rather than the outside. Bug-chasing
and gift-giving involve fantasies about making an indelible con-

nection with someone else’s insides.20

What also occurs in the sexual act of barebacking and breeding is the reor-
ganising of the traditional disempowerment attributed to the penetrated
individual in the sexual act. The balance of power shifts in the sexual act with the penetrated male becoming re-masculinised. Indelible’ s appropriated bareback pornography reveals the border that the abject bodily fluid,
semen, encroaches upon is that of the condom and the interior/exterior
border of the body itself.

Kristeva argues that it is not uncleanliness or illness that is the source
of abjection, rather, it is a symbolic representation of that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. The abject is that what does not respect borders,

positions, rules, it is the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.21

Indelible’ s appropriated bareback pornography reveals the border that the abject bodily fluid, semen, encroaches upon is that of the condom and,
further still, the body (and as discussed later – film) itself. When the border is transgressed, semen can become potentially dangerous. For Lum, it
becomes abject in its ambiguous representation of both intimacy and lethal
infection frequently visualised via oral ingestion.

In her discussion of abjection, Creed emphasises food loathing as, ‘per-
haps the most elementary and archaic form of abjection. Food, however,
only becomes abject if it signifies a border between two distinct entities

or territories’.22 Lum’s mixing of blood and semen is further agitated, if we consider the idea of semen as also symbolically representing milk. Creed
notes that the oral nature of sucking and feeding in vampire films is often paralleled with oral sex:

Semen is sometimes referred to as milk […] Insofar as the act
of vampirism mixes the idea of blood/sperm/milk, it becomes
a particularly abject act in relation to biblical taboos on mix-
ing blood and milk. The penis also takes the form of the breast
in that it is suckled and it gives forth a milky substance […]

Vampirism combines a number of abject activities: the mixing
of blood and milk; the threat of castration; the feminization of

the male victim. 23

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Queer Horror Film and Television

In this sense, Indelible posits the penis as a replacement of breast. The transgression of boundaries is demonstrated by the male being placed in
the position of both breast (female/passive) and suckling (vampire/active), therefore collapsing boundaries between man and woman, sex and nur-turing, human and animal. The symbolic mixing of blood and semen

(and milk) in Indelible, coupled with the religious mania of Mrs. White that permeates its citations from Carrie, is rendered sacrilegious despite Lum’s confessed identification with Mrs. White’s conservative, right-wing
standpoint.

If abjection is only possible if it straddles a border between distinct entities and territories, what are those in play here? Are the entities that of the socially constructed (but still phobic within these structures) ideals of the feminine and the masculine, here symbolised by (menstrual) blood and

(gay men’s) semen? Does Lum want to tie a heterosexist (and homosexual)

fear of gay men, as represented by their potentially infected semen, to the heterosexist and homosexual male fear of menses and the abjection it connotes for women? If menses crosses the border between men and women,
it operates, according to Kristeva, to threaten ‘the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference’. 24 Can semen, and more specifically HIV infected semen in its juxtaposition with menstrual blood, also create the same threat?

The central visual motif of Indelible intermingles Carrie’ s shower of blood with LA Tool’s shower of semen, combining not only blood and
semen, but the culturally determined and gendered connotations that are
projected onto them via colour codings. The mise en scène of De Palma’s

Carrie is re-presented in Indelible and begins to form one of the film’s basic binary oppositions of red (representing blood and, by extension, femininity) and white (symbolically representing semen and masculinity). Clover
observes the comparative connotations of white-hot heat (and the eroti-
cised connotations of heat as sexual intensity) with the cooler red: ‘the genital coolness of the female is normally red and manifest as menses [which]

becomes, in the greater heat of the male, whitish and manifest as semen’.25

Indelible picks up on the idea in the original film and develops it. In one significant scene from De Palma’s Carrie, Mrs. White enters her daughter’s room in a final attempt to dissuade her from attending the prom. She
curses Carrie’s choice of dress, again prefiguring the excess of colour in the blood shower that is to follow: ‘Red! I might have known it would be red!’

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
suggesting the colour’s cultural connotations of wanton sexuality. But, as

Carrie protests, the dress’s actual colour is pink, combining red and white.

Pink, with its cultural connotations of homosexuality, further supports
both De Palma’s and Lum’s films’ queer appeal. Indelible develops this symbolic intermingling of red and white via their symbolic and colour coded
referents to create a queer text. Blood (red) and semen (white) intermingle to make pink and with it fuse the gendered cultural connotations of the
aforementioned bodily fluids.

The opening of Lum’s film sets up the colour coding that is to follow. The
film’s title ‘INDELIBLE’ appears repeatedly in the opening shots, changing
from red bold type to a white type with a slightly translucent quality. The paler appearance of the second title suggests perhaps that the previous,
bolder, red image has become a persistent afterimage. This suggestion is
made more explicit as the frame cuts to black, with the word INDELIBLE
in bold white type flashing intermittently. This repetition of the word both references Carrie as an indelible memory for both the spectator and Lum himself and also prefigures the opposition of the film’s main visual referents, blood and semen.

Dissolving over the fading white titles from LA Tool and Die, the shot tracks back into a scene from Carrie. The frame slowly reveals the Whites’

tapestry representation of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98), and then an altar-like dinner table at which Carrie and her mother, Margaret White,
now sit eating an evening meal. Carrie’s family name ‘White’ now also
forms part of a colour coded opposition within Indelible as a whole. The scene at the dinner table continues from Carrie, but sub-imposed underneath and running concurrently are images of a rough, wooden garage or
workshop connoting labour and masculinity. A hand-held camera, sug-
gesting a subjective point of view, frames a man’s shadow approaching
the door of the garage and continues to follow his movements inside the
warehouse. Throughout this melding of images, the domesticated dinner
conversation between Carrie and her mother continues. The films play out
in composite layers under/over each other in a dream-like synchronicity,
where images of hairy, male legs shadow the wooden walls of the garage
underneath the dinner in Carrie.

As the Whites’ conversation turns from apple pie and pimples to that
of a prospective date at the prom, the images from LA Tool become more 71

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 2.2 Gay porn digitally bleeds into the domestic in Lum’s Indelible (2004).

visible. Out of focus, extreme close-ups reveal hands, legs and what appears to be a penis. Mrs. White’s shock and disapproval at Carrie’s suggestion,

‘Prom?!’, is pronounced at precisely the same time that images of sexual
acts become more apparent under this domestic scene (see fig. 2.2). A hand fleetingly comes down over the penis at bottom centre of the frame and
a mouth follows; fellatio is being performed. Mrs. White’s face becomes
aghast in disbelief, and under the image again is a sub-imposed wide shot
of three or four torsos of burly, muscled men, standing partly in shadow,
masturbating.

A cut to a medium close-up frame Carrie pleading with her mother,
more brightly lit at the right of the table. ‘It’s that teacher that called…’ Mrs.

White protests on. ‘Please see that I’m not like you, momma. I’m funny – all the kids think I’m funny and I wanna be, I wanna be normal, I wanna start
to try and be a whole person before it’s too late,’ Carrie pleads.

Cut to a medium close-up of Mrs. White, who throws the contents
of a glass of milk at her daughter’s face, prefiguring the shower of blood
that the viewer expects to follow, but this time it is a milky shower now

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
foreshadowing the ejaculation that will actually follow. Their arguments
continue, with Mrs. White ranting wildly, over shots of more men, indulg-
ing in barely visible anal sex and fellatio. Mrs. White cries out for her
daughter to ‘run to your closet!’, which the knowledgeable viewer of Carrie will understand as the room under the stairs into which Carrie is thrust
to pray for her sins. The closet in Indelible then, like Carrie’s plea to be

‘normal’ and her declaration that she is ‘funny’ (as in peculiar), becomes
a representative symbol for clandestine homosexuality or queerness. Mrs.

White’s order is directly linked to the heteronormativity that would con-
demn gay sex.

Other instances of this opposition of red and white occur in Indelible.

The first scenes of the prom stage at the high school in Carrie are represented in high angle wide shot with the bucket of pig’s blood positioned
precariously on a girder, hovering over the school stage. The girder splits the image between stage (the place of spectacle, stars, fantasy and eroticised imagery) and the dancehall (the audience, the place from which the
spectacle is to be viewed). The palette of colours on stage from De Palma’s original is of a decidedly whiter, silvery shade, whereas the audience
appears redder, warmer and darker. Lum juxtaposes De Palma’s tinted red/
magenta split-screen images of the stage across the ‘borrowed’ films but
it is the fusion of (red) blood with (white) semen at the film’s centre that demands more detailed discussion.

Suddenly, ‘Jim’ is introduced to the viewer in a startling cut in the midst of Carrie and Mrs. White’s argument about the prom. In contrast to the
dreamlike dissolves to gay male sexuality that have gone before and con-
tinue underneath this scene, there is an abrupt cut from Carrie’s domestic setting to an opaque, medium close-up of a man bathed in a yellowish,
amber light. His hair is slicked back and oily, and he appears naked and
sweaty. In the lower portion of the frame the groin and penis of another
man is shown, his chest and lower legs cut by the frame, fragmenting and
objectifying him. Jim pumps the erect penis, while directly gazing at the
camera. A gruff male voice addresses him from off-camera and renders the
shot subjective: ‘Don’t let me stop you, Jim’, to which he replies ‘Nothing could’, proceeding to plunge down and fellate the erect penis. Then, continuing the idea of the extreme heat of seminal fluid, he announces, ‘This
guy’s real hot…he’s just about ready to pop!’. It is Jim, the fellator, who is 73

Queer Horror Film and Television
the main scene of spectacle and the active party, rather than the recipient (deliberately cut out of the frame). Similarly, his aggressive demands are
to be rendered passive, as he commands the diegetic and extra-diegetic
voyeur in a direct address to camera: ‘Why don’t you jack that dick off ‘till you cum in my face?’.

After introducing us to Jim in this scene of phallic and oral obsession
from LA Tool, Indelible speeds through dissolves, flash cuts and shots from Carrie: Carrie meeting Tommy; her prom date; the rigged voting at the prom; Carrie and Tommy’s dizzily romantic dancing; the announce-ment of their victory and their procession to the stage. Lum includes
most of De Palma’s editing of these proceedings (adding his own jump
cuts and dissolves to the build-up to the seminal climax of LA Tool), which comically eroticise the tension that Chris feels in her plotting and
revenge upon Carrie. The original sequence replays extreme close-ups of

Chris’s hands and fingers teasing at the rope from under the stage, her
eyes blinking. In several close-ups, her moist tongue darts out to lick her full lips. However, Lum supplements this implicit eroticism with scenes
of literal masturbation and fellatio. He juxtaposes the feminine imagery
of Chris’s lips and her teasing of the phallic rope with an erect penis and Jim’s gaping mouth. The succession of cuts to and from Carrie and LA Tool speed up as the former film approaches its humiliating climax. Carrie’s tense, Hitchcockian strings warn of impending horror and humiliation,
which also serves to lend a moralistic warning to the approaching act of
release. The action in both Carrie and LA Tool is then slowed, creating a parallel romanticism in Carrie’s ascent to the stage and Jim’s frantic sex.

As Pino Donaggio’s lyrical and sentimental score swells over both films,
it also serves to eroticise, romanticise and render spectacular the scene
from LA Tool.

In close-up Chris pulls down on the cord attached to the bucket. The
shot is orgasmic in suggestion. Her ecstatic release is shown as the action cuts to the high angle shot of the bucket, falling from the rafters in slow motion, to the sounds of sexual groans from LA Tool (later mixed with Mrs. White’s orgasmic death cries throughout the ejaculation). Lum cuts
to a visually matching expression from LA Tool. Jim’s eyes are closed in pleasure as a voice from off-screen warns ‘I’m gonna cum’, and we see the
first, almost subliminal, spurt of semen (figs. 2.3 and 2.4).

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

Figure 2.3 Chris’s ecstatic pleasure in Carrie (1976).

It is interesting to notice, at this point, that the object of spectacle
crosses genders, but it is the fact that it is the initiator of the sexual act who is the centre of attention, not the victim or passive object of spectacle.

Carrie does not pull the bucket of blood onto herself, but Jim willingly
exposes himself to the shower of semen. By this, Lum offers an alternative
to gender stereotyping and arguably a de- gendering or re- gendering of the conventions of the horror genre by crossing traditional boundaries of who
is deemed the object of spectacle. He plays with these gender connota-
tions and reverses them, by positing Jim as a very aggressive, demanding
fellator and paralleling him with the orally ‘biting’ Chris from Carrie. As a sexually objectified but aggressive, manipulative and demanding female
character, she links the two gender types and blurs their conventions.

Lum’s film cuts the blood descending from the bucket in slow motion as
a low angle medium close-up shows Carrie, centre frame, looking out to
the audience at the prom, awaiting the shower of blood. The blood falls
into the extreme top of the frame, but a freeze-frame holds it in mid-air
with the words, ‘gonna cum’ from LA Tool echoing repeatedly over it. The 75

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 2.4 Juxtaposed ecstatic oral pleasure in Indelible (2004).

downward cascade of red blood is paused, instead focusing on an upward
spurting fountain of white semen. As King replays the blood shower in
his novel, Lum eventually does the same – but this time with the symbolic
effect of blurring the gendered connotations of genital fluids and the spectacular objectification.

On the freeze-frame, Lum cuts to LA Tool where a penis emits a tor-
rent of semen in slow motion, showering Jim’s face, with the initial spurt
replayed over and over. All the while, the blood splash from the sound-
track of Carrie is layered underneath these images. The looped replay of the money shot, (the visible ejaculation – a convention in pornography) is one that is even more exaggerated in Indelible via the re-editing of these extracts. The spurt of ejaculation, which in the penetrative sex act remains hidden within the body, is shown to authenticate the sex on screen. In

Indelible, semen is even more visible in the multiplicity of replayed images and scenes. The spurts are synchronised to the amplified sound of screech-ing violins used in Carrie, suggesting a link between her psychokinetic powers and the potency of ejaculation. The note held by the strings slides

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
down in musical scale in a glissando effect – suggesting an almost vertigi-
nous decline to a mood of foreboding and seriousness, in contrast to the
upward ejaculation. Lum is perhaps suggesting, in his underscoring of the
seminal spectacle with a typical horror score from Carrie, that Jim’s unprotected ingestion of the man’s ejaculate is a cause for concern rather than
frenetic pleasure, or indeed perhaps a thrill, that is derived from the potential danger of such an act. There is an ambivalent tension between pleas-
ure and revulsion that ties the films together at this point, in representing ejaculation as a spectacular liberation and visceral pleasure but also as
dirty and dangerous. Is the moralising suggestion that unprotected gay sex
is threatening influenced by the hysterical heteronormative anxiety about
gay sex and gay male sexuality as paralleled with HIV and AIDS? It seems
more likely that it is precisely this danger that provides the jouissance for Lum, and a dangerous act that provides another means of disavowing passivity and femininity.

‘After the blood comes the boys’: Phallic

Panic in Indelible

The visual representation of masculinity becomes hysterically multi-
plied in Lum’s film, not only in the many increasing repetitions of exces-
sive machismo but also in an overload of phallic imagery. Carrie pleads
with her mother to let her go to the prom. She proclaims: ‘He’s a nice boy
momma, you’d really like him…’, to which Mrs. White replies in despair,

‘Boy? Ha-Ha!’ with humiliating laughter. ‘The Boys…’ she continues, and
beneath the sequence from Carrie a dissolve reveals multitudes of men mutually masturbating from LA Tool and Die. Mrs. White goes on clapping her hands with glee, belittling these images, turning them into boys and
making the act seem adolescent and ridiculous but, at the same time, offer-
ing an excuse for another objectification of the male and his act of onan-
ism. By multiplying the amount of’ ‘boys’ that pose such a threat to Carrie, Mrs. White enlarges the singular menace into epidemic proportions. The
male gender, in its plurality, becomes an ever-increasing metaphor for
infection, much like Opendra Narayan’s rhetorically charged metaphor of
gay sex that Bersani’s article ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ cites at its opening: 77

Queer Horror Film and Television

These people have sex twenty to thirty times a night […] A man
comes along and goes from anus to anus and in a single night
will act as a mosquito transferring infected cells on his penis.

When this is practised for a year, with a man having three thou-
sand sexual intercourses, one can readily understand this mas-

sive epidemic.26

Mrs. White continues in her pluralising of this male threat: ‘After the blood comes the boys! Like sniffing dogs, slobbering, trying to find out where
that smell comes from, where the smell is…that smell’. Yet, in Indelible, it would appear that after the blood, the boys cum. Mrs. White’s rhetoric of a canine male sexuality, visually paralleled with a singular image of penetration taken ‘doggy style’, seems to suggest an anality to the sexuality
on display. The smell that Mrs. White refers to in Carrie is that of menstrual blood. Yet in its reworking via Indelible, the reference to ‘smell’ and to boys ‘like sniffing dogs’, complete with the accompanying (but brief)

imagery of anal sex, takes on a new faecal suggestion. The images of anal
penetration are few and are out of focus: a pair of jeans is pulled down to reveal bare buttocks in close-up. The camera then jerks manually to reveal
another man, pumping his penis into his partner’s anus. These images are
blurred, darkly lit and angled to show very little. Both Gage’s camera angle and Lum’s refusal to allow the dissolved image to become fully opaque and
supersede the White’s conversation makes Indelible’ s only shot of anal penetration a rather non-explicit one.

The film’s presentation of gay male subjectivity offers an opportunity to
consider representations of (gay) male sexuality orally and phallically, but not essentially anally, directed. This appears to be at odds with Bersani’s suggestion that all gay male sex culminates teleologically in anal penetration. Indelible centres on oral sex, a more equivocal sexual act, which defies easy classification as active or passive. Conversely, Bersani’s argument revolves around a masculine subjectivity that he claims is ‘shattered’

in the penetrative act of anal sex and which he links, by analogy, to the
feminine, supine sexual position. For Bersani, ‘to be penetrated is to abdicate power’27, but Indelible does not overtly conflate anal penetration with cultural or political subordination. Fellatio is not exclusive to homosexuality and same-sex sexual practices are neither the only non-reproductive

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
practices nor the only transmitters of HIV. Lum chooses to show gay pornography exclusively because, as a gay man, it has particular relevance and appeal for him, but can Indelible’ s abjection of blood and semen be transposed to other sexualities and genders? And why does Lum choose to omit
the multiplicity of anal sex scenes from LA Tool and Die, focusing instead upon scenes of masturbation, ejaculation and oral sex? Lum has produced
short films such as Facts.suck (2005) that consider the apathy within gay male sexual culture towards safe sex and the debate concerning the safety
of oral sex. The director describes himself as:

a longtime AIDS survivor who has never had receptive anal
sex. The content of my videos deal directly with that traumatic
fear, its [the exclusive practice of oral sex] inability to protect
me from the virus, and the negotiations I have with myself, sex
partners, and the public about the risks and responsibilities
of ORAL sex in the current sexual arena in which HIV is (or

should be) always invisibly present. 28

The indelible effect that Carrie has upon Lum is then paralleled with the traumatic effect of HIV and is made formally visible in the ‘invisibly
present’ superimpositions and sub-impositions which perpetually inter-
change. Lum’s presentation of oral sex and masturbation draws upon

cultural notions of such sexual acts as polluting practices of self-harm.29

The eroticised moments of self-touching in the opening of Carrie, as the protagonist touches her own body in the school shower, become a bloody
spectacle with the flow of her menstrual blood. The scene can be read as a
self-caused injury, a punishment for self-pleasuring, and one that contin-
ues throughout the film’s narrative.

In Indelible, the horror of the horror film and the eroticism of the porn film become fused with a masochism that is tied to the idea of fatal infection.

The pollution of HIV transmission supplants the polluting connotations of
both Carrie’ s self-touching and subsequent menstruation and the pig’s blood shower that is a horrific symbolisation of her menses. The masochistic pleasure experienced by the spectator in viewing the horror film, as discussed earlier, is transposed in the porn film’s own subjective framing via juxtaposition.

Indelible is a masochistic text for Lum, in that it associates sex (largely oral) with death via Carrie and other cultural and personal references.

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As Aviva Briefel points out, much of mainstream horror’s effectiveness in
producing masochistic viewing experiences for the spectator is dependent
on the ‘cultural gendering of masochism’ (Briefel, 2005: 22). She maintains that it is this opposition of masochism/female/passive against sadism/male/
active that intrinsically genders pain and the enjoyment of it and therefore: sets a safe parameter around the spectator’s alleged masochism
in choosing to sit through a horror film and prevents the ‘will-
ing subjection’ from turning into an act of self-destruction, if

not of lives then of identities.30

I would argue that in Indelible, by crossing the traditionally gendered concepts of object of spectacle and of victim and monster, Lum attempts to
both acknowledge and challenge the passivity of the recipient of oral sex.

What Lum offers in his uneasy ‘de-gendering’ of horror is a symbolic
self-destruction of a culturally enforced, patriarchal concept of gay male
subjectivity associated with femininity. He achieves this by visually manipulating the fatal implications of oral sex and symbolically working through masochism via a cathartic and explosive finale, suggesting that the only
relief for gay male masochism is a symbolic suicide, figuratively represented in the increasing freneticism of le petit mort and ejaculation on display.

Lum regards his avoidance of anal sex as the cause of his apparent mar-
ginalisation within a gay male subculture: ‘as a non-anal practising gay

male, I only know too well my own rarity within this club’. 31 Lum seems to disagree that only penetrative sex is related to power structures, seeing this possibility in other forms of sex. He is interested in the shame that a gay man can be subjected to by a gay male subculture that defines itself in terms of the penetrative anal sexual act. He connects Carrie’s representation of social rejection to gay male subjectivity. The struggle to ‘be normal’

is transposed to a gay subculture simultaneously fixated on and struggling
against being defined by anal receptivity:

Both Carrie and I avoid penetration. We kill everyone through
non-penetrative methods. (Spraying water, creating fire, elec-
trocution, spinning car wrecks, crushing gym teacher, an eye
bleeds from a kiss, a woman is centrigifued until her blood
sprays out, and Childress totally explodes.) Carrie only pen-

etrates her mother in self-defense. 32

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

Phallic obsession also features heavily in Indelible and seems to confirm Bersani’s proposal of ‘gay men’s almost mad identification’ with phallic

masculinity33 in its symbolic form. This obsession crosses Indelible’ s filmic boundaries. In the scenes from Carrie, phallic symbols resurface in the face of threatened castration and now constitute what Barbara Creed terms a

‘phallic panic’. She argues that:

Proper masculinity embodies phallic power […] By his very
existence, the male monster points to the fact that masculin-
ity, as defined by the symbolic economy, is a fragile concept,
one that is rarely, if ever fulfilled. To undermine the symbolic is
to create a disturbance around the phallus, to create a sense of

phallic panic. 34

Carrie’s vengeance on her schoolmates and teachers takes the form of a
telekinetically-controlled phallic fire hose which sprays high speed jets of water at her classmates. The image alone is a highly eroticised phallic metaphor but, when juxtaposed with images from the gay porn film The Final

Link, they are made sexually and comically explicit. The most notable of these phallically potent images is the repeated powerful ejaculation of one of The Final Link’s actors, Spike, whose spurting penis mirrors the hose’s own powerful spray from Carrie. In this juxtaposition Indelible becomes quite frantic and, in its mania, almost comical. Lum seems initially to be representing
this phallic obsession as monstrous. Yet does the potency of the phallus, when controlled by and associated with a decidedly feminine power, become
threatened?

Indelible is caught between a frenetic embrace of the oral act as an alternative and supposedly safer sex, and the risks involved in contracting sexually transmitted diseases through indulging in it, as Lum may have done, in what is seen as a phallic panic. Lum’s ambiguous desire to both defend and
prosecute fellatio and masturbation as unsafe, yet erotically alluring, sexual practices is presented in the face of both heteronormative and homosexual views of anal sex as infectious. A spectacular, liberating, yet dangerous,
orality is paralleled with the religious right’s castrating view of anality with which Lum also seems to identify.

Yet there is still a clear jouissance in the film’s literal and visual climaxes, and an ecstatic frenzy that frequently overwhelms the guilt and

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anxiety of Lum/Mrs. White’s ‘avoidance of sex’. Lum sees the liberating jouissance in Indelible as only possible because of its co-existence with guilt: ‘If there were no guilt or anxiety, ecstatic frenzy would not be liberating or

spectacular’.35 It is worth noting here Bersani’s claim that ‘there is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it’. 36 The ambiguous aversion to sex represented in Indelible seems to agree with Bersani’s description of the

‘gross-ness’ of sex. If Indelible’ s narrative were to completely adhere to Mrs.

White’s repression then the symbolic visual castration would, via editing,
cut away from such imagery. Instead, it lingers on it. To return to the film’s sequence, Indelible serves to show a continuation or a flowing of the homosexual sex act. Just as Carrie ignores her mother and goes to the prom, the gay pornography carries on, perhaps in a mania of ‘unstoppable sex’.37 Lum not only wishes to gain access to the potent flow that is attributed to menses in De Palma’s Carrie, but hopes to supersede it in his presentation of a more powerful ejaculation. In this sense, Indelible effectively concurs with Bersani in positing the gay male as what Carole-Anne Tyler terms is the

‘better woman’. 38 His flow is shown issuing forth with a more concentrated force than Carrie’s seeping menstruation. The inclusion of powerfully
spraying hoses of water in Carrie’s prom sequence, juxtaposed in Indelible with almost comically powerful ejaculations, support the apparent conclusion that male fluids are more powerful and (more abject) than feminine
ones. The power represented by these forceful bodily emissions progresses
to a literal masculine explosion in Indelible’ s final images.

Indelible represents a desperate reaffirmation of phallic power as a response to the threat of femininity. Lum and other gay male fans of

De Palma’s Carrie are drawn to the heroine as both victim and powerfully phallic woman, but in their consequent representation of her they reveal a
desire to be dissociated with a femininity that compromises their mascu-
line aspirations. Although Lum’s film may not exhibit the same grotesque
misogyny of many of the drag- Carries in associating guilt with feminine masochism and penetration, a similar shame is indirectly suggested.

Indelible paradoxically reveres and disavows femininity both in the female subject and in the feminised and, by extension, penetrable gay male subject, though aversion to penetration may be motivated by the director’s status as a gay man living with AIDS. While not overtly misogynistic, Indelible recognises a negatively coded and powerful femininity as something to be

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
adulated yet feared and ashamed of. Yet the abject potency of femininity
is surpassed by the explosive potency of gay masculinity, which is both
worshipped and, in its heterosexist and oppressive form, also disavowed.

Indelible re-inscribes this complex representation of gender within the erotic culture of unprotected gay sex. In its fusion of gendered horror and bareback porn, the tropes of woman as victim and as penetrated
are conflated with new vigour. Dean’s argument – that bareback porn
complicates the idea of the gay male subject’s passivity by representing
the passive recipient of the ‘gift’ of the HIV virus as active in his passivity is entirely relevant here. It is his pleasure that is the focus of attention. In subjecting himself to the lethal possibility of HIV infection, the ostensi-bly passive male is hypermasculinised. Yet Indelible reveals not only the falsity of the supposedly masculinising act of unprotected sex, but also
the contradictory re-inscription of feminine language and traits associ-
ated within ‘breeding culture’. The ‘breeding’ bottom, despite his claim
for hypermasculinity, is feminised to the extent that the terminology
used within the subculture is drawn from concepts of artificial insemina-
tion, pregnancy and a re-establishment of heterosexual family values, no
matter how subversive this familial unit maybe. The AIDS virus becomes
a ‘child’ that is passed on via clearly gendered ‘parents’. Notwithstanding the masculinisation attributed to unsafe sex, the language used within
the subculture has a symbolically feminising quality. Paradoxically, this
new feminisation of gay masculinity within the emerging sub-culture of
barebacking and breeding films, and indeed within queer horror, contin-
ues to reveal the gay male subject’s identification with femininity as his
most indelible scar.

Broken men, male vulnerability and
the cathartic spectacle

In understanding the processes of identification in Indelible, it is necessary to read across from drag-Carrie performances representing transves-
tite (dis)identification in female impersonation to the (dis)identification experienced by the film’s spectator. If the intention of the gay male transvestite or, in this case, gay male spectator who experiences trans-sex identification, is to identify with the phallic woman, why is there such a heavy 83

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 2.5 Queer fusion of Jesus/St. Sebastian from Carrie (1976).

emphasis on the inclusion of macho imagery in Indelible given Joe Gage’s examples of tumescent masculinity? The link between spectator trans-sex
identification and transvestite performance may indeed be a tenuous
one, but it may also reveal the gay male subject’s own discomfort with
an assumed cross-gender identification that he is both continually drawn
towards and yet at odds with. Further still, the answer may be revealed
in the film’s presentation not only of femininity but also of masculinity –
especially in the film’s finale. The paradox of Indelible gives rise to yet another contradictory image: that of male subjectivity blown apart in the
film’s denouement.

It is interesting to observe a striking addition in De Palma’s treat-
ment of Carrie that does not appear in either King’s original or Lum’s re-appropriation (at least not explicitly). In King’s original, the icon of religious worship that Carrie and her mother keep in their makeshift chapel
under the stairs is a crucifix. In De Palma’s film, it is changed to a statue of St. Sebastian. De Palma’s art director Jack Fisk alters, and effectively queers, a model of a crucified Christ by removing the cross, adding arrows and
repositioning the body in a Sebastian-like figure (figs. 2.5).

St. Sebastian enjoys most obvious notoriety as a gay icon, but the saint
has been represented in a variety of forms throughout the centu-
ries. Sebastian is thought to have originally served in the third century

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

Roman army under the emperor Diocletian, who was also rumoured to
be his lover. Upon discovering that Sebastian was a Christian, Diocletian
ordered him to be executed by archers. Surviving this first attempt at exe-
cution, Sebastian was returned to the emperor, who then ordered him
to be stoned to death. Sebastian’s arrow-pierced body is a very popular
image in Italian painting. His earliest appearance, in the mosaic of the

Basilica of St. Appollinare Nuovo in Ravenna is dated from the early to
mid-sixth Century and reappears frequently between the fourteenth and

seventeenth centuries.39 Often depicted tied to a stake and penetrated with arrows, the handsome youth has an expression between anguish and
ecstasy. St. Sebastian has also been known as a ‘plague saint’ throughout
the Middle Ages. During the fourteenth century, Europeans likened the
random infection of the Black Death to being showered with a flurry of
arrows. To ward off the plagues, they turned to Sebastian. The saint is frequently depicted erotically, as a feminised male or a sadomasochistic fig-
ure. In light of the AIDS pandemic, Sebastian’s iconic resonance becomes
more topical in a contemporary culture facing the ravages of sexually
transmitted disease. Though the figure of Sebastian has had various sym-
bolic embodiments throughout history, it is in the late nineteenth cen-
tury that his role as the homosexual saint was founded. Sebastian became
eponymous with homosexual decadence, a resonance continued through

twentieth century literature and film. 40

Lum chooses to omit any explicit reference to the icon or Mrs. White’s

Sebastian-like execution, but the imagery of Indelible implicitly references the saint. In the opening orgy from LA Tool, and similarly choreographed scenes from The Final Link, visual allusions to St. Sebastian are more effectively present. Both scenes centre upon a single, ecstatic
male figure being ejaculated onto. The visual parallels of the vulnerable
male being ‘shot at’ here become comically obvious. Here the trauma
faced is not of literal arrows but of virally charged semen. As this book
argues in later chapters, the themes and motifs of queer horror often
involve placing the male protagonist in jeopardy. Juxtaposing this fig-
ure with Indelible opens up a discussion about the representation of the male under threat as a source of eroticism, jouissance and, equally,
anxiety. Lum’s inclusion of scenes from The Fury, in the final moments of Indelible, show two images of apparently feminised and shattered 85

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Figure 2.6 Carrie’s explosive return of gaze in The Fury (1978).

masculinity that connects with Bersani’s ‘shattered’ gay masculinity. Lum
literally restarts the fall of blood onto Carrie after he has transposed it with that of the shower of semen, and it is in this re-flow of blood and
of femininity that masculinity begins to become more fragmented. Lum
furthers the narrative of Carrie within Indelible by including scenes that foreground the female gaze and, in turn, the potent telekinetic power
of Carrie. The return of the gaze from the normally objectified woman,
objectifies and fragments the male. Its threat is shown in spectacular
form as Lum cross-cuts from a fragmented jump-cut which acts as a
zoom into Carrie’s eyes in a gaze, that via juxtaposition with Indelible, seems to cause the explosion of the male antagonist Childress (John

Cassavetes) from The Fury (see figs. 2.6).

In another example, a similar ‘zip-zoom’ technique moves in close-up
to focus on the eyes of Childress, The Fury’s villain, whose captive female prisoner, Gillian (Amy Irving), enacts telekinetic revenge upon, making

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Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz
him weep tears of blood. The feminine act of weeping is rendered even
more so by its association with (menstrual) blood. Femininity makes itself
known by crossing the border of the body and forcing its way out. It is the externalising of bodily fluids, here semen and blood, which suggests the
inability of the body to contain its own fluids. The fluid has passed through the border of the body (which represents the self) and its visible return

‘threatens one’s own and clean self’. 41

Yet the film’s final images reveal an explosive rather than explod ed
masculinity. The explosive male seems to perpetuate the concept of pow-
erfully ejaculating machismo, rather than the Bersanian ‘shattering’ of

‘proud’ heteronormative masculine potency. In Indelible, Lum retains the glowing eyed feminine catalyst for Childress’ explosion, yet the increasingly powerful ejaculations from the juxtaposed segments of pornog-
raphy seem to radiate from within the potent male. Childress seems to explode himself in extreme slow motion. In a cut on action to an extreme
high angle shot, his head flies up into the frame and his body explodes
with such force that its liquids are evaporated. There is no longer any
flow here.

I would argue that Indelible literalises Lum’s paradoxical concerns regard-ing the contraction of the HIV virus and AIDS through sexual practices like the ones previously considered, the very same practices that provide an
erotic thrill and appeal. In the face of the suicidal sex of bareback porn, Bersani’s symbolic shattering of the self is negligible and the excessive display of bodily fluids can only be surpassed by the ultimate explosion of the subject himself. Shattered masculinity is of a different order here, leading us to question what exactly is being exploded. Is it a visual representation of the death of proud male subjectivity or the idea of the passive, penetrated male?

Indelible’ s narrative peak seems to be reached in this explosion of masculinity and seems to revel in the renewed potency of gay masculinity. Yet, in its fusion with patriarchally defined femininity, it is also defiled. The anxiety this ambiguity provokes is displayed in Indelible’ s final images and is arguably developed from De Palma’s version of the
film, whose denouement reveals femininity continuing to flow in a con-
tradictorily liberating and yet powerfully repressive form as maternal

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Queer Horror Film and Television
repression. In Indelible femininity is also allowed to flow once more, despite the spectacular death of iconic masculinity. Carrie’s bloodied
face is the film’s final figure of identification for the gay male spectator as Margaret White’s warning resounds over this last image, ‘They’re all
gonna laugh at you!’

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3

The Rise of Queer Fear:

DeCoteau and Gaysploitation Horror

The queer reception and appropriation of the horror genre has been shown to offer a working through of specific anxieties within gay male culture in the various cinematic, theatrical and experimental adaptations of Carrie. This chapter charts the emergence of a sub-genre of the exploitation film, Gaysploitation horror, featuring films made by gay male or queer identified directors which highlight either homoeroticism, or homosexuality, in increasingly erotic ways in order to attract audiences. The titles discussed are born from the recognition of a gap in the market: gay male horror fans. Beginning in the early 2000s, the emergence of this niche sub-genre focuses upon the celebration, erotic display, torture and evisceration of the male body spectacular in horror feature films and gothic television serials that are aimed at gay male audiences. Ironically, the homosexuality they portray is often shown to be remarkably ‘straight acting’ and obsessed with a machismo that is coded heterosexual.

Via a textual analysis and a study of the sub-genre’s allegorical nar-
ratives, this chapter will demonstrate that queer horror also summarises
contemporary anxieties within gay male culture surrounding an associa-
tion with penetrability as feminising and traumatic. As a consequence, this leads to a phallic mimicry via an exaggerated masculine performance and
a gendered scripting as ‘straight’ by the gay male subject that often fore-
grounds impenetrability.

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Harry Benshoff ’s study1 of 1997 understandably does not extend to an analysis of more recent horror titles that favour an overt homoerotic display of monsters and male victims alike. In ‘ “Way too Gay

To Be Ignored”: The Production and Reception of Queer Horror in the

Twenty-First Century’ (2015) Benshoff attempts to address the recent
surge of popularity in Queer horror, but the brevity of the article only
allows for a short study of key auteurs (namely David DeCoteau and

Victor Salva) and arguably remains focused on the production and dis-
tribution elements of Queer horror film and television and does not
allow for much space to analyse the texts themselves. The titles, direc-
tors and production companies that Benshoff discusses hold significant
interest to those wishing to uncover recent representations of homo-
sexuality in the horror genre. This chapter will consider whether they
constitute a contemporary sub-genre of the horror film, one which
draws more specifically upon slasher horror and which I wish to title

Gaysploitation horror.

In titling this niche sub-genre so, it references the exploitation film and the connotations and conventions that have been outlined in the past by
critics and academics. In her work on the exploitation film and its feminist reception, Pam Cook (1976) defines the genre accordingly:

essentially a commercial category […] for those films produced
at minimum cost for maximum return which take up, ‘exploit’

the success of other films – replaying the themes […] and gen-
res of much more lavish, up-market productions [and] are

made with specific markets in mind.2

The horror genre has long been categorised as a cornerstone of the exploi-
tation industry and is frequently considered as ‘low culture’ or as produc-
ing ‘trash movies’. Cook continues that:

exploitation films offer schematic, minimal narratives, comic
book stereotypes, ‘bad’ acting, and brief film cycles that disap-
pear as soon as their audience appeal is exhausted […] in order
to attract/exploit their target audiences [they] contain a high
degree of sensationalised sex and/or violence, playing on the
more retrograde, sadistic/voyeuristic fantasies of young male

viewers. 3

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Carol J. Clover (1992) also indicates the slasher horror film’s status as exploitation fare and its deliberate courting of the young male audience in its end-less production of sequels and derivative titles:

At the bottom of the horror heap lies the slasher film [which]

lies by and large beyond the purview of the respectable

(middle-aged, middle-class) audience [and] of respectable
criticism. Staples of drive-ins and exploitation houses […] even
commentaries that celebrate ‘trash’ disavow the slasher, usu-
ally passing it over in silence or bemoaning it as a degenerate

aberration.4

Nonetheless, titling the sub-genre Gaysploitation horror is problematic.

The titles discussed in this chapter can indeed be considered exploitation
films in that they are born out of a market-driven recognition of a gap in
the market (gay male horror fans). Alongside this, they parody and ‘rip off’

existing horror titles and narratives, are often extremely low-budget, usu-
ally enjoy limited (or non-existent) theatrical releases, are mainly produced and distributed by amateur filmmakers or independent studios, employ
non-professional actors and often amateur direction but, above all, they
contain nudity, sex and sexual violence that ranges from soft to hardcore.

However, while audiences, horror narratives and semi-naked cast
members all may well be ‘exploited’, a closer study of Gaysploitation horror reveals a curiously chaste and conservative presentation of the explicit. At times, it is oddly withdrawn in its presentations of the explicit, in terms of both nudity and scenes of gore/horror and, even more curiously, in its
coy presentation of homosexuality. In fact, early Gaysploitation horror, in the case of David DeCoteau’s productions, remains closeted in that, while
homoeroticism exists, there are few explicitly defined gay or lesbian char-
acters. Even through the few exceptions that do present gay male protago-
nists, such representation and the sub-genre itself is conversely defined by its non-gay-ness. Initially then, Gaysploitation horror may perhaps be a
misnomer for it queers the very definition of exploitation cinema.

Pam Cook’s study of the feminist reception of exploitation films con-
siders the works of director Stephanie Rothman, who (like DeCoteau him-
self) worked alongside exploitation auteur Roger Corman at New World

Pictures throughout the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. What

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interests Cook about Rothman’s work is that the director consciously took
on the conventions of the exploitation film, recognising a potential audi-
ence of female viewers, and ‘exploited’ them to produce texts that attempt
to subvert and challenge the often offensive stereotyped representations

of women in film. 5 For Cook, the exploitation film’s production methods existed outside the Hollywood mainstream of the 1970s, and the lure of
working without big studio involvement allowed such directors to use
the conventions of the exploitation film (allowing for greater discussion
of alternative issues and themes) to work with more challenging material.

She argues that the exploitation film, in spite of its own patriarchally constructed stereotypes and ideologies, remains more radical and, therefore,
more appealing to feminist filmmakers like Rothman. In Cook’s view, the
concept of the patriarchally defined ‘stereotype’ of woman, seen as wide-
spread in many mainstream Hollywood productions, is also present in the
exploitation genre. Yet due to Hollywood’s ‘naturalistic’ presentation of stereotypes, such mainstream movies appear to be less offensive, tending
to cover over the constructed nature of their stereotypes and presenting

them as ‘true’.6 Conversely, exploitation films make plain their deliberate presentations of women and stereotypes, so much so that the culturally
constructed nature of such ‘naturalistic’ representation is revealed:

it is […] clear that naturalised forms represent an attempt to
efface and suppress contradictions, whereas the overt manipu-
lation of stereotypes and genre conventions allows us to see that
language is at work: myths are revealed as ideological structures
embedded in form itself. In fact, exploitation films are poten-
tially less offensive than mainstream Hollywood cinema pre-

cisely because of their resistance to the ‘natural’.7

Yet Rothman’s works such as The Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Student Nurses (1970) were received by feminists with mixed acclaim:

Widely shown in women’s film festivals for their feminist inter-
est […] they are perhaps the most difficult of any women’s films
to justify in terms of feminism, relying as they do on the codes
and conventions of softcore exploitation genres [however] they
manipulate the stereotypes and codes of the exploitation genres

to create new meanings for women. 8

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The Rise of Queer Fear

While I am reticent to claim the same radical and political inclinations
for many of the films and directors working within the sub-genre of

Gaysploitation horror, I want to draw parallels with Cook’s study of the
progressive potential within exploitation products and this sub-genre’s own negotiation with patriarchal and reactionary stereotypes based around gay
masculinity. I want to explore whether Gaysploitation horror films and
their directors, like those from Rothman’s oeuvre, deliberately or uncon-
sciously exploit the dominant ideological conventions of the exploitation
film in order to create new meanings within the texts themselves.

There are further issues surrounding the sub-genre’s embrace of the
horror cinema tradition. Many of the films discussed in this chapter prove
difficult to categorise generically. The films’ highly parodic, satirical and above all ‘exploitative’ natures suggest that, on occasions, the conventions of the horror film are borrowed and assimilated into other generic structures.

I would go so far as to say that it is this elusion of any clear and distinctive horror convention that is a defining characteristic of the Gaysploitation
horror. Evading definition as either gay or horror then, Gaysploitation
horror is a sub-genre that paradoxically can be defined not by those con-
ventions and traits it possesses (as it does so largely with a sense of irony and parody) but by those it eludes. Early Gaysploitation horror then (such
as those titles discussed in the first part of this chapter) is both gay and not-gay, horror and not-horror, adopting those conventions that suit it at
any given moment. In itself, this defining point of Gaysploitation horror
remains its most controversial; as Carol J. Clover states of the traditional horror genre, the successful horror movie achieves in ‘having the shit
scared out of’ its audiences, ‘to the extent that a movie succeeds in “hurting” its viewers in this way, it is good horror; to the extent that it fails, it is bad horror; to the extent that it does not try, it is not horror but something else’. 9 Gaysploitation horror lies somewhere between Clover’s three ‘types’

and moves towards that indefinable ‘something else’.

So what are the elusive conventions of Gaysploitation horror? Recurring
traits generally include: an erotic objectification of male victims; the prolonged and fetishised slaughter of male rather than female victims; an
emphasis on youth, softcore nudity and sexuality and the presentation of
gay male sexuality as problematic and often closeted. In Gaysploitation, the representation of gay masculinity privileges machismo or ‘straight-acting’

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behaviour. While this exclusion of feminine gay male stereotypes may
challenge heterosexist constructions of gay masculinity, by transposing
equally stereotyped masculine traits onto effeminacy such narratives
could be accused of heterosexist macho posturing. Gaysploitation horror
typically includes narratives involving inclusion or exclusion from a peer
or aspirational group of characters. Finally, they present an ironic parody of traditional horror conventions or icons in camp fusions of often incongruously mis-matched genres, for example crossing explicit gore and
horror with nostalgic teen sex comedy as in Psycho Beach Party (2000) and even 1950s-style creature feature with high school drama in Leeches!

(2003).

David DeCoteau: Gaysploitation horror-‘lite’?

Of the many producers and directors working within this niche sub-genre of
exploitation horror, it is David DeCoteau’s titles that demonstrate a blueprint for the conventions of Gaysploitation horror-‘lite’. DeCoteau’s filmography features clear similarities and crossovers in theme, aesthetics, narrative and cast.

His films appear formulaic, derivative and offer seemingly little social commentary. However, there is a distinct personal style that is recognisable via recurring subtexts and motifs, which present a continued preoccupation with certain aspects of gay male culture. Their narratives and representations reflect a sub-cultural concern within gay male communities with the eroticisation of hypermasculine images, which leads to the eradication of femininity.

Like Rothman, David DeCoteau began his career working in the
exploitation horror and fantasy genres, having assisted on the production
of many of Roger Corman’s works with New World Pictures. He achieved
moderate success in the nineteen eighties and nineties with Full Moon

Pictures where he produced and directed hilariously titled exploitation horror films that eroticise and eviscerate their female leads, including Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988) and Beach Babes from Beyond (1993). DeCoteau was moderately successful at producing and directing

Corman-influenced direct-to-video, softcore ‘Tits and Ass’ horror aimed
at heterosexual adolescent males. Focusing on erotic female spectacle may
seem an odd choice for DeCoteau as an out gay male director, but his inter-
est in such tongue-in-cheek horror seems to lie, not only in the titillating 94

The Rise of Queer Fear
or erotic elements of femininity, but also in the camp appeal of the presentation of excessive female sexuality.

DeCoteau’s films play with the concept of gender performance
extra-cinematically. Pre-2000, he often directed films under a pseudo-
nym taking cross gender aliases such as Victoria Sloan and Ellen Cabot
and still defends this choice by advocating that ‘every gay boy should

have a drag name!’10 As such, his place as a director within the horror genre is a confusing one: a pseudo-transgender director producing softcore erotic low-budget horror for what appears to be a largely adolescent
straight male audience but, in accentuating a trashy and camp appeal,
his films also play to a niche queer audience. DeCoteau’s adoption of
cross-gender masquerade also lends an extra erotic appeal for the films’

straight male audiences, in that it appears that a female director has pro-
duced the voyeuristic and erotically objectifying images of other women
for the sole consumption of a male audience. This masquerade of fem-
ininity becomes more complex then, perhaps adding a frisson of pos-
sible lesbian voyeurism to the films’ lure having possibly been made by a
woman for women.

In 1997, DeCoteau directed his first drama as an openly gay male
director, Leather Jacket Love Story (1997), a film that explicitly deals with issues surrounding gay male sexuality in Los Angeles and also departs
from the horror genre. The film is the first that DeCoteau made, apart
from those completed for Full Moon Pictures, and it also marks a ‘coming
out’ for the director. In the films made during the period between 1997
and 1999 (especially in Curse of the Puppet Master (1998)), DeCoteau’s characters were increasingly male. One particular film, The Killer Eye

(1999), although featuring an erotically objectified female antagonist
who controls a giant mind-controlling eyeball, offers several scenes
where two young male characters (coded as heterosexual) sleep in the
same bed wearing only white boxer briefs while being possessed by the
towering phallic eyeball. The plot reveals that the young hunks are, in
fact, under the erotic controlling gaze of a female seductress – thus disa-
vowing the presence of any explicitly homosexual gaze.

Voodoo Academy (2000) is the first of DeCoteau’s films to display
his recurring structure, themes, cast and conventions. Five young men
enrol at a religious training school, run by a seductive headmistress, Ms.

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Queer Horror Film and Television

Bouvier (Debra Mayer), and become part of her larger plan to transform
each one of them into ceremonial dolls in order to raise an army of the
undead to sustain the running of the school. Their seduction, and subse-
quent punishment, is channelled through and meted out by the school’s
handsome male minister, Reverend Carmichael (Chad Burris). It is the

Reverend who entices the men into the confession booth, whereby he
hypnotises them to do the headmistress’ bidding, and who watches over
his young charges as they indulge in their nightly, and lengthy, sojourns
of supernaturally-induced self-caressing in their dormitory beds. Though

Voodoo Academy has engendered somewhat of a cult following11, its departure from an overtly heterosexual narrative made Full Moon Pictures
wary and it was the final movie that DeCoteau made with the company.

Encouraged by the film’s success and the possibility of new audiences, the
director set up his own production company, Rapid Heart Pictures, with
the release of the key title The Brotherhood (2001), which can be seen as setting DeCoteau’s original and basic template, narratively, thematically
and aesthetically. Both it and its sequels were all produced or co-produced by Rapid Heart Pictures whose productions, simply put, take the template
of his earlier heterosexually-oriented exploitation horrors and, in switch-
ing the gender of the victims from female to male but keeping the male
monster/killer, effectively queer them. But DeCoteau’s aesthetic remains
curiously chaste, conservative, even reactionary. The Rapid Heart films
are direct to video (DTV) products. With the proliferation of cable televi-
sion and on-demand online streaming, his films are more widely seen on
gay-run or specialist horror cable channels such as Here! TV, who have

also acted as co-producers. 12 They have very low-budget production values ( Voodoo Academy was produced on a budget of $55,00013), use amateur actors, recurring locations and sets across films and series that are not connected diegetically. These actors are predominantly young, physically
toned white men, with the almost tokenistic inclusion of a few attractive
white women.

Taking his cues from Universal Pictures’ films of cinematic monsters
from the 1930s ( Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932) and Frankenstein (1931)), DeCoteau mimics the studio’s generic (and somewhat queer) pack-aging of monstrousness. His films largely relocate the monstrous figures
from horror history into a modern, North American collegiate, workplace

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The Rise of Queer Fear
or gang-related setting. These are refigured in the plural, as an exclusive set or group of male characters that an outsider becomes associated with,
lured by their presentation of excessive glamour and power. Beneath their
veneer of white, male, largely middle-class respectability, lies a monstrous reality of: vampires ( The Brotherhood (2001)); werewolf stockbrokers ( The Wolves of Wall Street (2002)); witchcraft ( The Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks (2001) and Voodoo Academy (2000)); serial killers ( Final Stab (2001), The Frightening (2002) and Beastly Boyz (2006)); ghosts and spectral forms ( 1313: Haunted Frat (2011)); mummies ( Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy (1999)); zombies ( The Brotherhood IV: The Complex (2005) and Ring of Darkness (2004)); demons ( The Brotherhood III: Young Demons (2003) and Speed Demon (2003)); 50s creature feature-inspired, chemically-enhanced monsters ( Leeches! (2003) and Grizzly Rage (2007)) and, most recently, even a gender-flipped version of Carrie ( 666: Kreepy Kerry (2014)).

While perpetuating and parodying the treatment of horror clichés
and monsters, DeCoteau’s films offer a critique of certain social subsets
of American youth culture: fraternity groups, religious cults, boy-bands,
college swim-teams and small town biker gangs. Yet DeCoteau’s critical
analysis of such (debatably monstrous) sub-groups remains at surface
level and gay male subjectivity remains curiously absent in any explicit
sense. After the open discussion of gay sexuality in Leather Jacket Love Story, DeCoteau’s treatment of gay male sexuality returns to the implicit and the suggested (with the exception of the more recent Edgar Allen

Poe adaptations ( The Raven (2007) and House of Usher (2008)) which present some of its male characters as homosexual, yet who never explicitly declare themselves as ‘gay’). While homoeroticism is a major con-
vention within the Rapid Heart catalogue, by deliberately marketing the

films as ‘celebrations of the male form’14, the production company underlines a decidedly ambiguous stance that offers the naked male form for
consumption.

While his earlier films celebrate the display of explicit female nudity,
his later films do not offer the same candid erotic spectacle in their presentation of the naked male form, often retaining boxer briefs and gym
socks and recalling a fashion trope of gay pornography. In his Rapid Heart
films, none of DeCoteau’s male characters have penetrative sex with the

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opposite sex, engaging only in foreplay, and much of the softcore erotic
display features his male cast in the privacy of the shower, the gym or
their bedrooms, either self-caressing or seducing barely visible women.

There is no escaping the films’ clear homoeroticism but it is at the expense of the women characters who, while providing a catalyst for male erotic
touching, are often used to disavow any explicit homoeroticism and then
framed out of view.

Rapid Heart films often follow a narrative formula, featuring a central
male protagonist who is either a newcomer to the town, fraternity, sport
team, workplace or party, or is returning to a small town having lived in
the city or vice versa. The story centres on the protagonist’s attraction to and induction into a largely male group, the ‘Monsters’. The films move
to the revelation that the ‘Newcomer’s’ inauguration into the ‘Monster
group’ is needed as a sacrifice to perpetuate its members’ immortality,
to sustain them as ‘Others’. Despite the variety of monstrous archetypes,
the vampiric element of the immortal (read aged) monster group need-
ing new blood to sustain itself, figures as an important one in relation
to gay male anxieties revolving around ageism and the erotic potency
of youth.

Rapid Heart’s fraternity narratives can be understood as ‘coming out’

tales, stories centred on anxieties surrounding the private and public dec-
laration of one’s homosexuality. This can be understood via two distinct
and oddly conflicting reading strategies.

Firstly:

The Reactionary ‘Coming Out’ Narrative: (as seen in The

Brotherhood, Ancient Evil: The Legend of the Mummy II, Ring
of Darkness)

Here the ‘Newcomer’ can be read as a sexually confused individual who
is attracted by the erotic allure of the ‘Monster group’ who are coded as
queer (given their stereotypical associations with monstrousness and
non-normative sexuality). He is tempted to experiment erotically in vari-
ous coy scenes of bloodletting but eventually is rescued by the support of
his (heteronormative) ‘Sidekicks’. They overturn and destroy the ‘Monster
group’ and return the narrative to stasis and normality.

And conversely:

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The Rise of Queer Fear

The Counter ‘Coming Out’ Narrative: (as seen in Speed

Demon, The Wolves of Wall St, The Brotherhood II: The

Warlocks, Beastly Boyz, The Frightening)

Here the ‘Newcomer’ is also coded as an outsider, a marginalised individ-
ual perhaps due to his presentation as a sexually confused individual. In
some instances, this is complicated by the presence of a girlfriend. Despite the girlfriend’s heterosexual significance, their relationship is a decidedly chaste one where sex is non-existent or overwhelmed by the allure of the

‘Monster group’. The girlfriend then becomes a friend or a kind of ‘fag-hag’.

The ‘Newcomer’s’ status as an outsider is further supported in his choice of unpopular, ‘nerdy’ male friends or roommates who represent a decidedly
non-stereotypical masculinity. By contrast, the ‘Monster group’ is presented as hypermasculine. If the ‘Newcomer’ is coded as a gay man, the attraction
lies in the potent phallic masculinity of the group with which he eroti-
cally dis-identifies, rendering the ‘Monsters’ heterosexual. Recognising his erotic attraction to, yet difference from, the group’s ‘straight-acting’ masculinity, the ‘Newcomer’ eventually destroys them and returns to the margins.

The films’ narratives usually feature moralistic warnings against vari-
ous American cultural taboos: the dangers of drink and drugs ( Leeches!

& Speed Demon), gang-culture ( The Brotherhood), sexual promiscuity ( Final Stab, The Frightening), corrupt religion ( Voodoo Academy) and the exploitation of the young via patriarchally-defined capitalism ( The Wolves of Wall Street and Ring of Darkness). In addition to these concerns, the central character’s ambiguous sexuality may also suggest a censori-ous attitude towards homosexuality. While not wholly presented as het-
erosexual, these characters often display an indifference to sex in general.

Whether these presentations are a response to marketing concerns about
the target audiences of exploitation films (traditionally considered to be
heterosexual men) or whether they reveal a personal shame or guilt in
regard to the director’s own homosexuality remains to be seen. There is
no explicitly presented gay sexuality. While the films’ death scenes focus
on the erotic slaying of men, these are usually offset by the presence of a female victim to disavow any homoeroticism. In many seduction scenes,
her presence allows the scene to be read as merely homosocial rather than homoerotic. The presence of the female character in homoerotic scenes

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also allows the erotic male spectacle to be consumed as marketable erotic
material for straight women, but does not wholly discount its appeal to a
gay male spectator.

DeCoteau himself understands the chasteness and deliberate sexual
ambiguity within his films as a means to achieving financial success by
appealing to as wide a market as possible:

The films I do have basic gay appeal, but the character’s sexual-
ity is always fluid or unspecific or ambiguous. It’s more a matter
of trying to cover a lot of different bases […]you know a gay
market, straight female market, couples market, trying to keep
it as open as possible in order to sell the movie in lots of differ-

ent ways. 15

Rapid Heart Pictures originally marketed their products to a wider female

audience, as ‘horror films for girls’.16 Recognising the appeal of the horror genre to the teenage girl, Rapid Heart links their presumed interest in men to that of gay male spectators. Via the marketing of its titles, it avoids separating one from the other. But in intimating that the films’ ‘celebration of the male form’ has cross-gender appeal, the studio implicitly assimilates
gay masculinity not only with femininity but with an adolescent girlish
sexuality.

Insofar as DeCoteau’s works fit into a Gaysploitation sub-genre, it is
their failure to frighten that has often resulted in much criticism from
horror fans, who, as Clover has suggested, are generally made up of

(straight) adolescent male viewers. The negative responses from many
male horror fans dwell mainly upon the films’ failures to deliver the
genre’s staple conventions, for example, female nudity, explicit gore
and, above all, fright. This failure contributed to their lack of critical
success and the ostracisation of DeCoteau from the horror canon. The
director replies that such negative responses to his films are indica-
tive of the straight male horror film fan’s anxiety about homoerotic
death or torture scenes queering the genre and, consequently, its view-
ers. DeCoteau maintains that the sight of such apparently provocative
homoeroticism is guarded against by primal (homophobic) defence
mechanisms enacted not only by straight male spectators, but gay male
viewers also:

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Maybe the most frightening thing in the horror film, is the fact
that even the most jaded horror fan, heterosexual, homosexual,
whatever, when there’s homoerotic scenes or celebration of the
male form, when those buttons are pushed – the reaction to

them is very primal.17

By ‘primal’ DeCoteau suggests a raw aggression perhaps provoked by a
shameful association with visible homosexuality or homoeroticism in both
straight and gay male viewers. Many of the most vitriolic responses (and
the inference of their homophobic undercurrents), are difficult to refer-
ence, given many internet-based film forums’ policies of removing offen-
sive language. Such comments include:

My not so straight roommate put this movie on tonight [ Ring
of Darkness], I’ve never felt more gay in my life. My roommate’s
girlfriend commented, ‘it makes me feel gay watching this’.

Wow! What a horrible movie! 18

Where the hell was the gore? I can’t stand homoeroticism
in horror movies! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if
that’s your thing go for it, but man it really pushed this movie

over the edge. I never ever need to see anything like that again19

A typical straight male is not going to enjoy this type of
movie, unless he is hiding something! I am getting sick of Mr

Decotau’s [sic] films. They are polluting movie shelves and
quite frankly…gay or not, are really bad movies […] He must

be stopped!20

Such responses to DeCoteau’s movies perhaps uncover anxieties of the

(assumed heterosexual) young male horror fan’s disappointment after rent-
ing what appears to be a typically softcore exploitation horror that focuses on female victims, only to discover that it disposes of many female characters off-screen and instead objectifies male slayings. DeCoteau essentially reads the typical horror fan’s disappointment as one that is grounded not only in the anxiety felt as a result of forced identification with the voyeuristic female/
gay male gaze at the objectified male body, but one that is born out of a basic disappointment in the failure to deliver a formulaic ‘straight’ slasher film: They’ve really pushed a lot of homophobic buttons in a lot of
people […] it’s just one of those things where the people who

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maybe have a homophobic streak in them are just really upset
that the films didn’t deliver, that there’s a vampire film with
essentially no blood, and very little gore if any. No nude chicks.

Celebrating the male form. 21

The DVD covers and publicity materials of DeCoteau’s Rapid Heart
films often feature head and shoulders shots of the attractive young

male cast members, often in a delta formation22, but also figures one or two female cast members in the background. This selling strategy is
transposed onto the films’ narratives and presentations of key scenes.

Reversing the conventional straight film focus, he brings the semi-nude,
young male characters to the forefront of many scenes, while keeping
semi-nude female characters in the background of the frame, reassuring
any straight male, or indeed any straight female viewers, that what they
are watching may be homoerotic, but not explicitly homosexual – not
too gay. In short, DeCoteau’s films appear to sell an anodyne, curiously un-erotic ideal of homoeroticism to straight men and women. If this is
true then, what is the appeal of his continuing series of films for the out gay male spectator? To understand this it is necessary to look specifically at a key scene from The Brotherhood, to question whether the framing, narrative structure and aesthetic of DeCoteau’s film markets a chaste,
non-sexual homoeroticism to gay male spectators and fans (in a sense
presenting a non-gay gayness); or, conversely, whether or not the film
may also be providing a conservative, yet fantastical, ideal of (straight)

masculinity to gay male spectators who are willing to buy into the fan-
tasy of an erotic encounter with a straight man who is erotically coded
with macho masculinity.

The Brotherhood is DeCoteau’s self confessed ‘homage to [Schumacher’s 1987 film] The Lost Boys’23, a film with its own, perhaps unintentionally produced, homoerotic undertones24 and it follows the format of the assimilation of a young man into a group of sexually coded vampires/monsters. The Brotherhood explicitly sets the action within a college fraternity (a recurring milieu within queer horror), which further underlines the
male-oriented exclusivity of the ‘Monster group’ and marks out the fra-
ternity setting as a convention and an integral part of the mise en scène.

Situating the characters in such masculine environs provides the means
by which the cast can be comprised largely of male actors, and offers the

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The Rise of Queer Fear
excuse for the continued exclusive and voyeuristic access to the spectacular male body whilst ensuring the invisibility or exclusion of women. 25 North American fraternity cultures are notorious for their hegemonic male exclusivity and, most notably, for the perpetuation of heterosexist ideologies.

Fraternities are associated with straight male privilege and gay male initiates often prefer not to disclose their sexual orientation. The fraternities in DeCoteau’s films appear initially to be heterosexual, but this appearance is often undermined in the ensuing narratives.

In a study of the emergence of gay fraternities, Yeung, Stombler and

Wharton (2000) discuss the masculinist ethos of traditional male fraterni-
ties. The exclusion of the feminine from ‘traditionalist’ fraternities often extends beyond the exclusion of women, to that of marginalised male
subjects who display feminine traits, typified in dominant heterosexist
ideology by the gay man. Considering the homoerotic elements in the ini-
tiation antics of heterosexual fraternities, Yeung et al suggest that this is simply another means whereby femininity is disavowed and masculinity
reaffirmed:

Even when homoerotic rituals are prevalent in some fraternities,
they are merely tools to humiliate pledges and reinforce broth-
ers’ heterosexuality, serving as a rite of passage to ‘real’ man-
hood. With the intention to produce men who are not-women
and not-feminine, the process of men-making in the traditional

model hinges on stigmatizing homosexuality. 26

In DeCoteau’s films, it remains to be seen whether the fraternities are presented as heterosexual. It could be argued that they could be understood
as monstrous gay fraternities, depending on which of the previous two
reading strategies the spectator adopts when interpreting DeCoteau’s fra-
ternity horrors (whereby the monster group is either coded queer or het-
erosexual). Despite the sexual orientation of its members, gay or straight
fraternities both operate towards the same effect – to disavow and exclude
femininity. Yeung et al’s study reveals that this gender division exists even within actual gay fraternities27, the male members of which, despite frequently adopting feminine gestures and language within the fraternal
structure or donning drag or performing femininity, still draw the line at
the inclusion of women. Anthony James notes that in gay fraternities, drag

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was a central pastime and masculinist ideologies and structures were nev-
ertheless re-inscribed:

Although members comfortably performed femininity, a strict
gender distinction was re-inscribed when brothers rationalized

the gender exclusiveness of the fraternal model.28

One particular sequence from The Brotherhood featuring a ménage a trois exemplifies the homoerotic triangle and the exclusion of women from
erotic proceedings. Central protagonists, Devon (Bradley Stryker, leader
of the vampire fraternity) and Chris (Sam Page, the new initiate) take an
invited girl, Sandy (Chloe Cross) into an opulent Gothic bedroom, giv-
ing rise to a threesome, which all but excises the female subject from both the frame and the narrative. Although Sandy is figured centrally in the
frame, the direction of both her and Devon’s gaze in turn directs the spec-
tator towards Chris who looks off frame, unaware that he is now figured
as erotic object of spectacle. Devon, positioned behind and in close prox-
imity to him, begins massaging Chris’ shoulders sensuously. As he does
so he explains to Chris: ‘We’re fraternity Chris, blood brothers, they’re all the rites of passage… you could stay in college forever! You could live and relive, all the glory days, all the great home games…all the good times’. But, Devon explains, ‘You’ve gotta pay to play’. In order to get the ‘good times’, which the framing suggests would involve just Chris and Devon, that occur

‘between men’, he must ‘pay’ or take a gamble. Enacted heterosexual erotic
relations with a woman become an initiation, a dare or a rite of passage in the fraternity, which would normally take the form of something unpleasant or humiliating, rather than something enjoyable. Upon Chris’ discov-
ery that Devon is a vampire who wishes to turn Chris, Devon replies, ‘No,
vampires wear capes and have fangs, I drive a Maserati and spend an hour
a day in a tanning booth. Vampires are myths, they don’t exist, we’re the
reality.’

Chris is slowly undressed, firstly by Devon and then by Sandy as he
relents and participates in the ensuing vampiric foreplay. During this
soft-focused erotic scene, Sandy is gradually framed out, both by the cam-
era frame itself and by the bedding that serves to ‘cover up’ her presence in the room, re-centring instead on the two men. Devon leans in, takes out
the pin from the heart-shaped jewel in his fraternity necklace, gently pricks 104

The Rise of Queer Fear

Figure 3.1 Chris ‘fellates’ Devon in The Brotherhood (2001).

Sandy’s arm with the needle and urges Chris to drink from her wound.

A sudden cut reveals a homoerotically suggestive sight, due to the posi-
tioning of Chris’ sucking head and of Devon’s body directly behind it and
where both the arm and Sandy are obscured from the frame. It appears,
instead, as though Chris is fellating Devon, whose hand gently but firmly
guides his head and mouth (see figure 3.1).

After Sandy is eventually drained of blood, Chris falls back on the bed
with a look of post-coital exhaustion. Blood begins to dribble downward
from his upturned mouth. A zoom outwards shows Devon looming over

Chris as he asks, ‘How do you feel?’. Cut to Chris in extreme close up, with the blood on his cheek, as he answers, opening his eyes ‘I feel…alive’. As

Devon touches Chris’ face in an almost romantic caress and dabs at the
blood with his other hand, Chris teasingly kisses his symbolically phallic
finger. Devon then sucks the blood from his own finger, furthering the now
explicit suggestion of this fellatio and post-coital ejaculate.

The homoeroticism here is incredibly self-aware, obvious and thus,
almost parodic, but it is also rather coy. What appears to be occurring
in this and throughout many of DeCoteau’s films is a re-inscription of
the homosociality described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between

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Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desir e (1985). Sedgwick’s book builds upon Gayle Rubin’s (1975) consideration of the gendered
triangle (made up of two men and one woman) and the concept of the

‘traffic of women’29, whereby a woman is situated as an object of exchange between men as a means of confirming patriarchal power structures.

Sedgwick maintains that within patriarchal society, male sexual identi-
ties negotiate between two contrasting social dynamics: ‘homosociality’,
which works to reaffirm the power structures between men within patri-
archy and upholds common interests and values, and ‘homosexuality’

(explicit erotic relations between men), which conversely threatens the
stability of the patriarchal system and, consequently, must be suppressed

or disavowed. 30

To summarise, for Sedgwick, women exist not only, as Rubin suggests, as
objects of exchange, but also to mask or disavow any suspicion of homosexu-
ality, in regard to homosocial relations between men. They channel away any existing homoeroticism via their very presence. Elizabeth Young (2000) further develops Sedgwick’s work in her own study of the male-female relations in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), stating that woman exists as: a desperate cover-up […] In such a homophobic culture, any
threat of exposing the potential homoeroticism that underlies
male homosociality constitutes a challenge to the whole system

of exchange.31

Young refers to a homo-social triangle (between the Bride, Dr Praetorius
and Dr Frankenstein/the monster), whereby homoeroticism is disavowed
by the presence of a woman (the Bride) returning the dynamic, at certain
points in the narrative, to the homosocial and eventually returning the
entire narrative to a heteronormative conclusion. Young argues that the
film consists of a series of visualised gender triangles, each superseding
the previous one, building to a potential break with the homosocial: ‘each
successive gender triangle is even less stable and suggests a progressive falling away from an ‘acceptable’ homosociality into an overt homosexuality. ’32

I would argue that this is also the case in DeCoteau’s films, especially in his Brotherhood series, whereby each ‘successive gender triangle’, as visualised in the many sex/death scenes that involve a female victim as the

‘third character’, increasingly excise woman from the frame and eventually

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The Rise of Queer Fear
the narrative, arguably leaving only homoeroticism between men. Young’s
article highlights the initial reading of the eroticised ‘gender triangle’

seduction scene from The Brotherhood. Although they are more obvious in their suggestions and presentation of homoeroticism, any explicit discussion of homosexuality is pointedly avoided in DeCoteau’s films. Such
titles actually appear closer to the anodyne and comedic homoeroticism
of Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein particularly as represented by Ernest Thesiger’s characters, Horace Femm and

Dr. Praetorius. A homosocial triangle is continually operative within much
of the Gaysploitation horror sub-genre, and does indeed work to consoli-
date male power. By adopting a performance of straight acting masculinity,
in its coy presentation of explicit homosexuality and in focussing wholly
on eroticising male victims and death scenes, DeCoteau’s films disavow
femininity. As in Young’s description of Bride of Frankenstein, homosocial/
homoerotic bonds are determined through the exclusion of women, but
this is not a subversive homosexuality; it is one that maps macho masculin-
ity (as a performance and an unattainable ideal) onto any gay male charac-
ters in a desperate desire to be recognised as not-woman. ‘Straight-acting’

serves to render homoerotic situations anodyne, and reinstate the homo-
social alongside the homoerotic, ending up with an uncomfortable confla-
tion of the two.

There is a further difficulty in proposing DeCoteau’s films as potentially radical queer texts, in that their conservatism is increased extra-cinematically by elements of their production. Specifically, I refer to the use of heterosexual male actors in films that may include (explicit or implicit) homoerotic scenes that they may feel uncomfortable enacting. DeCoteau himself recognises the issues surrounding this:

About 98% of the actors I use are straight. They’ve seen my
movies and know what they are about, but when you want
them to do certain things, like the scene in The Brotherhood. If
you suggest to them maybe to take it a little further, they aren’t

going to want to do that if they don’t feel comfortable with it. 33

Analysis of the ‘straight-acting’ within his films then becomes more
complex: there is an apparent self-reflexivity in many of DeCoteau’s
films, whereby straight actors play sexually ambiguous (potentially gay)

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Queer Horror Film and Television
characters, acting ‘straight’. This erotic trope of the sub-genre, particularly DeCoteau’s works, draws upon the gay man’s erotic conversion fantasy – to
fuck straight or apparently straight men.

DeCoteau can arguably be cast himself as a genre thief of sorts.

Throughout his work, he is notably drawn to adaptations and appropria-
tions of genre icons, tropes, conventions, alongside his films’ appropria-
tions and representations of hypermasculine forms. It is not surprising
then that, most recently, DeCoteau has turned to outright adaptation
in his interpretations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, specifically The Raven (1845), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1842).34 Furthermore, DeCoteau’s versions make allusions and pay homage to Roger Corman’s equally camp, lurid Technicolor
adaptations from the 1960s. Though Corman’s Poe adaptations have
a camp allure of their own, his versions of The Pit and the Pendulum

(1961) and The House of Usher (1960) both point out coded references to tropes of non-normative (homo)sexuality (or at the very least sexual
transgression by way of implied incest). In The House of Usher, Roderick Usher’s ‘acuteness of the senses’ implies a sensitive, neurotic, passive,
penetrable feminine masculinity and The Pit and the Pendulum’s sadomasochistically infused narrative and mise-en-scène is concerned with
recording and experiencing overwhelming sensations at the limits of the
body and, as such, can be seen to connect with Leo Bersani’s considera-
tion of the radical nature of gay sex as traumatically ecstatic, offering a jouissance that ‘shatters the self ’. 35

Despite criticism of DeCoteau as a queer horror ‘metteur-en-scene’ of
somewhat closeted fare, his Poe cycle of films stand out as key films in
his oeuvre as they are among the first to feature ‘out’ gay male characters.

Still, despite this move away from the veiled homoeroticism of his previous Rapid Heart releases, the Poe films continue to perpetuate a chaste disavowal of transgressively alternative sexualities, lost (and perhaps masked) within the layers of camp Gothic adaptation. DeCoteau’s Poe films not only
revel in heterosexual appropriation in their presentation of hypermasculin-
ised, straight-acting gay men as a sublimation of the desire to both identify with and to bed heterosexual machismo, but his adaptations (via the visual
and a narrative compounding of excess) also work to foreground the layer-
ing that appropriation affords the spectator in order to mask gay shame.

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The Raven (2007), relocates Poe’s narrative poem to a wealthy, white South African milieu, where spoilt, gay rich-kid Roderick (Rick Armando)

invites his friends (largely a cast of well-muscled fraternity types with one black female character) to his Gothic mansion for a party, where they are

‘offed’ one by one by a killer wearing a Raven mask. The murderer eventu-
ally turns out to be Roderick whose male lover was killed while at college by a bunch of homophobic jocks (as revealed in flashback) and thus becomes
obsessed in seeking vengeance. As such, Poe’s tale becomes an unhinged
homophobic revenge horror fantasy in the hands of DeCoteau. The Pit and the Pendulum (2009) takes Poe’s notion of erotic sensorial experience and reworks it to centre upon a group of young college students who attend a
psychiatric home for the weekend to earn fast cash by taking part in hyp-
notic experiments to eliminate the sensation of pain. The project is run by a young female psychiatrist, J.B. Devay (Loreille New), who, the film later reveals, is obsessed with carrying on the unhinged and unethical medical
work of her equally psychotic father. During hypnosis, J.B. encourages the
largely straight young men, to strip, wrestle and explore their fluid sexualities in true DeCoteau style, often mitigated by the presence of an equally
nude female character. However, the film’s main protagonist is a young ‘out’

gay man, Jason (Stephen Hansen), who begins to come to terms with his
feelings for his friend Kyle (Bart Voitala), who becomes the suffering prisoner, strapped to the table in the film’s denouement awaiting the descend-
ing pendulum axe, but who is rescued in time by the film’s gay ‘hero’ Jason.

Finally, The House of Usher (2008) is perhaps DeCoteau’s most unabashedly out of the Poe adaptations. The reclusive and hypersensitive Roderick Usher (Frank Mentier), and his increasingly sick sister Madeleine (Jaimyse

Haft), are visited by old childhood friend Victor (Michael Cardelle), with
whom Roderick previously had a romantic relationship. Together, brother
and sister conspire to capture Victor so that the house can feed from his
energies and replenish the siblings. Victor is haunted both by his past erotic reminiscences with Roderick and, further still, by the spirits of the eroticised blue-collar handymen (including a gardener and a plumber) whom Roderick
had previously sacrificed.

While DeCoteau’s films do not appear to fit neatly into an explic-
itly gay horror aesthetic, many more of the titles within Gaysploitation
horror cannot be considered explicitly as gay or queer texts. In her

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discussion of Rothman’s films, Cook highlights their radical potential as
they ‘produce contradictions, shifts in meaning which disturb the patri-

archal myths of women on which the exploitation film rests’. 36 DeCoteau’s works (whether consciously or not) also manipulate pre-existing stereotypes prevalent within the exploitation film, firstly in swapping the
erotic objectification of gender from female to male and, secondly, in
challenging the typical effete stereotypes of gay men as erotic objects by
emphasising the machismo of his male leads. Consequently, DeCoteau’s
films, and arguably other Gaysploitation Horror texts, create new gay
male stereotypes.

DeCoteau’s films appeal to an audience made up of gay men, straight
women, teenage girls and also, arguably, heterosexual male horror fans.

In doing so, they have opened up the market for other horror films
that present non-specific or fluid sexualities, eroticised male victims
and scenes of homoeroticism. In spite of their homoeroticism, there is
very little evidence in the characters’ dialogue, language or behaviour
that would suggest that they are anything but typically young, white,
male heterosexual American ‘Jocks’ (referring to American slang for
an athlete). These character types effectively become ‘homo-dudes’,
that is: apparently gay male subjects who adopt the language, behav-
iour, fashion and cultural connotations of young, white, heterosexual
machismo as represented by the ‘Jock’. Despite the move towards a
more open acknowledgement of homosexuality in his Poe cycle of films,

DeCoteau’s depiction of gay masculinity is clearly still problematic in
its seeming valorisation of the straight-acting, homonormative apeing
of heteronormative machismo. Yet they reveal, via their many forms of

‘borrowing’, a tension present within gay male culture. Such a focus on
appropriation, parody and pastiche (particularly of gender forms) may,
in fact, operate to highlight the constructedness of an implied essential-
ism to gender binaries in the dominant discourse that LGBTQ culture
so often contradicts.

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4

Shattering the Closet:

Queer Horror Outs Itself

In the, arguably implicit, adoption of heterosexual masculinist ideals in

DeCoteau’s early Gaysploitation horror, gay male culture may indeed be
enacting a new invisibility – by disavowing any effeminate behavioural traits and associations through ‘straight-acting’ and by being non-stereotypical
and unrecognisably gay. More specifically, the presentation of gay mascu-
linity in Gaysploitation horror strips often stereotypically effeminate gayness from gay male subjectivities and replaces it with a diffuse, but equally stereotyped, gay masculinity. Whether or not the replacement of stereotyped effeminate gay behaviour with equally stereotyped straight-acting
gayness is indeed subversive remains to be seen. While these texts’ charac-
ters’ sexual fluidity is undeniable, it generally comes at the expense of any positive representation of femininity.

This chapter focuses on the development of the queer horror sub-genre
post-early DeCoteau to present, which gradually dispenses with the mon-
strous metaphor of homosexuality and, instead, acknowledges it explic-
itly from a gay male perspective. The recent surge in horror films that are directed by, produced by and feature gay men raises the questions that

Harry Benshoff’s study (1997) does not fully address: what is the appeal
of a queer horror aesthetic for gay male audiences and filmmakers and,
furthermore, what anxieties do their horror narratives play upon? This 111

Queer Horror Film and Television
chapter provides plentiful examples of Gaysploitation horror that all
present out gay characters and which offer a more self-aware critique of feminine/macho gay male stereotypes and evaluate anxieties within queer
subcultures throughout the early 2000s.

Gender Wars: Dante’s Cove (2005–7) /

The Lair (2007–9)

While the majority of DeCoteau’s Rapid Heart productions do not fea-
ture characters with clear homosexual orientations, Here! TV’s horror and
supernatural serial dramas, Dante’s Cove (2005–7) and spin-off series The Lair (2007–9), both foreground their gay male protagonists. Here! TV, founded in 2002 and owned by gay distributor Regent Entertainment, is
a premium cable and online television network that targets lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender audiences. It markets itself as the alternative television channel for those discerning viewers who wish to ‘live openly’, with

‘no apologies’1, referencing an assumed guilt within gay and lesbian culture. The channel’s name apparently references the 1990s political slogan

of protest group Queer Nation ‘We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it!’.2

Dante’s Cove also features lesbian, gay and bisexual characters who indulge in erotic encounters. Nevertheless, these are clearly designated
as support to the centrally-featured gay male couple, Kevin (Gregory

Michaels) and Toby (Charlie David). The serial takes place on a fictional

US island in Dante’s Cove, where a hotel/boarding house is home to various
hyper-sexed characters. Kevin, a young blonde man from the mainland, is
in love with Toby, an older, ‘out’ gay man. Invited to stay with him on the island, Kevin comes out to his parents who reject him. The history of the

Cove influences the present throughout the narrative. Season one’s pro-
logue features an immortal witch, Grace (Tracey Scoggins), who discovers
her fiancé, Ambrosius (William Gregory Lee), sleeping with another man,
for which she enacts her revenge by killing his gay lover and imprisoning

Ambrosius for centuries in the cellar of the hotel. Kevin begins suffering
visions under Ambrosius’ spell and, in a trance, he eventually frees him
with a kiss. Ambrosius, in turn, falls in love with Kevin and strives to split him from Toby and to wage war with Grace by using the power of ‘Tresum’

witchcraft that links feminine power with that of the moon and water, and

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Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself
masculine power with the sun. Its convoluted narrative is derived from
soap operas, but it has horror elements too and is driven by the tumultuous love affair between the two gay men and the forces (supernatural or otherwise) that conspire against them. Dante’s Cove takes the basic structure of DeCoteau’s films and updates them into a long running serial format, but
instead confidently presents its male and female characters as gay, lesbian, straight or bisexual. Despite this seemingly fresh presentation of unapologetic homosexuality, the representation of gay masculinity in Dante’s Cove is not without its problems. While the characters clearly state their sexual preferences, it is the continued adoption of macho posturing and language
and, at times, oddly contradictory straight-acting behaviour that subverts
any ‘outed’ and guilt-free declaration of homosexuality that the channel’s
title, Here! TV, suggests. Dante’s Cove’ s marketing campaign often ran with the tag-line ‘Your newest Guilty Pleasure’. These horror soaps borrow the softcore erotic elements of the exploitation film with their soapy
aesthetics being loaned by the aforementioned Gaysploitation horror films.

Further analysis of Dante’s Cove and, to a lesser extent, The Lair reveals that the representations of gay masculinity within these supernatural horror soaps propose the incidental nature of homosexuality by foregrounding a stereotypically heterosexual, macho, masculine performance by young

gay men (again played largely by straight actors3). Dante’s Cove features straight actors playing gay, yet effectively acting straight. It is via this paradoxical fusion of performances that a certain type of idealised macho and
straight-acting gay masculinity is affirmed.

Dante’s Cove stages a gender war between the power of masculine
witchcraft and its feminine counterpart; here the solar/lunar symbolism is
queered as the traditionally stronger power of the sun is overwhelmed by
the traditionally weaker feminine moon. Given the shameful disempowerment of the gay male, it is understandable there is a great deal of macho
posturing. As a young, recently ‘outed’, gay male character, Kevin suffers
the most in coming to terms with this idealised masculinity. In contrast
to his blonde, androgynous prettiness, his partner Toby is an older, more
hirsute, darker-skinned figure with brown hair and stubble. Kevin’s status
as ‘kept-boy’ and being the younger of the couple only further emasculates
him. This is countered by his overcompensating macho language, clothing
and heteronormative behaviour and in his casting of himself in his fantasy

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Queer Horror Film and Television
visions as a ‘Prince Charming’ figure. As Kevin struggles to pay his way
at the hotel, his torrid love affair with Toby is fraught with anxieties of powerlessness. Through his supernatural connection with Ambrosius, he
attempts to re-masculinise himself but, instead, Ambrosius feeds upon his
youth in order to gain the power to avenge himself on Grace. In the series’

second season, Ambrosius’ character is developed further into a macho
stereotype. His long hair is cut into a shorter fifties slicked style, he wears a black leather jacket and the shortening of his name to ‘Bro’ furthers this rejection of a feminised gay male culture.

One sequence, in particular, reveals Kevin’s anxieties about his
homosexuality and fear of emasculation. He reveals to Toby that, in his
youth, he was a street hustler. He continues that he never let his cus-
tomers anally penetrate him and still has never let anyone do so. In bed
with Toby, Kevin confesses, ‘I never let anybody fuck me, because – you
know I had to love them to…let them do that’. Breaking down, Kevin
weeps, ‘I never let anybody have that part of me! Nobody ever, ‘til now’.

Upon which Kevin kisses Toby, and they begin to have sex. A cross-cut
between Kevin’s confession and the intial stages of their love-making,
shows Grace casting a spell on the moon, turning it blue to affect the
actions of the male characters. Her voiceover chants, ‘The power of
the moon frees us…The power of Tresum frees us!’. Freed by feminin-
ity, Kevin has anal sex with Toby, crying throughout in a hilarious mix
of relief, pain and guilt. Despite the scene’s obvious comic nature, it is
clearly indicative of the central themes of Dante’s Cove, with gay male passivity being associated with feminine passivity and the social and
cultural powerlessness that is inferred as a result of such an association.

The series’ gay director, Sam Irvin, may indeed be attempting a parody
of such views, but in perpetuating the erotic objectification of machismo

he effectively maintains them.4

The Lair, like DeCoteau’s The Brotherhood, draws upon a cinematic and literary history of queer/vampire narratives, historically representing gay men’s fixation with youth. A spin-off from Dante’s Cove, the serial takes place in a sadomasochists’ nightclub on the island which is run by a vampire clan. The Lair fuses the narratives from Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), both queer commentaries on the attraction of youthful beauty and the fear of ageing.

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Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

Because of the all-male nature of the club, The Lair features only one female character (Laura, played by Beverly Lynne), who is revealed to be the victim of domestic abuse. By narratively figuring its only female character as

‘victim’ (unlike Dante’s Cove, which has more than one), the series offers no place for the female ‘bitch’ character that carries over from American soap culture. Instead, the archetypal ‘bitch’ in The Lair is the effeminate male, Colin (ex-hardcore gay porn actor Dylan Vox), a camp and untrustworthy
bleach blonde bent on taking over the queer vampire clan. In The Lair, effeminacy displaces femininity, but it is equally vilified. Both soaps borrow from the conventions of the horror genre and Gaysploitation, becom-
ing camp pastiches of Gaysploitation horror with resulting series that can
be considered, not only as gay horrors, but more so as gay commentaries
on or satires of gay horror texts.

Where Dante’s Cove and The Lair associate a passive femininity with male homosexuality, this is counterposed to the ‘straight acting’ über-masculinity of the gay and straight male characters. By ‘straight-acting’, I refer to a gay sex advertisement term for traditional masculine behavioural traits. 5 What is the appeal of the parodic spectacle of machismo in Gaysploitation horror? Dante’s Cove has developed into a camp supernatural comic soap that many of its fans watch both for its comedic value and for its display of
naked male flesh and softcore titillation. Yet such anodyne sexual display
essentially achieves only a flaccid eroticism, one that is not designed to
arouse, but merely to provide ‘eye-candy’, and is arguably just a source of comedy. The parodic representation of macho masculinity in DeCoteau’s
films and in Here! TV serials like Dante’s Cove and The Lair remain celebratory caricatures, without lampooning machismo.

Emasculation anxieties and top/bottom politics
in October Moon (2005) and Socket (2007)

October Moon (2005) mixes psychological thriller with horror and presents its central characters as gay, yet it avoids any obvious straight-acting caricatures and focuses instead on the everyday emasculation and age-centred
anxieties of young and middle-aged gay men. Having previously worked
with DeCoteau in various roles ranging from writer, assistant director to
camera operator, Jason Paul Collum sought to take DeCoteau’s version

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of Gaysploitation horror to a less sensational and self-aware level while
acknowledging their success:

DeCoteau’s films were marketed as ‘horror films for girls’,
adhering [himself] firmly to the market research in 1997 that
well over 40% of horror film goers were female. DeCoteau tried
to tap into the completely dry gay market. But there techni-
cally wasn’t any ‘gay’ at all. All the male characters claimed to
be straight, though at the end of each film a single line of dia-
logue would conjure up a ‘possibility’ that perhaps some homo-
sexual tendencies could exist in the hunkiest characters. So,

DeCoteau’s idea, to make safe homosexual films which weren’t

homosexual films, paid off.6

October Moon immediately wears its influences on its sleeve as it references horror in its opening shower sequence (another homage to De Palma’s

Carrie (1976) and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In the film’s closing third act, it turns to the horror genre wholeheartedly, borrowing a Gothic aesthetic
and narrative with its brooding soundtrack punctuated with sharp stabs
of strings in moments of tension. Its recurring voiceover is slowed to give it a monstrous connotation, the lighting is expressionistic in style and the film’s final sequence is a typical discovery of and escape from the monster/
killer’s dungeon.

Its plot (a gay take on the Fatal Attraction (1987) narrative7) centres on gay couple Corin (Sean Michael Lambrecht) and Jake (Jeff Dylan-Graham)

who have relationship problems due to age anxieties (Corin is markedly
older than Jake, an unemployed, ‘kept boy’ figure). Their relationship
is thrown into turmoil when Corin’s new male assistant, Eliot, (Jerod

Howard) conceives an erotic obsession with his boss. Eliot infiltrates their home life, driving a wedge between the two, stalking Corin, building a
shrine to him in a nearby abandoned house, and eventually kidnapping
and murdering him before attempting to murder Jake. Distraught with
grief, Jake eventually kills Eliot. October Moon also satirises and highlights anxieties around ageism and gender stereotyping particularly the conflation of gay masculinity with passive femininity this time, both by the
dominant heterosexist ideology and from within a gay male sub-culture.

There is very little erotic content; homoeroticism is rendered obvious
given the characters’ out gay status and it remains very clear, via a distinct 116

Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

Figure 4.1 Jake and Corin from October Moon (2005).

lack of nudity, that October Moon does not intend to titillate its viewers.

Within the diegesis, there is an awareness of sexual stereotypes and the
anxieties surrounding them. Via his characters’ dialogue, Collum seems
to be dramatising the issues surrounding the feminisation of gay male
culture, both from without (via heteronormativity), and from within (via
its own sub-cultural language).

Several scenes involving Corin’s colleague, Lisa (Brinke Stevens), reveal
both her and Corin’s uneasiness over gay male culture’s feminisation of itself.

Corin reveals that, as a child, he would play-act as Wonder Woman: ‘I’d be

Diana Prince, and do the spin and everything!’, to which Lisa replies, ‘You are such a fag!’, at which Eliot (their dinner guest) looks uncomfortable.

When questioned by Lisa as to the sexual orientation of his new assistant,

Corin affirms, ‘Hell, yes – she screamed “Mary” the minute she walked
through the door!’. Lisa, looking perturbed, asks ‘Why do you always refer
to gay men as women?’ to which Corin responds, ‘Well, aren’t we?’ and Lisa
replies, ‘Yeah, I guess’. It is precisely these moments of feminine identification by gay male characters, and a general feminising of gay men by the
film’s straight and gay characters, that define the film’s central anxiety.

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The film also discusses anxieties surrounding ageism within gay male
sub-groups. The main protagonists’ relationship is dogged by their own and
gay male culture’s celebration of youth. Emasculation anxieties revolve around age and inexperience for Jake, who becomes depressed at being the dependent partner, uncomfortable with being tied down, and finding monogamy
oppressive. The older Corin is a clear ‘daddy’ figure, a more mature gay man (although, tellingly, he is still fairly young), the sole bread-winner, and who is relatively successful at his job and independent of his family (see fig. 4.1).

Most importantly, Jake is anxious about being unemployed and the passive
connotations of being unable to bring home a salary. On top of all this, Corin and Jake are a long term couple and are continually represented like heterosexual, married partners, inviting them into the gender positions of husband and wife respectively. Jake’s journey from ‘kept boy’ to ‘Final Boy’ is indicative of his struggle to be recognised as a masculine gay man.

Collum consciously places such social commentary within October Moon’ s narrative, suggesting that:

Whereas in straight culture there is clearly a stereotypical ‘man/
woman’ role in the household, when you place two men together
in a homosexual relationship, there remains that sense that one
of them ‘has’ to be the stronger ‘dominant’ and the other has to

be the ‘subservient’ weaker partner.

As a result of American culture’s inbred psychological need
to define who is the more powerful in a relationship, it seems
to me gay men still feel the need to define who’s who in their

relationships. 8

Jake’s survival is brought about via a burgeoning maturity. In attempting to rescue Corin from Eliot in the film’s final sequence, Jake becomes the hero, the ‘knight in shining armour’, in order to prove his worth as a masculine
and (upon Corin’s death) vengeful male. In losing his more masculine part-
ner and vengefully stabbing Eliot to death with his own knife, Jake is phallicised and becomes an independent, masculine gay subject.

Sean Abley’s Socket (2007) is a science fiction horror which clearly references the narrative of Frankenstein (both Mary Shelley’s novel (1818) and James Whale’s queerer 1931 cinematic adaptation) while paying cinematic homage to the sci-fi and body horror of David Cronenberg (partic-
ularly Rabid (1977) and Videodrome (1983) and, most obviously, eXistenZ

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(1999)). Despite being marketed as a science fiction fantasy, the film, again, wears its horror antecedents on its sleeve. Abley and executive producers

John Carrozza and Doug Prinzivalli state, in several interviews and on the

DVD’s ‘Making Of Featurette’, that, as gay fans of horror, the film references significant titles from the genre. Abley comments:

I’m a gigantic Cronenberg fan. I love his biological horror mov-
ies. I was trying to come up with something that incorporated
your body rebelling against you with the added extra bonus
of sexualizing something that wasn’t normally sexual. I also
wanted to do a gay film that was uncompromising in the sexu-
ality of the characters, but didn’t rely on their sexual identity

for the plot.9

In demonstrating an awareness of the anxieties of gay male association
with shameful feminine passivity, Socket is typical of Gaysploitation horror. It also remains true to the sub-genre in its presentation of an everyday, non-political gay subjectivity. Abley continues that his production company Dark Blue Films intended to feature:

leading characters who are incidentally gay […] We want to
continue to do horror films that have gay characters whose

sexuality have nothing to do with the plot.10

As is also seen in the work of directors Sam Irvin, Fred Olen Ray and Paul

Etheredge-Ouzts, Abley highlights the incidentally homosexual nature
of his film’s characters, rendering their sexual orientation matter-of-fact, non-threatening and, some would argue, non-gay. Socket is a tale of lightning strike victims who survive only to develop an insatiable addiction to
electric current, eventually compelling them to modify their bodies to seek the ultimate high in unleashing the bio-electric energy in others’ bodies.

Socket clearly plays on the vampire metaphor of the addicted mon-
strous individual feeding on others for power but, more importantly,

references Cronenbergian ‘Body Horror’11 via its characters’ eroticised obsessions, sexually symbolised murders and bodily dysfunctions. Abley

takes the main narrative of Rabid (1977)12, transposes it onto gay male characters and adds electrocution as the main motivation for their obsessions. In Rabid, the sexually aroused heroine emits a phallic spike from her armpit-wound to stab her victims, infecting them with a virus that turns

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Figure 4.2 Socket’ s (2007) body modifications.

them into sexually-obsessed ‘zombies’. In Socket, Dr. Bill Matthews (Derek Long), driven by his erotic obsession with electricity, surgically alters his and the group’s bodies to implant a similarly hidden phallic implement in
one of their wrists (see fig. 4.2), while also implanting vaginal/anal open-ings in the other one. The film also references Videodrome (1983), via recurring visual motifs of television screens whose picture turns to static in Bill’s presence. Bill views flashbacks of his own traumatic past and the traumatic memories of his victims when he ‘plugs into’ their spinal cords at the base of their skull. Most importantly, the sub-textual trauma of Socket, which revolves around the psychical and physical (un)pleasure associated
with gay male penetration anxieties, more than references that of eXistenZ

(1999).

It could be argued that Socket is a queered (or queerer) homage to Cronenberg’s science-fiction tale of virtual realities and the blurring of a fictional gaming world with reality. eXistenZ’s plot follows the many versions of reality that befall Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a savvy virtual-reality games creator and one of her fans, Ted Pikul (Jude Law) who becomes embroiled in a plot to assassinate Geller and destroy the game
world she has created. In order to unravel the mystery, the two escape into that game world. Cronenberg’s body horror twist to the software heavy plot
involves the inclusion of ‘wet-ware’ in which game participants connect to

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other gamers and the game world via bio-ports fitted at the base of their
spines. These symbolically anal holes allow for their users to import ‘pods’, living biological gaming machines that tap into their hosts’ spinal cords,
and afford the possibility of connecting with other gamers, both mentally
and physically, if one gamer ‘plugs into’ another. Ostensibly, eXistenZ is a narrative about male penetration anxieties13 and fantasies borne out of the gender play that Cronenberg instils into the plot (having a female games designer whiz-kid, the wide-eyed ‘Alice’ who falls down eXistenZ’s many metaphorical ‘rabbit holes’). Indeed, Ted Pikul is characterised within the film as an uptight, prissy and weak adventurer, with Law’s soft, willowy
body type further suggesting a very feminine vulnerability. Despite this
feminisation, Pikul remains resolutely heterosexual throughout (becoming

Geller’s lover) and, in one notable scene, it becomes clear that penetration anxieties in eXistenZ are heterosexist and represent ‘homosexual panic’.

Led to a run-down garage by Geller, in order to help her access the ‘game
world’, Pikul is fitted with a bio-port by the garage proprietor, Gas (Willem Defoe) who is in the pay of the game’s designer. The fitting of the port is depicted as a comic scene of exaggerated phallic suggestions and traumatic
male penetration anxiety. After Gas reveals the immense gun-like weapon
with which he is to drill Pikul a new bio-port, Pikul protests ‘I have this phobia about my body being penetrated…surgically’. Pikul’s pause underlines the scene’s obvious homosexual rape metaphors. Gas’s retort, in ref-
erence to his phallic weapon, further confirms the potential trauma: ‘You
don’t wanna mess with the stud-finder!’ Immediately after the installation, Allegra fingers Ted’s port, lubing it up and penetrating him with one of
her bio-ports. Gender roles are reversed and the male is penetrated by the
female. Equating the new (anal/vaginal) bio-port as a site of male bod-
ily and psychical penetration, Cronenberg’s narrative continues throwing

Ted into various game world and real world scenarios in which he remains
out of control, thus paralleling penetration (and the feminine masochism
implied therein) with disempowerment.

Socket’ s penetration scenes take place in an explicitly homosexual environment, but this is not to suggest that similar anxieties do not arise for the film’s gay male protagonist. I want to suggest that the penetration anxieties within Socket are not necessarily based upon a fear of sodomy per se, but of the feminine masochism that is implied in it and, further still, 121

Queer Horror Film and Television
the guilt and shame at one’s own homosexuality (as coded feminine) and
even the trauma experienced in sharing one’s body with another. The film

also reconstructs Elizabeth Young’s homosocial/erotic triangle14, in the dynamic between Bill, his female boss, Dr. Emily Anderson (Alexandra

Billings) and intern/lover Craig Matthews (Matthew Montgomery). The
men’s relationship is discovered and frowned upon by Emily, which effec-
tively emasculates them. The role of Emily is a castrating one throughout
the narrative: she initially forbids Bill to perform surgery after his accident, relegating him to running rounds and completing administrative work.15

Indeed, the representation of women throughout the film can be argued to
be masculinised, with Bill’s friend Olivia (Allie Rivenbank), a butch lesbian caricature, whose increasingly aggressive threats and desire to buy a ‘big
fucking truck’ further masculinise her and emasculate him.

At face value, Socket appears again to be presenting the typical Gaysploitation horror narrative of emasculation anxieties. The lightning strike imposes a traumatic passivity upon its target. It is this passivity and an
inferred masochism, taking pleasure in willingly submitting oneself to
pain, that central character Bill must negotiate throughout the film. Bill
is a successful, very masculine surgeon who becomes disempowered (in
his work and personal life) by his accident through being taken off sur-
gery rounds and being cared for by his female friends. The relationship that develops between him and Craig centres on Bill’s attempt to regain control
of his life. Cared for by Craig and by Olivia and Carol (a lesbian couple
whom he refers to as his ‘parents’), Bill is rendered feminine and con-
fined to the domestic. Upon seeing his newly clean house, Carol remarks

‘Welcome to Stepford!’ and Olivia retorts ‘StepFAG is more like it!’. The
post-traumatic desire for electrical energy that Bill develops seems to be a drive to regain ‘order’ within his life. In one scene, Craig links Bill’s curious desire to clean and tidy with his desire to experience electrical shocks: ‘You craved order…[and]…the brain produces energy…[therefore] energy is
pure order’. Later, refusing to embrace Craig at work, Bill exclaims, ‘It’s all about the pecking order, you know that as well as I do!’ But it is the cultural stigma of gay penetration that provides the film’s central tension.

The relationship dynamic between Bill and Craig fits the recurring
pattern in Gaysploitation horror, Bill being the older, mature, ‘Daddy’

figure, while the worshipful intern, Craig, is smaller in stature, younger

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and, despite his initial status as carer, eventually dependent on Bill. Craig is clearly figured as the ‘boy’ in the relationship, a status that is made explicit when Carol and Olivia remark, ‘so he really is a boy!’ On the other hand,

Bill is a more stereotypically mature, masculine, character with messy
habits. When taken home by his female friend carers, his house is figured
as a typical ‘bachelor pad’ – untidy, unclean and with sober decoration.

Once Bill is struck by lightning and begins to take erotic pleasure in sub-
mitting himself to shocks, he becomes anally retentive and an obsessive

‘neat-freak’, in other words, a stereotypically house-proud homosexual. In

Bill’s sexual relationship with Craig, however, he remains the top – the initiator of sex and the penetrator in the electric plugging sessions. It is as if Bill overcompensates for his daytime domestication and, by extension,
feminisation by dominating in nightly ‘plugging sessions’ with his partner
and other ‘victims’. Socket parallels domestic order (tidiness) with a domestic gendered order that centres around power relations. Both exist within the same subject, Bill, and are at odds with each other, suggesting his inner turmoil. Despite his efforts to re-empower himself as male/active/penetrator, Bill masochistically experiences the dying moments and memories of
his victims, and is feminised once more as a result.

Above all, while the narrative appears to represent gay male emascula-
tion anxieties, it is Socket’s equipping of its obsessed characters with the potential ‘to plug’ into electrical circuits and each other, as well as being

‘plugged into’, that almost comically symbolises the gay male subject’s
potential to penetrate as well as to be penetrated in sexual intercourse. It is this dual potential that, via such unnatural surgical enhancements, turn the group and its members monstrous. Bill’s surgical enhancement of his
body into a site of active and passive penetration eventually turns this
potential into an unnatural ability and informs Bill’s mounting guilt and shame. The Cronenbergian surgical procedures, in which Bill and Craig
graft metal prongs and socket slots into one another, would seem to afford
an equalising potential for sexual partnership (to be both top and bottom
simultaneously) but, tellingly, it is Bill, the more masculine of the two, who remains the top. Reciprocity (whereby Bill allows Craig to ‘plug into’ him
and vice versa) eventually proves unsatisfying to the doctor, who, sneak-
ing out at night, continues to ‘cruise’ and seek electric shocks in secret.

Bill sadistically penetrates others’ bodies to experience their bio-electrical 123

Queer Horror Film and Television
impulses but, as a consequence, also masochistically experiences their pain

‘by proxy’. The references to vampirism, obsessive drug abuse and the dan-
gers of promiscuous sex become obvious here, with the doctor killing peo-
ple indiscriminately and becoming addicted to it. Finally, guilt overwhelms Bill and he attempts a typically excessive (and camp) suicide by plugging
into a local power station.

The concept of the self-help group is parodied in Socket (as a means of ‘coming out’ as a victim of a lightning strike) and comes to represent
a pseudo-sadomasochistic community (in that its members are rep-
resentatives of various genders and ages who meet in private to con-
fess ‘what they are’). Adding to the sadomasochistic symbolism, their
meeting place is styled as a dark dungeon complete with rough-hewn
brick walls and an antique electric shock machine. There the group’s
admission of pleasure gained in self-inflicted pain clearly states their
masochism. At one stage in the group’s discussion of when ‘their life
changed’ (after being struck by lightning), a montage of individual dec-
larations reveals the parallel excitement and shame associated with their
new found (sexual) identity: ‘It felt exquisite…and I felt ashamed…until

I found this…and my life became…perfect.’ Socket clearly links masochism with homosexuality, but the film’s ‘self-help’ group is made up of
an equal number of men and women of varied sexual orientations. Its
members are equally sadistic as well as masochistic, but it is precisely
the (gay) man’s possibility for both (in his desire to experience both
penile and anal pleasure) that is turned unnatural via the traditional horror genre’s conventional demands and heteronormative ideology. It
is this that causes the most ‘pain’ for Bill: masochistic pleasure leads to cultural, and therefore psychical, trauma and pain. His drive for ever
greater levels of pain or unpleasure in the form of electrocution is pre-
sented as a means to prove himself ‘more of a man’, and it inevitably
fails. It could be argued, however, that in Bill’s continued drive towards
re-empowerment and re-masculinisation, he continually finds himself
propelled back into the passive position of ‘victim’. In ‘plugging into’

the mains, he willingly submits himself to electrocution and the maso-
chistic enjoyment of ‘pain’. In his attempt at sadism, in inflicting pain on his human victims by ‘plugging into’ their spinal cords, he subsequently
experiences their bio-electrical surges and memories masochistically

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which feeds his shame. What Socket’ s narrative provides is a guilt-ridden visualisation of Freud’s understanding of sadistic pleasure whereby he
states that sadism (pleasure in inflicting pain on others) and masochism

(pleasure in having pain inflicted upon oneself) are bound together in
the subject’s own enjoyment of suffering, either inflicting it or having it inflicted upon themselves. Freud states that:

while these pains are being inflicted upon other people, they are
enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identifica-

tion with the suffering object.16

This is visually depicted when Bill finally ‘plugs into’ Olivia and he experiences a flashback in which he sees, in montage, the deaths of all his previous victims (partners). The shame and danger of the gay male subject’s promiscuity (particularly the viral connection between victims/partners) is cata-
lysed in this series of shameful flashbacks. There are obvious references to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases that are particularly relevant
to gay male culture in Socket; viral infection is represented by Bill retaining the memories of his dead victims (partners) even after unplugging from
them and their memories (rather than a literal disease) infect Bill, adding to his guilt. The painful memories return unannounced to him causing
both psychical and physical trauma: headaches, blackouts and the loss of
his own memories. His final words before his suicide articulate the guilt
and shame of Gaysploitation horror and the gay male subject’s simultane-
ous desire for and frustration with re-confirming the heterosexual ‘order’

(a heterosexist masculinity with which he erotically disidentifies with):

I’m a fucking doctor and I’ve done terrible things. The man on
our street, the one they found…and another one in an alley…

they were all so desperate…Everything’s a mess and I have to
put things in order.

Bill’s suicide attempt is an attempt to access the overwhelming energy
and (phallic) potency of the power station and to overload himself with
a phallic charge. His failure to do so is a reminder of Lacan’s argument
that the phallus is unattainable. But Bill does not enter the power sta-
tion in order to ‘top-up’ his failing masculinity; in attempting suicide
he accepts his masochism overwhelmingly. In plugging into the power

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station, he is also filled up (penetrated) with an electrical phallic charge, rendering him ultimately passive. In the film’s closing shot, both Bill
and Craig are seen to survive in a passive comatose state, side-by-side
in hospital beds and connected to one heart monitor. Socket’s final shot summarises its overriding trauma, that of the assimilation of one subject
into another. It is the union of bodies and of subjectivities (the ‘loss of self ’ that is implied in sexual penetration) that terrifies and fascinates in queer horror.

Screaming Queens: 50s Queer

Creature-Feature Parody

In his book, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers,

Actors and Authors (2013), Sean Abley compiles discussions with past and present producers, directors and writers who have all contributed in
some form to the developing queer horror sub-genre. In it he recognises
that during a significant period of time in the mid-2000s, gay horror was

being produced at a rapid pace; he terms it ‘The Little Genre That Could’.17

Two key directors who Abley interviews include the out gay filmmakers

Chris Diani and Tim Sullivan, whose additions to the sub-genre clearly
veer towards a comic-horror aesthetic. Their films, Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (2006) and I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011), are outright parodies of various tongue-in-cheek exploitation films from the 1950s. These
include creature features like Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and the radioactive ant horror film, Them! (1954) and the teen party/beach film Beach Party (1963).

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon’s black and white aesthetic is reminiscent of both atomic-age anxiety sci-fi and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), but its embrace of slapstick comedy reveals it as an outright lampoon of the form. It portrays a group of gay friends on holiday who are
terrorised by homosexual zombies that emerge from a nearby lake. Diani’s
film follows collegiate sissy Phillip (Nick Garrison) who is jilted by his promiscuous, butch boyfriend Bobby (Bill Morrison), due to his penchant for
cruising in an infamous roadside rest stop. There, Bobby and a horde of
libidinous gay men, are turned into ravenous zombies after being stung
by giant radioactive mosquitoes from a nearby chemical treatment plant

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and the undead descend upon the partying friends. Phillip’s friends are all comic caricatures ranging from show tune-loving African American Stan

(Lowell Deo) to Randall (Phillip D. Clarke), a bitter, older ‘queen’. Only the film’s promiscuous gays are susceptible to infection by the mutant mosquitoes and therefore to zombification, driving home its warning against
cruising. Hilariously, the queer infected are miraculously cured upon hear-
ing any Judy Garland song as the film’s hero Phillip proclaims: ‘No homo-
sexual, not even a flesh-eating, walking dead homosexual can resist Judy

Garland!’ With its comic fusion of parody, camp melodrama, musical (at
one stage, the friends and the zombie hordes stop to perform stiffly a dance routine to a show tune) and outlandishly amateur gore, Creatures of the Pink Lagoon ridicules both feminine and macho stereotypes of gay men.

Anthology horror Chillerama! (2011) follows the conceit of a drive-in theatre screening short horror films for a gathered, and sexed-up, teen
audience. Each of the feature’s sections makes an homage to certain clas-
sic sub-genres of horror film, yet Tim Sullivan’s entry , I Was a Teenage Werebear! is, perhaps, the most explicitly queer. Werebear takes inspiration from the beach blanket/party film of the 1950s while revisiting the trend
in teen/youth problem films of the same era. The more outlandish of those,

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), merge Universal Pictures’ horrors of the 1930s with the more recent
popularity of the teen-problem film. Gaysploitation horror films such as

Sullivan’s merely exaggerate the horror genre’s already-present predilec-
tion for appropriation to camp extremes. Sullivan himself recognises that
camp appropriation can often shift queer reference from the implicit to the explicit:

Let’s take these gay clichés (the closeted content from Rebel

Without a Cause [1956]; Brando’s macho leather biker from The

Wild One [1953]; Kiefer Sutherland’s vampire seducer from The

Lost Boys [1987] and what has been subtext, let’s make it text.

Let’s take the sub out of text. Let’s have fun with this18

In doing so, overtly performative Gaysploitation horrors that appropriate
horror film conventions, aesthetics and themes often move the metaphor
away from straight-oriented depictions of ‘queer monstrousness’ and,
instead, offer pointed critiques of sub-cultural animosity and self-loathing 127

Queer Horror Film and Television
from within the gay community. Despite Werebear’s comic parody of
exploitation horror and musical, Sullivan declares that the piece is about

‘acceptance’ and ‘about making a stand’.19

The film follows high school newbie, Ricky (played by porn star Brent

Corrigan under the pseudonym Sean Lockhart), as he battles with his
repressed homosexual ‘urges’, torn between fitting into the conformist
group (Butch’s (Adam Robitel) gang of jocks) and the alluring and dan-
gerous biker-coded outsiders led by the appropriately monikered Talon

(Anton Troy). Ricky is a curious blend of, firstly, James Dean’s Rebel Jim Stark, replete with red bomber jacket and even borrowing the famed, and
now campy, ‘You’re tearing me apart!’ lines from Ray’s original film and,
secondly, High School Musical’s (2006) Troy Bolton (Zac Efron) com-
plete with floppy brown fringed haircut, naïve demeanour and ability
to burst into song. Sullivan remarks that the references to High School Musical were, in fact, part of his pitch to the producers: ‘Imagine, Zac Efron gets aroused and turns into a leatherman!’. 20 After a car accident, in which Ricky is saved by Talon but his girlfriend is severely injured, the young teen begins to fall in with Talon’s group, developing feelings for
the blonde-quiffed leader. Ricky is warned by school’s Nurse Palava (Lin

Shaye), a heavily accented, stereotypical gypsy-type, to ‘stay away from
those animules’ having her old folk tales about ‘ Verebears’. Palava recounts an old saying that: ‘Even a boy that thinks he is straight, yet shaves his balls by night, may become a were-bear when the hormones rage and the latent
urge takes flight.’

Accompanying the hackneyed plot, Sullivan employs campy musical
numbers which further underline the characters’ obvious non-normative
desires, with titles such as ‘Don’t Look Away’, ‘Purge This Urge’ and

‘Love Bit Me On the Ass’. During a wrestling match on the beach, Ricky
takes on Talon who taunts the young twink goading him to ‘give in to it’

and warning him not to ‘run away from yourself ’. The match becomes
more heated as Talon seems to facially transform into a canine creature
and bites Ricky on the behind, passing on the curse. Afterwards, Ricky
is discovered by Coach Tuffman (Tim Sullivan) singing the song ‘Purge

This Urge’ in the locker room which includes the lyrics: ‘I’ve got this
feeling, a feeling like I’m gonna explode, yes I’ve got this feeling, how
much longer must I hold my load?’ To which the coach suggests that

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Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself
he come to terms with his true self, by offering to give the young teen
oral sex, something he claims his wife will not do for him. The werebear curse, however, causes those afflicted to transform into hirsute,
werewolf-faced leather daddies when aroused. Ricky changes and, dur-
ing the act, crushes the coach’s head between his thighs resulting in an
orgasmic and comic spray of blood and matter. Seen by Talon and his
crew, Ricky obtains their help in disposing of the body, but are soon
confronted by Butch’s gang who proceed to humiliate and torture Talon’s
gang, now with Ricky, in the locker room. In front of a sign reading

‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’, Butch performs a comically enforced
rape of Talon in front of the others who are pinned down by his cronies,
who all the while chant ‘Plug Him Up!’ in another queer horror refer-
ence to Carrie (1976). Becoming aroused by the act, Talon eventually transforms into a Leather Daddy werebear and his crew also turn into
rotund, beefy werebears wearing leather studded harnesses and black
leather caps. They then proceed to attack and eviscerate Butch’s gang.

Talon turns the tables on Butch by penetrating him in return and even-
tually kills him when his penis bursts through his stomach in a ridicu-
lously camp reference to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

Talon later confronts Ricky, encouraging him to come to terms with his
own true nature and asks him whether ‘the bite put the beast in you? Or let it out?’ An enraged Talon reveals to Ricky his plans to attack the ‘straights’

at the annual luau end of term summer beach party under the guise of singing on stage. The section concludes when Ricky, having deliberately
transformed himself into a werebear while masturbating backstage over

Playbear Magazine, attacks a transformed Talon on stage in front of the revellers. Ricky stands up and exposes the group of werebears to the audience calling for ‘tolerance and love’ to help with their acceptance. Talon
amusingly expresses his regret in initiating Ricky into his group: ‘I freed you from a life of conformity, I unleashed you from the mundane, initiated
you into a life of boy-love!’ and his gang angrily turn on the crowd in their bloodlust. Nurse Palava, being aware of werebear lore, throws a nearby silver baseball bat to Ricky onstage, who then uses it as a dildo, anally pen-
etrating Talon with it in order to both kill him and return him back to his human form, at which point the others are freed from his curse. As Talon
dies in Ricky’s arms on stage, his last request is that Ricky ‘tell them I’m not 129

Queer Horror Film and Television
a monster and that werebears need love too.’ Sullivan’s film clearly follows the outrageously comical and camp performative trend of Gaysploitation
horror but does so in order to remark on the, often exclusive, nature of

LGBTQ subcultures (here the film pokes fun at the established and now cli-
chéd leather scene, but also at ‘Bear culture’ and the various sub-divisions therein, such as bear cubs and otters). Despite the film’s clearly trashy aesthetic and light-hearted homage to both exploitation film and the horror
genre, it clearly points to a critique of the isolation felt by individuals within the gay community. Sullivan also suggests it is indicative of his experience as a gay director in the industry:

I didn’t come out until I was twenty-seven. I moved to California
when I was twenty-seven. I finally said, ‘Ok I’m going to be just
who I am’ […] I found that gay Hollywood is the most isolat-
ing, backstabbing…where did I find acceptance? In the horror

community.21

A Far Cry from Acceptance

More recently, Western gay culture has found itself at the centre of a cul-
tural debate surrounding the legalisation of gay marriage and the conse-
quent outrage felt by far right religious, political and social pressure groups decrying the move to equality as a desecration of the sanctity and traditions of heterosexual marriage. In 2011 in the USA, the Obama adminis-
tration attacked the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) (passed into law on

21st September 1996 and which defined marriage as the legal union of one
man and one woman) as unconstitutional calling for its repeal. As such, the Republican leadership has frequently attempted to defend the law via the

House of Representatives. As of June 26 2015, same-sex marriage is now
legalised nationwide across the United States following the Obergefell vs.

Hodges case in Ohio which altered federal law – now requiring marriage licences be issued to all same-sex couples and to recognise the validity of any same-sex marriages that have already been performed in other juris-dictions. Throughout the first quarter of 2012 in the UK, the Conservative/

Liberal Democrat coalition government held a public consultation on their
intentions to allow same-sex marriage and the law duly came into effect in

December 2014.

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Arguably, both The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (2007) and A Far Cry From Home (2012) tap into this cultural unease, portraying those right-wing groups as the films’ monsters. Both films feature gay and lesbian characters as their main protagonists who, in true survival horror tradition ( The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)), unwittingly stumble into the world of religious and Republican fanaticism
in the mid-West and find themselves tortured and slaughtered by stereo-
typical rednecks. These Gaysploitation horrors are significant in that they depict seemingly heteronormative, middle America as their monsters, and
suggest that repressed homosexuality lies at the root of homophobia.

The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror follows the parodic leanings of Gaysploitation horror in foregrounding grotesque feminine masquerade,
gross-out comedy and backwoods survival horror. The film riffs on the
stereotyped stratification of gay and lesbian ‘types’ alongside an equally
stereotyped presentation of right-wing, Republican, God-fearing, back-
woods families who attempt to rid the world of its ‘queer fornicators’ and

‘sodomites’. During the weekend of the ‘biggest gay circuit party of the
year’, the Sahara Salvation Inn is the only available accommodation for
party revellers. Run by Helen (Marki Marks) and Luella (Georgia Jean),
an obsessively religious mother and daughter, the guest house, comically
marketed as ‘A Small Slice of Paradise Here in the Desert’, masquerades
as a chintzy bed and breakfast but is, in fact, a slaughterhouse. Five cou-
ples check in for the weekend: Dom (Vinny Markus) and Alex (Michael

Soldier), both ageing drag queens; Mike (Derek Long) and Erik (Rebert

Borzych), a middle class, bourgeois couple with their ‘fag-hag’ girlfriend

Lizette (Lisa Block-Wieser); Deborah (Shannon Lee) and Gabby (Denise

Heller), both glamorous, stereotyped ‘lipstick-lesbian’, career women; Starr (Hilary Schwartz) and Brenda (Allie Rivenbark), an aspiring female folk
singer and her butch lover; and Rodney (Jim Polivka) and Todd (James

Tolins), an older sugar daddy with his younger ‘personal trainer’ lover.

During their stay, Helen attempts to ‘cure’ Erik of his homosexuality
by torturing him and forcing him to marry her (secretly lesbian) daugh-
ter. Her discovery of Luella’s erotic penchant for other girls is met with
brutal punishment, as she beats her, Mommie Dearest (1981)-style, channeling Faye Dunaway’s unhinged, draggy-performance of Joan Crawford
while screaming ‘No more girlfriends, EVER!’ Helen’s outrageous religious

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Queer Horror Film and Television
fervour and her wildly curled red hair also recall Piper Laurie’s Mrs White (and the various drag-renditions of the role) as echoes of De Palma’s Carrie continue to be heard throughout queer horror. However, the depiction of
religious fundamentalism is clearly more tongue-in-cheek in its attempt
to chastise the young and the sexually transgressive; at one point, Helen
threatens her captive: ‘You will embrace the light of God, and dream of
the sugar-sweet holy vaginal walls of your soon-to-be-wife and my lovely
daughter…FOREVER!’ One by one, the other couples are murdered (often
using a dagger with a crucifix for a handle) and fed to her mutant cannibal son Manfred (Noah Naylor). Helen later reveals that Manfred is the result
of a gang rape: ‘the illegitimate love child of a hundred Republican convention delegates’ (a comic reference to both Carrie and horror icon Freddy Krueger’s conception, being ‘the bastard son of a hundred maniacs’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)).

A Far Cry From Home, part of the anthology horror Gallery of Fear (2013), takes a slightly more serious approach to its depiction of backwoods horror. It arguably marks the clearest move yet towards the matur-
ing of the queer horror genre in that, as Abley states:

If gay horror as a genre truly exists, the films would have to
be about something that is terrifying to the GLBT crowd, as
in people wanting to kill them because they’re queer. Which is

what A Far Cry From Home is about.22

Lane (a typically Final-Girl style neutral name, played by director Alan

Rowe Kelly, notorious for being cast in female roles), a forty-something
androgynous gay man, with long, feminine hair and subtle traces of drag
make-up, and his lover Kayle (Don Money), a twenty-something, attrac-
tive, masculine lover, play the typical Gaysploitation couple (see fig 4.3).

Their relationship is already wracked with generation gap anxieties as indicated by Lane’s complaint: ‘If I was ten years younger we’d be fine’. The couple decide to escape for a weekend’s antiquing for some quality time
together. Stopping off at ‘Hung by a Thread’, a dilapidated junk store in the woods, they come across a family of Christian ‘rednecks’ who claim they
are ‘God’s warriors put on this pitiful planet to rid it of all its abominations’.

Moving away from outright parody, the film still utilises pastiche in that
it clearly references USA backwoods survival horror, such as the porcine

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Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

Figure 4.3 Kayle and Lane in backwoods queer horror A Far Cry From Home (2013).

references of sodomy-obsessed Deliverance (1972) and the grotesquely-mutated family of The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It also pays visual homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s mise-en-scène in the junk shop’s animal skins, rickety furniture, dried bone ornaments, toy skeletons, grotesque Mardi Gras masks
and pickled vegetables and human organs in jars, and now parallels such primal collectables with Christian objets d’art, including crucifixes and figurines of the Virgin Mary. A Far Cry From Home also mirrors Hooper’s film’s narrative trajectory in that, while Lane smokes a joint outside the shop, Kayle dis-appears, leaving the feminine central character to endure extended torture at the hands of the monstrous family, Final Girl-style. The family, consisting of Aunt Idella (Katherine O’Sullivan) and her grown nephews Otis (Benzy) and

Buster (Jerry Murdock) (a squealing, Leatherface-like porcine brute), receive religious guidance from an equally monstrous Preacher (Terry West) who,
quoting from Corinthians, legitimises their crusade against ‘certain debased, debauched humanity’, declaring that ‘sodomites will be sent straight to hell!’.

The Preacher encourages the slaughter of homosexuals, particularly effemi-
nate gay men, whom he claims ‘fuel the fires of Satan!’:

‘Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolators, not adulter-
ors, nor effeminate, not abusers of themselves with mankind,
shall inherit the kingdom of God (Corinthians 6:9–10)’

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Lane’s feminine masculinity provides the main source of hatred for
the family, and, arguably, is the main source of anxiety for both homo
and heterosexuality. Both Otis and Buster make continual references to
it: ‘Do you smell pussy? I smell pussy’, ‘Well, I smell cock!’, before con-
cluding ‘You look like a girl!’ Director and actor Rowe Kelly comments
on his decision to keep Lane’s gender fluid: ‘I kept Lane sexually ambig-
uous. Viewers needed to look at Lane the same way as the rest of the
characters in the film look at him/her – with confusion, curiosity and

apprehension.’23

After being tortured, Lane escapes the family and, fleeing into the woods
nearby, discovers a collection of tents pitched in a clearing, each of which contains the rotting corpses of gay couples. Lane finds Kayle strung up and barely alive, tied between two trees and positioned in a crucifixion-pose,
complete with a crown of thorns and nails driven into his wrists. He stum-
bles into a trap that literally tears his lover in two and orgasmically sprays him with arterial blood and innards. Tracked down by his pursuers, Lane
is eventually captured and forced to repent. As the preacher and the two
brothers prepare to kill him, he reveals wounds in his palms caused by
falling in the woods onto metal spikes, wounds that appear as stigmata
to the religious fanatics. Tricking them by appearing to speak in tongues,

Lane dispatches Buster with his own axe, before being shot and killed with
a crossbow by the Preacher. Lane’s dead body is dragged into the tent cir-
cle. In the film’s final shots, a mixed-race straight couple arrive at the junk shop, much to the annoyance of Aunt Idella.

To conclude, the aforementioned titles in this chapter provide clear
evidence of an ongoing trend in Gaysploitation horror that continues to
develop homosexuality as an explicit element of both narrative and char-
acterisation. Similarly, the final two films, The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror and A Far Cry from Home, also invert traditional survival horror’s dynamic of heteronormativity (as represented in the heterosexual couple and/or the nuclear family) threatened by marginalised, transgressive

‘Others’; here, conservative and oppressive heteronormativity are turned
monstrous. Though the previous titles in this chapter have focused
on the sub-cultural anxieties that arise from the recent acceptance of homosexuality in Western culture (of a de-gaying of gayness), both
these films clearly manifest a very real, violently homophobic reaction

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encouraged by religious fundamentalism and right-wing family values
that is exacerbated by the increasing assimilation of homosexuality into
the mainstream. Rowe Kelly also concludes that the partial acceptance
of homosexuality into the norm of US culture as reported in mainstream
media actually masks the still stagnant hatred that A Far Cry from Home claims to present more truthfully:

I needed to make this film in order to move on and really kick
folks in the face with the horrible reality of what still occurs
among many hate groups in America’s society today. Yes, it’s

ugly as hell. But it’s truth, whether you want to accept it or not. 24

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5

Gay Slasher Horror:

Devil Daddies and Final Boys

Building on the previous chapters’ considerations of Gaysploitation hor-
ror’s ruminations on gay male emasculation anxieties, this chapter com-
prises a case study of a single film: Hellbent (Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, 2004).

Though it can be considered a part of the Gaysploitation sub-genre,

Hellbent is a queer appropriation of the slasher horror formula that looks at the relationship between those penetration anxieties and desired models
of masculinity within gay male culture. The film not only queers the tradi-
tionally construed ‘reactionary’ plot structure and character types from the traditional slasher film in its parodying of gay masculine stereotypes, but also queers Carol Clover’s concept of the Final Girl1, supplanting her here with a Final Boy who establishes an almost complete rejection of femininity. In its presentation of objectified, desirable male figures, it addresses the slippage between identification with and desire for the erotic object that the gay male subject experiences as both pleasurable and traumatic.

The marketing tagline of Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’ (henceforth Etheredge)

Hellbent (2004) as the ‘First Gay Slasher film’ is debatable with previous titles such as the transgender oriented Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and JT Seaton’s short supernatural slasher homage Nightshadows (2004) that could claim to be so. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Etheredge’s film explicitly declares itself as a slasher horror, but it also contains elements of 136

Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
gay parody and its director arguably comes closer to achieving a radicalism similar to that of Stephanie Rothman’s works in exploitation film. Hellbent, produced by Halloween (1978) creators Joe Wolf, Josh Silver and Steven Wolfe2, takes the traditional narrative format of the slasher sub-genre and introduces gay and bisexual characters in a contemporary West Hollywood
locale. The film exploits the conventions and stereotypes of the slasher
sub-genre to produce a text that plays with patriarchally constructed defi-
nitions of gay male subjectivity and consciously offers a social commentary on them. This is achieved via its display of ironic stereotypes and representations of gay male gender and age anxiety. Hellbent also employs the tactics that Pam Cook attributes to Rothman:

in displaying ingenuity and in injecting ideas that do not entirely
go along with hardcore exploitation principles…the director can
also exploit the exploitation’s material in his or her own interest,

and have fun at the expense of the genre. 3

However, the film remains problematic in using the exploitation stereo-
types and cinematic language that it trades in. In presenting an alterna-
tive voice, Hellbent runs the risk of perpetuating the very same oppressive structures. Cook points out that despite Rothman’s ironic presentation:

[her] exploitation films were problematic for feminists in a
number of ways. Not only were the films’ use of sexualised
images of women a bone of contention, the highly charged sub-
ject matter, in particular the relatively graphic depiction of rape
and sexual assault, were viewed by many as pandering to sadis-

tic male fantasies. 4

The same problems arise for Hellbent, for despite its use of parody, its adoption of macho performance and costume can be seen to perpetuate, rather
than challenge, the masculinity of gay male culture.

Unlike the creators of the aforementioned niche Gaysploitation hor-
ror films, the director and producers of Hellbent consider it a ‘mainstream horror’. 5 Etheredge and producer Steven Wolfe wanted to create a film that offered gay audiences an alternative to the low budget ‘gay films’ that the-matise homosexuality as a political issue. Greg Riefsteck’s article on the
film in Fangoria reports that:

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Queer Horror Film and Television

According to Steven Wolfe (producer), gay cinema has gotten
stuck in the rut of studying the lifestyle, never fully embracing
a leap into genre fare without becoming issue related. “What
is lacking right now are gay films that are just entertainment,
and not dealing with any particular issues…We’ve seen enough
coming out stories and suffering people, and it’s time to move
into the next phase and portray characters who are just out
there in everyday normal life like a lot of us are, and don’t have

a problem with being gay. 6

Intentions aside, Hellbent remains a relatively low-budget exploitation horror which playfully presents its stereotypes, as the director admits: ‘we pay homage to the recognisable slasher stereotypes – the bad boy, the sex

addict, the virgin – but they’re more fully formed characters’. 7 Stereotypes, as historically defined in 1922 by Walter Lippmann8, effectively render social groups immediately recognisable and legible to spectators. Further
to this, and in relation to gay stereotypes, Richard Dyer states that:

[they] are associated with invisible social groups e.g. homosex-
uals, which cannot be distinguished from other groups unless
by their own choice […] The role of stereotypes is to make vis-
ible the invisible, so that there is no danger of it creeping up on
us unawares; and to make fast, firm and separate what is in real-
ity fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant value

system cares to admit.9

Hypermasculine Parody in Hellbent

The masculine stereotypes present in Hellbent and Gaysploitation horror in general, whether ironically envisaged or not, not only highlight
the visibility of a macho gay masculinity but also subsequently render in visible femininity and effectively distance the (gay male) spectator from shameful association with it. While Hellbent openly and ironically trades in hypermasculine gay stereotypes, the director is quick to state
that the defining element of the gay male sexuality within his film is what he terms its incidental nature. For Etheredge, gay masculinity is an everyday phenomenon, devoid of political tub-thumping. On Hellbent’s website the director attempts to define ‘gay horror’ and questions that: ‘Most 138

Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
audiences will expect a camp version of a slasher – characters growling
double entendres as they off each other. This image doesn’t describe the
film at all. What makes the film gay are simply its characters and their

object of affection.’10

As with De Coteau’s films, Hellbent’s gay male protagonists are often played by self-described straight male actors.11 In an interview with Fangoria magazine Etheredge explains that:

I didn’t want actors who played ‘gay’. I wanted the sexuality to
feel incidental rather than be their defining trait. I envisioned
the leads to be regular guys – regular, beautiful guys. Having
screaming men is a really hard line to toe. Once you have men
shrieking through the house with their hands up in the air, it’s
going to become something very different. We do have men in
peril who are upset, but it’s not a camp film; it’s very much a

‘man’s’ movie.12

The use of hypermasculine performance as a method of feminine
disavowal is continuous in Hellbent. In its presentation of mascu-
line caricatures, the film offers a fantastical gay masculinity yet these
hypermasculine types are excused via the plot device of a fancy dress

Halloween Carnival. Four of the main protagonists dress as a police-
man, a biker, a cowboy and a harness-wearing ‘leatherboy’ (with sado-
masochistic trappings of bondage apparel). The director’s reference is
the work of 1950s artist Tom of Finland (Finnish illustrator Toukko

Laaksonen), renowned for its display of hypermasculine stereotypes –
the cop, the cowboy, the leather daddy.

Laaksonen’s work involves graphic illustrations of men indulging
in sex with one another. His images present what Micha Ramakers calls

‘hyper-real masculinity’13 in various caricatured forms and often exaggerate bodily features, with genitals and muscles magnified to dispropor-
tionate sizes. Fetishism of clothing is commonplace and is often used to
intensify masculinity via associations with manual labourers, construction
workers, lumberjacks and policemen. Ramakers defends this imagery as
radical claiming that:

[Tom] held up a mirror to gay men in which they could see

themselves as they were not: real men. 14

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Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 5.1 Hellbent’s (2004) 70s cop parody.

Laaksonen is acclaimed by Ramakers to have created a new gay stereo-
type – the macho gay man. Variations on this stereotype are realised in

Etheredge’s film by way of: the policeman (fig. 5.1), a figure with connotations of law enforcement and the control and oppression of others;
the leatherman, an idealised, masculine yet conversely queer image with
an overly muscled, ‘armoured body’ and sadomasochistic clothing; the
cowboy (fig. 5.2), a figure with connotations of isolation and wild sexual potency and the biker, with connotations of rebellion, freedom and the
obvious phallic masculinity of the motorcycle itself.

The leatherman is somewhat ironically envisaged in Etheredge’s film.

He is anything but a representation of the hirsute, mature phallicised male who uses his armoured body-as-weapon that is so regularly represented in

Laaksonen’s works. Instead he becomes a leather boy as represented by the character of Joey (Hank Harris), the youngest, least sexually experienced
and physically inferior of the group. In leather harness, chaps, chains and peaked cap, his thin white body appears as a comedic subversion of the
masculine archetype. Yet Hellbent’s variations of Tom of Finland’s other caricatures remain suitably faithful to their original incarnations: Eddie’s (Dylan Fergus) policeman is a fantastical version of his own, law-abiding,
conservative self (dressing in his father’s seventies police uniform allows him to masquerade as a cop for the evening); Chaz’s (Andrew Levitas)

140

Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

Figure 5.2 Hellbent’s (2004) erotic cowboy.

bisexual cowboy is an unrestrained, indiscriminate sexual pioneer sleep-
ing with anyone he finds attractive; the mysterious biker figure Jake (Bryan Kirkwood) is typically enigmatic and rebellious and is the only character
who does not wear a costume through the Halloween celebrations for his
biker clothing and accoutrements are his everyday wear.

Tom of Finland’s types all parallel gayness with symbols of potency that
are clearly informed by Laaksonen’s wish to present ‘homosexuality [as]

the zenith of masculinity’.15 According to Ramakers, Tom’s work can be seen as a polemic that sought to rectify:

the injustice of their exclusion from the realm of masculinity –
perpetually associated with femininity, he wanted to demon-

strate that, first of all, gay men were men, virile men. 16

Critics have argued, however, that rather than reinstating masculine
potency in the gay male, Laaksonen’s works simply overwrite it with heter-
osexist values. Mark Simpson (1994) argues that, rather than allowing for a new definition of gay masculinity, Tom can be held conversely responsible
for an erasure of ‘gayness’ within mainstream culture:

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Queer Horror Film and Television

[Tom’s] drawings demonstrated a guilt-free (and gay free) world
of spontaneous public sex. What should be the most obviously,
unapologetically, explicitly gay images […] become something
not very gay at all […] it casts Tom […] as a devious pioneer of

a paradoxically non-gay gayness. 17

This resounds strongly with Leo Bersani’s concern in Homos (1995) that the ‘de-gaying of gayness’18 brought about by the adoption of traditional masculine behavioural traits from heterosexual males thus renders homosexuality relatively invisible.

Hellbent’s main narrative premise and source of both its erotic and horrific tension is the invisibility of the film’s main killer and the main characters’ exaggerated macho (gay or bi) sexuality. The inclusion of costumes as either a disguise or exaggeration of the characters’ own traits and desires also works to blur reality, to the point where characters cannot distinguish between it and performance. The film’s West Hollywood Carnival setting
provides the perfect event where both sex and murder can occur unnoticed
in the assumption that everything is a macabre performance. Etheredge
continues:

Monstrous images of violence and gore are as common on
the boulevard as drag queens […] if a killer were hunting the

Halloween Carnival, no one could distinguish between the stage
blood and the real murders. He could kill, unrecognised in his

costume, without attracting much notice from the crowd.19

The tension between reality and illusion also takes in the sexuality of
potential partners. Jake the Biker’s aggressive and elusive masculinity is
read as macho heterosexuality along with that of Joey’s love object Jared

(Baron Rogers), whose jock identity is exaggerated in his own costume,
replete with midriff-revealing American football crop top and traditional
cheek smudge marks. Such stereotyped traits and behaviours confuse both
the characters and the film’s spectators. The film’s general exclusion of stigmatised gay male effeminacy renders some of the characters’ sexualities

(and Devil Daddy’s potentially sexual/violent propositions) unreadable.

They appear ‘unspecific’ or ‘straight-acting’ despite the central protago-
nists’ matter-of-fact gay male status. The erotic appeal of Hellbent lies then in the possibility of seducing a heterosexual, masculine male, an element

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

Figure 5.3 In drag Tobey poses narcissistically in front of his macho alter ego in Hellbent (2004).

that, as we have seen, is of vital importance to the narrative pleasure of the Gaysploitation horror.

In another sense, the liberating environment of the carnival is, for

Etheredge, the arena in which the exaggerated femininity of the drag queen
is associated with monstrosity, failed subjectivity and unsuccessful eroti-
cism. In choosing to attend the festivities dressed in female drag, Tobey

(Matt Phillips) appears to subvert the masculine fancy dress of the carnival but, instead, reveals a world where gay male sexuality is disguised in both hypermasculine and hyper-feminine modes. Hellbent’s drag queen character (fig. 5.3) is used as a means of literalising gay male anxieties about being thought of as a woman. In contrast to October Moon’s drag figure20, Hellbent’s is considerably more sympathetic and complex. Tobey, a male underwear model, is the fourth gay man in the central group of friends
in Hellbent. Objectified as a traditionally masculine spectacle via his muscular physique and handsome face, Tobey drags up for the carnival as a
means of escape. Ironically he takes up the guise of a woman, traditionally objectified within heteronormative culture. In Hellbent, however, woman is no longer the erotic object of spectacle. Tobey does get his ‘night off’, much to his chagrin. The stereotypical narcissism of the male model (and
perhaps, it is implied, of all gay men) eventually gets the better of this

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Queer Horror Film and Television
apparent subversion of masculinity. Against traditional slasher horror con-
ventions, feminine characters are completely ignored in Devil Daddy’s ter-
ror campaign. A feminine victim is, apparently, a less sexy kill. If eroticised death is a metaphor for sex, the victims in Gaysploitation horror must be
masculine.

Separated from his friends, Tobey catches sight of Devil Daddy, disap-
pearing down a nearby alley. Desperate for a sexual partner for the even-
ing, Tobey follows him. ‘I like your costume!’ Tobey exclaims to attract his attention. After turning to glance at Tobey, who remains in full drag, the
enigmatic killer walks away. The annoyed Tobey complains, ‘What? You
got all the candy you need? You superficial faggot!’. Becoming desperate

Tobey continues, ‘I don’t always look like this you know! Here, look!’ and
throws over his driver’s licence at Daddy’s feet. Daddy stops, picks up the card, and realises that Tobey is male and attractive. Tobey continues, ‘Not bad eh? Tobey Wetherton, eyes green, hair brown, sex: male’. With each
revelation, Tobey removes another part of his drag costume including his
false eyelashes and his wig, and eventually pulling down the top half of his sequinned dress to reveal his muscled chest. Upon seeing this, Devil Daddy
makes his way back to Tobey. As his large shadow falls on Tobey’s smaller
body, he reaches down and caresses his face and lips, then smears his lip-
stick across his face. In relief at having finally attracted someone, Tobey closes his eyes and whispers, ‘I’m never doing drag again…’ At which
point Devil Daddy’s hand reaches back out of frame. A medium close-up
of shadows on the wall reveals Tobey’s head flying out of frame as he is
decapitated by Devil Daddy’s large scythe.

The Devil Daddy and Father Figures in

Gaysploitation Horror

Given that the figure of the gay daddy or muscle daddy blatantly references erotic feelings towards the paternal figure, it is worth briefly considering Freud’s Wolf Man case and Leo Bersani’s subsequent reading of it in the

‘Gay Daddy’ chapter of Homos (1995). Freud’s case study in A History of Infantile Neuroses (1918) centres around a dream from his patient’s (who he names the Wolf Man) childhood in which he sees outside his bedroom
window a large tree, in the branches of which sit several white wolves

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
staring at the child. Freud elaborates on this dream as a symbolic reinter-
pretation of the traumatic primal scene. He posits that the child had previously witnessed his parents having penetrative sex a tergo (from behind) and was consequently traumatised by the sight of his father’s penis disappearing momentarily into his mother’s body, which the patient interpreted
initially as him being literally castrated by her. Forming a gendered, sym-
pathetic identification with his father, the patient similarly feared castration himself, and later figures his mother as the source of this fear.

The Wolf Man’s initial perception of his mother’s ‘expression of pleas-
ure’ during intercourse leads him to ‘acknowledge that what was at issue

here was satisfaction’.21 Consequently his desire to receive similar attention from his father is driven by this pursuit of pleasure and represented
in his identification with his mother. Freud continues that ‘the organ
through which he could express his identification with the female and
his passive homosexual attitude towards the male was the anal zone’. This
is signified in the recollection of the dream by the act of the ‘little boy produc[ing] a stool as a sign of his sexual excitement [and a potential
gift replacement for the missing penis…] judged as characteristic of the
sexual constitution already in place.’ Freud concludes that this ‘shows a
greater inclination towards later identification with the female than with
the male’ building on the patient’s confusion between ‘that part of the
woman’s body’ that the patient assumes was ‘receiving the penis […] the

anus’. 22

Throughout the case history, Freud outlines the oscillating identifica-
tion with his patient’s love for and fear of the father as both the victim of and later the exacter of symbolic castration. The subject replaces his paternal identification with a desire for him, that is retrospectively understood as a homosexual love for his father symbolised by a desire to be penetrated by him like his mother. Yet his understanding of the mother’s vagina as a
wound as ‘a condition of intercourse with his father’ supersedes this desire with the fear of castration that the father now symbolises. Freud argues that his patient’s fear of the castrating father, inevitably demands identification with the ‘castrated’ mother and a further association with a receptive, passive femininity. Freud continues that: [the patient’s] fear was also proof, however, that in his later processing of the primal scene he had put himself in his mother’s place and envied her relationship with his father. 23

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However, far from concluding that his patient developed a whole-
hearted identification with the passive mother, Freud recognises a contra-
diction in his relationship with the paternal figure:

The identification of his father with the castrator was signifi-
cant in that it was the source of an intense unconscious hostility
towards him – which went as far as wishing him dead – as well
as of the guilt he felt in response to this […] What was remark-
able was that in him a counter-current existed […] according
to which his father was in fact the castrated figure, and as such
demanded his sympathy. In the end two contradictory currents
existed alongside one another, one of which abhorred the very
idea of castration, while the other was prepared to accept it,

consoling itself with femaleness as a substitute. 24

Thus the father figure in the Wolf Man case exists simultaneously as both
oppressor and victim. For Freud, the case study provides a clear study of neu-rotically conflicted male homosexuality whereby the subject ‘expresses a feminine tenderness, a readiness to renounce manliness if in return one can be

loved as a woman’.25 He continues that ‘from the time of the dream onwards he was unconsciously homosexual; during his neurosis he was at the level of cannibalism’. 26 The transformation of the Wolf Man’s desire for the father into a fear of him, ‘was a rejection of the wish for sexual satisfaction from [him]’.

Freud concludes that the wolf imagery in the dream, ‘was an expression of
that fear, now repressed desire, “being gobbled up by the wolf” – was simply the reversal – a regressive one, as we shall hear – of the wish for coitus with the father, that is for satisfaction such as his mother had experienced’.27

In the ‘Gay Daddy’ chapter of Homos, Leo Bersani reconfigures Freud’s reading. The Wolf Man’s repressed sexual desire for his father and its displacements by the threats of castration is reconsidered as a:

genealogy of gay love [whereby] the appeal of the muscular,
mature male figure – the Gay Daddy is complexly tied up with
both the frisson of masochistic desire for the punishing, castrat-
ing male-father-figure and remarkably tender paternal feelings

for Freud’s dreaded castrating father.28

Bersani effectively maps the castration anxieties of the primal scene onto
the anally penetrative sex act between gay men, focusing on the traumatic

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
loss of the self in the penetrative act of sexual union. Countering the terror of physical merging in penetrative sex, the receptive partner’s erect penis is instead offered as a token of protection:

We might imagine that a man being fucked is generously offer-
ing the sight of his own penis as a gift or replacement for what
is temporarily being ‘lost’ inside him – an offering, not made
in order to calm his partner’s fears of castration but rather as
the gratuitous and therefore even lovelier protectiveness that
all human beings need when they take the risk of merging
with another, of risking their own boundaries for the sake of

self-dissolving extensions. 29

But despite his decidedly emotive re-reading, Bersani points out that Freud has a very different view of such a union:

For Freud, that decidedly non-gay-daddy, nothing would block
the theoretical confirmation of murderous relations among
men – based on the still deeper need to keep the sexes distinct

and to warn that castration is the precondition of femininity.30

Father figures are present throughout queer horror texts31 and are represented as powerful, mature men. These characters are typed as gay daddies
by virtue of their age, their responsibilities (they financially support and house their younger partners) and their greater bodily girth and hirsute-ness. Hellbent’s monstrous variation of the gay daddy becomes horrifically imbued with the threat of castration. At one point, a character comments
fittingly that he is a ‘walking hard-on’. In the words of Chaz, he is a ‘Devil Daddy’ (fig. 5.4), a phallic monster who carries out symbolic castration by decapitating his victims with a rusty scythe. Devil Daddy’s weapon of
choice is itself another symbol of the anxiety in regard to ageing that runs throughout Gaysploitation horror. The scythe reference recalls that carried by the Greek mythological figure of ‘Chronus’ (or Chronos, meaning
time) who is thought to further influence visual incarnations of the figures of Old Father Time and the skeletal representations of the Grim Reaper
from medieval carvings. ‘Chronus’, father of Zeus, is a Titan proto-God
and is himself the personification of time. He is often depicted carrying

a sickle or a scythe, given to him by his mother Gaia.32 Together, they are associated with the harvest and reaping, the end of the growing season and, 147

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 5.4 Devil Daddy in Hellbent (2004).

by extension, the progress of time and death. Chronus’ castrating scythe
and his devouring of his own children represents the threat of time and of
death itself.

Hellbent’s characters not only demonstrate a clear erotic (dis)identification with the Devil Daddy figure, as a castrating figure of fear, but also erotically objectify him because of the very same pleasurable frisson that same threat affords them in being rendered passive. Devil Daddy’s
threatening and overpowering musculature and his phallic extensions

(devil horns in his helmet/head gear and his oversized scythe) provide
fetishistic appeal for the voyeuristic male characters, who check him out
before being mortally ‘checked out’ and killed themselves. Indeed the
enigmatic Devil Daddy figure becomes a memento mori for promiscu-
ous gay male cruisers, the scythe becoming at once an attractive phallic
symbol that threatens castration as well as a reminder of one’s own mor-
tality. The moralistic elements of the slasher horror are reconfirmed in

Hellbent: sex with strangers is dangerous. The maturity of Devil Daddy suggests a longer (and therefore more infectious) sexual history and

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
death via the transmission of disease. Etheredge confirms Devil Daddy’s
status as erotic threat:

He [the killer] should not look like the typical serial killer.

I wanted there to be that confusion, where everyone is reacting
to him as this hunky guy, someone a gay man would want to

know at this carnival. We wanted him to be very sexy. 33

Further still, erotically coding the villain in such a way, especially within an anonymous gay cruising narrative, perhaps also draws on gay male
anxieties surrounding the dangers of anonymous sexual encounters, in
terms of being physically attacked or contracting sexually transmitted
diseases.

The monster’s paternal status makes him both a figure of gay desire
and a figure of oppression – one capable of inflicting trauma upon the gay
male subject. The surviving central character Eddie has the most obvious
connection and possible fixation with his (dead) father. Alongside this
paternal loss Eddie is impaired both sexually (references to Eddie’s shy-
ness in picking up men are numerous) and physically (having lost one
eye in an accident, now wearing a glass prosthetic, Eddie is confined to
desk duties at work). He re-masculinises himself in two ways: by identifi-
cation with the father (in dressing up ‘as daddy’ in his father’s old police uniform), and by proving himself successful as a sexually potent man
and as an arbiter of the law as a cop. This re-empowerment is never more
phallically realised than in Eddie’s use of his father’s gun (previously symbolically concealed in his bedroom closet) to defend his male lover from
the killer by shooting the Devil Daddy in the film’s dénouement. Yet any
erotic desire between Devil Daddy and Eddie is met, in true Freudian
style, with the violence that separates the two subjects, just as Bersani
anticipates:

a terrifying scenario of the relation between father and son as
one in which the two are permanently separated, polarized, by
a threat of violence that forces the repression of love is then par-
tially rewritten as an account of a gentler exchange between the
two, one in which the son’s power is improvised as a response
to the vulnerability inherent in the very position and exercise

of power.34

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Prior to his final confrontation with Devil Daddy, Eddie initiates sexual
intercourse with Jake and is interrupted by the castrating father figure.

Eddie’s despatch of this punitive father figure would be a typical narrative trope of the more traditional family horror or slasher film were it not for the deliberate and obvious erotic coding of Devil Daddy as both oppressive figure and an object of erotic desire. The film’s sado-masochistic , flip-flopping dénouement (in which Eddie and Jake indulge in foreplay using Eddie’s
father’s handcuffs, whilst the two continually interchange between being
physically on top and underneath) moves between Devil Daddy as sadistic
dominator and Eddie as initially masochistic victim (handcuffed to the bed
during foreplay with Jake) and later Eddie as sadistic executioner (after
many scenes of tantalising foreplay with Jake, Eddie’s shooting of Devil

Daddy becomes symbolically ejaculatory). Etheredge plays with erotic
object confusion during the final sequence in which Eddie shoots the killer.

Devil Daddy, having removed Eddie’s glass eye with his tongue renders his
symbolic and literally ‘broken’ gaze obvious (his visual impairment pre-
vents him from aiming successfully and also symbolises Eddie’s failure to
see others’ attraction to him). Having trouble in aiming at his attacker, who uses Jake as a hostage, and in fear of shooting his lover, Eddie is encouraged by Jake who pleads for Eddie to aim at him, hoping that his poor aim
will indirectly hit their assailant, which it does. Thus, in Hellbent’s climax, both Freud’s and Bersani’s readings of the Wolf Man are represented. The eroticism between Eddie and Devil Daddy is met in the violent despatch of
the father figure and the transfer of phallic power takes place from father to son. But Bersani’s gentler exchange of power can be seen as depicted
between Eddie and Jake, where the roles of hero and victim are exchanged
between the two men between the sheets.

Daddy’s Final Boy

Etheredge deliberately constructs Eddie as a Final Boy who is positioned
both in relation to the film’s mature father figures but also as a counterpart to Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl35, the (often) surviving female victim/protagonist of the slasher horror sub-genre. Etheredge continues that ‘Eddie is my

‘Final Girl character…He’s a guy from a police family who is a little uptight, but has a fascination with the bad boys on the Strip’.36 As her main points 150

Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
of reference, Clover uses the source films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Friday the 13th (1981) and Halloween (1978). For Clover, it is the Final Girl who radically charges the slasher horror genre. It is via Clover’s paralleling of the Final Girl with the killer/monster figure, that traditionally gendered binaries are challenged within the slasher sub-genre. As Clover

puts it: ‘she is abject terror personified’37 who out-survives her female side-kicks and male counterparts long enough either to be rescued by outside
forces (often male) or to dispatch the killer/monster by empowering her-
self (often phallically). The Final Girl in slasher horror is often characterised by her androgyny (she is often tomboyish, or given gender-unspecific
names, such as Laurie ( Halloween), Marti, Hell Night (1981)), Sidney ( Scream (1996)) and she is extremely resourceful, often defending herself with makeshift/domesticated weapons). More vigilant and wary than her
peers, she is often ‘sexually reluctant’ and, at times, she identifies with boys over her female friends. As Clover states, some of these very traits provide the reason for the Final Girl’s prolonged survival:

The Final Girl is boyish […] Just as the killer is not fully mas-
culine, she is not fully feminine – not, in any case, feminine in
the ways of her friends. [Her gender] is likewise compromised
from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sex-
ual reluctance, her apartness from other girls, sometimes her

name. 38

The Final Girl figure diffuses stereotypical gender traits in her possession of masculine characteristics, most notably the active investigating gaze
which clearly defines her ‘unfemininity’:

The active investigating gaze, normally reserved for males and
punished in females when they assume it themselves; tenta-
tively at first and then aggressively, the Final Girl looks for the

killer.39

In her wider discussion of the horror film’s audience demographics, Clover
acknowledges that a large proportion of slasher horror fans are adolescent
males, whose sexuality is rarely referenced. Questioning their investment
in the Final Girl, who is often figured as the horror film’s sole source of identification, she concludes that the male spectator resolves the problem

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of feminine identification via both a re-gendering of the Final Girl figure and a temporary transgendering via the audiences’ identification with her. 40 If the male spectator initially assumes the monster/killer’s point of view in the slasher films’ opening sequences, the trajectory of both the narrative and the eventual shift of point of view from monster/killer to Final Girl marks a transgendered shift in allegiance: ‘our closeness to him wanes as our closeness to the Final Girl waxes – a shift underwritten by story line as well as a camera position.’41

Clover recognises both the heterosexual, adolescent male’s identifica-
tion with the monster/killer and the homoerotic implications of his trans-
gendered identification with the Final Girl:

She is feminine enough to act out in a gratifying way, a way
unapproved by adult male, the terrors and masochistic pleas-
ures of the underlying fantasy but not so feminine as to disturb
the structures of male competence and sexuality. [She] is a male
surrogate in things Oedipal, a homo-erotic stand-in, the audi-
ence incorporate; to the extent she means ‘girl’ at all, it is only

for the purposes of signifying male lack.42

As she points out, the Final Girl is also transgendered in surviving ‘agon-izing trials’ (typically the role of the female victim or damsel who is later rescued by outside forces) but also in saving herself by ‘virtually or actually destroy[ing] the antagonist’. Clover concludes:

Abject terror may still be gendered feminine, but […] to
represent the hero as anatomically female would seem to
suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of hero-
ism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly gendered
masculine […]

[…] the combination masculine female prevails over the
combination feminine male [this] would seem to suggest that is
it not masculinity per se that is being privileged, but masculin-
ity in conjunction with a female body – masculinity in conjunc-

tion with femininity. 43

The gay male spectator’s identification with the Final Girl may be, there-
fore, not so different from that experienced by the straight male spectator.

He too identifies with the Final Girl because she is, like himself, associated 152

Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
with cross-gender identification in sharing the same love object. In slasher horror films from the 1970s and 80s, the gay male spectator connects with
the powerful, strong female figure in a pleasurable and empowering iden-
tification which also reminds him of his perpetual parallel with femininity by heteronormative culture. The trajectory of identification also stimulates the anxiety or shame that the gay male may experience in this conflation with femininity, and the pleasures gained in the film’s final masculinising re-empowerment, which effectively prizes (as Clover points out) the masculine female over the feminine male.

Klaus Rieser (2001) argues that slasher horror eventually reinstates
heterosexist inscriptions via the supposedly radical Final Girl figure.

According to Rieser, male identification with the Final Girl is not quite as simplistic:

the male spectator does neither straightforwardly nor entirely
positively identify with the female victim-hero and thus does
not necessarily embrace an antipatriarchal and/or passive

position. 44

For Rieser, the Final Girl is a ‘masculinised rejuvenator of the patriarchal order’45 and he concludes that slasher horror centres around the ‘illegitimate (con)fusion’ of gendered forms and identification structures. In its
flaunting of feminised men and masculinised women, cross-gender identi-
fication and the monster ‘as spectator’, the typical slasher horror’s effectiveness lies in its ability to initially mark out ‘improper fusions’, in Othering them and expelling them outward from the proper and stable symbolic
system of subjectivity. Rieser summarises that the slasher horror is less
transgressive than Clover suggests: ‘difference from hegemony (queerness)

is othered while heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it maintains are reinstated’.46

Rieser’s article raises a valuable point in the study of slasher horror and one that is pertinent to the understanding of gay male identification with

Final Girls in slasher horror as simultaneously subversive and reaction-
ary. The pleasures of transgender identification for the gay male spectator of traditional slasher horror are similar to those afforded to the heterosexual male spectator, in that they are remasculinising. Rieser states that, rather than valorising difference, the slasher horror annihilates it instead.

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Despite the sub-genre’s obvious appeal to both women and gay men by
way of identification and in its presentation of difference and queer sexu-
ality, slasher horrors often castigate ‘non-hegemonic’ masculinity and
expel non-normative femininity via their narrative closure. For Rieser, the slasher film ultimately serves to reinforce heterosexual and homophobic
masculinity.

Rieser posits that the Final Girl’s successful fight over the monster,
which appears to allow her to emerge victorious as woman into the sym-
bolic, only serves to further support patriarchally defined and gendered
order. Where Clover argues that the Final Girl uses her masculinity to overcome the monster, Rieser claims that, after her struggle with the (queer)

monster, she emerges into the symbolic as woman:

It almost seems as though they [the Final Girl and the Monster]

are competing for clarification, for an exit into the sym-
bolic from the polymorphous and confused underground of

non-hegemonic gender spaces.47

Ultimately, Rieser suggests that (straight) masculine subjectivities are not so much challenged by the shifting identifications within slasher horror
as re-confirmed via an ‘Othered’ and eventual destruction of difference.

Rieser’s straight male spectator is pleased to destroy the monster and to
eschew any threat that the Final Girl may pose to his masculinity by mak-
ing her ‘his girl’. With this in mind, what restorative masculinity is there for the gay male viewer of the slasher horror? The gay male spectator is
identified by Rieser, but only in terms of his pleasure in masochistic identification either with (queer) monster or Final Girl. There is no develop-
ment of the problematic that occurs in Rieser’s formulation of the slasher
horror narrative’s resolution whereby Final Girl figures are usually allowed to survive and emerge as ideologically condoned feminine women. Upon her re-feminisation, what happens to the identifying gay male spectator?

Carrying on from where he fails to conclude, the only option Rieser leaves
for the gay male subject is to identify with either the (dead or disavowed) monster or with the Final Girl as woman. Further still, Rieser does not
discuss tensions that may occur earlier in the slasher horror’s formulaic
narrative, when the gay male subject may experience (un)pleasure in his
imposed temporary identification with the Final Girl also, very much the

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
same as the assumed straight male spectator does. Following Clover’s argu-
ment, the gay male spectator’s identification with passive female characters on screen may not imply an acceptance of his own passivity; by contrast it
may offer a chance for a distancing and re-masculinisation of his own gay
male subjectivity. However, following Rieser’s line of thinking (given the
assumed destruction of queer monster as a potential identification point),
if the gay male spectator disavows any shameful associations with feminine
passivity via the traditional slasher’s narrative denouement, when feminin-
ity is restored to the Final Girl figure, he must either assume heterosexual identification with the straight male spectator, or ‘become woman’. The
solution to this dilemma may lie in an analysis of Hellbent, which dispenses completely with any implied ‘unpleasantries’ involved in identifying with
the Final Girl, ultimately replacing her with a gay male stand-in, the Final Boy, who is equally gender conflicted and masculinised accordingly.

Rieser challenges Clover on her description of the Final Girl’s struggle
as one that centres upon gender difference and fluidity, instead claiming
that the Final Girl’s symbolic trajectory is more akin to the development of an adolescent girl into womanhood/motherhood:

In contrast to Clover, I would also claim that the Final Girl isn’t
really all that masculine. It is more precise to state that she is
lacking in traditional femininity […] Alternatively […] the flu-
idity assigned to her is not so much one between masculine and

feminine as between girlhood and full-fledged motherhood. 48

As in Rieser’s reconfiguration of Clover’s Final Girls ‘becoming women’, the Final Boy’s journey is an allegory of burgeoning sexual development and
confidence, and is in effect ‘becoming masculine’, further still becoming

‘more of a man’. He moves from a shy, closeted, dependent and inexperi-
enced feminised youth into a fully-fledged, independent, masculine (but
still stereotyped) gay man. In Gaysploitation horror, there is no subversion of the symbolism of the Final Girl, simply an excising and replacement of
it. Final Boys do not use their femininity to evade or destroy the killer; they are re-empowered by masculinity by overcoming their lack, associated with
shameful feminine passivity. The Final Girl provides a queer access point in her gendered androgyny for the gay male spectator and a strong source for
identification with powerful femininity. In Hellbent, the pleasure offered in 155

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the gay male subject’s disavowal of femininity becomes extra-diegetic in
the displacement of the Final Girl with the Final Boy from the sub-genre.

Like the Final Girl, Etheredge’s Final Boy, Eddie, is one of the least sex-
ually experienced and most conservative of Hellbent’s protagonists. At several points in the narrative, Eddie chastises Chaz, an openly bisexual and
promiscuous friend, for his sexual voracity, and later warns off Tommy, a
younger, impressionable friend, against exposing too much naked flesh in
his sado-masochistic costume, suggesting he should wear jeans under his
bottom-less chaps. Whereas Clover’s Final Girl is a tomboy, Eddie is a ‘sissy’

in several respects. He fails to become a recognised police officer and is relegated to an administrative post while his sister enjoys police officer status.

He Oedipally enshrines his dead police hero father, keeping his belongings
and photographs in a box in his bedroom closet. This is paralleled with a
similar secreted reverence for gay masculine stereotypes, for concealed on
the inside of the same bedroom closet hangs a Tom of Finland-style poster of a 50s male biker (suggesting a gay shame). Eddie’s fetishising of dangerous masculinity is practised in secret, despite being shamefully discovered and ridiculed by his sister. When he covertly prints mug-shots of attractive male criminals at work, his sister denounces his behaviour as perverse and
childish. Eddie’s adolescent worship of such ‘bad boys’ is eventually real-
ised in his cruising of Jake, a Brando-style biker whom he shyly attempts
to flirt with while masquerading as a policeman on the beat, dressed in
his father’s uniform. Given their initial gender differences, it would seem logical that the Final Boy would use his femininity in order to survive but, instead, like the Final Girl, he too employs objects coded as masculine. In order to survive and attain a successful male subjectivity (both in heterosexist and gay male terms), the Final Boy must masculinise himself.

The Final Boy’s ‘Broken Gaze’

In contrast with the Final Girl, who is characterised as unfeminine via her possession of the investigating/voyeuristic gaze, Eddie is initially rendered

‘un-masculine’ by his failure to master and possess it. This is literalised in his glass eye, which at once represents vulnerability, blindness and symbolic castration. His glass eye, which in turn gives the impression of Eddie’s

‘normal’ appearance and vision, marks out and yet masks his ‘difference’

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

Figure 5.5 Eddie’s glass eye in Hellbent (2004).

and his lack, emphasising Eddie’s wish to fit in. Yet, in the very absence
of a soft, fleshy eyeball, being replaced by a glass prosthetic, Eddie arguably possesses a less vulnerable gaze (fig. 5.5). The very fact that Eddie has only lost one eye, that he possesses both real and false eyes, enables him to access both a voyeuristic and masochistic gaze, those which Carol J. Clover terms as ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ gazes.

Clover rightly points out horror cinema’s narrative and formal obses-
sion with eyes that include:

problems of vision – seeing too little (to the point of blindness)

or seeing too much (to the point of insanity) […] the opening
eye of horror also announces concern ‘with the way in which we
see ourselves and others and the consequences that often attend
our usual manner of perception.’ Horror cinema privileges eyes

because […] it is about eyes. 49

In her analysis of Peeping Tom (1960), Clover points out that the eye of horror works two ways: it may ‘penetrate, but it is also penetrated’.50 Via a discussion of Laura Mulvey’s seminal article, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), and her construction of the binary opposition of male subject as possessor of the gaze and the perpetuation of woman as object
before the camera ‘to-be-looked-at’, Clover defines two particular gazes

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specific to slasher horror ( Peeping Tom, along with Psycho, are set out as its central antecedents). The assaultive gaze is the sadistic, voyeuristic gaze that ‘hurts’ objects before the camera and those looking onto the violent
events depicted by it:

This is the narrative’s present and causal gaze, its ‘doing gaze’.

It is also, of course, a predatory, assaultive gaze – in the story’s

own terms, a phallic gaze. 51

Conversely the reactive gaze is:

The second gaze – the horrified gaze of the victim, or more
completely, one’s gaze at surrogates for one’s own past victim-

ized self – I shall for want of a better term call ‘reactive’.52

The assaultive, active gaze belongs to patriarchy, and the reactive gaze to the object of spectacle, feminine and vulnerable. Clover later points out the psychologically symbolic structures attached to the respective gazes:

[The] alternation between assaultive and reactive gazes is com-
monly taken to suggest the interdependence of sadistic and
masochistic impulses […] assaultive gazing is associated with
those who hold the camera and reactive gazing with those who
stare at the screen after the fact.

Clover parallels her two gazes with Mulvey’s own formulation of the ways
in which male centred gazing in cinema looks at women:

A sadistic voyeuristic look, [which is paralleled with assaultive
gazing] whereby the gazer salves his unpleasure at female lack
by seeing the woman punished, and a fetishistic-scopophilic
look [which is paralleled with reactive gazing], whereby the
gazer salves his unpleasure by fetishising the female body in

whole or part. 53

Clover suggests, however, that Mulvey overlooks the masochism inherent

in what she terms passive ‘fetishistic scopophilia’. 54 She goes on to reference David N. Rodowick’s (1986) reading of Mulvey who defines:

fetishistic scopophilia as an overvaluation of the object, a point
which Freud would support. But he would also add that this

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys
phenomenon is one of the fundamental sources of authority

defined as passive submission to the object: in sum masochism. 55

Final Girls (and Boys for that matter) are also arguably in possession of
both gazes – being both avenger and victim. Eddie’s bin-ocular viewing
offers a clear symbolism of his possession of both gazes; as a variation on the Final Girl, he is generically predisposed to possess both. Firstly, he has an active investigating voyeuristic gaze (for example in masochistically
witnessing his friends’ deaths, discovering of their bodies both dead and in flagrante delicto, in his chastising of their promiscuity, and in his eventual destruction of Devil Daddy). Secondly, his possession of a reactive gaze is demonstrated in becoming the passive, ‘to-be-looked-at’ erotic male as fetishised cop both diegetically and extra-diegetically for the film’s voyeuristic spectators while his impaired vision also indicates his ‘lack’.

As Final Boy, Eddie suffers the greatest and prolonged trauma in

Hellbent, clearly displayed via the film’s representation of his protracted assault at the hands of Devil Daddy via subjective (reactive) camera. Yet his fetishising and objectifying of Jake, his secreting and eroticising of attractive criminal mug shots at work and his capacity for fetishistic scopophilic looking clearly indicate an active (yet, for Eddie, shameful) voyeurism. The masochism that Clover declares as inherent in such a gaze is literalised in Eddie’s vulnerability, his eye having already been destroyed and his vision impaired, and his fetishistic obsession with ‘bad boys’ suggesting that he

(unconsciously or willingly) seeks to be ‘hurt’. Eddie’s replacement eye

(as a seemingly invulnerable glass orb), however symbolically masculine,
remains an illusory cover to hide Eddie’s true lack, his broken gaze and his partial blindness. Hellbent’s narrative, if anything, represents Eddie’s initial failure to possess the voyeuristic gaze, the displeasure this causes him and his attempts to master and cover up his lack as well as his homosexuality, in order to ‘appear normal’ (much like Carrie in De Palma’s film). Eddie’s eye is as false as his seventies ‘cop uniform’, which affords an eroticised illusion of active, punitive surveillance.

Clover states that ‘assaultive gazing never prevails and mean lookers do

not survive as such (if at all)’56, though in this film, Devil Daddy is shown to survive. The gaze that prevails in Hellbent is the masochistic, reactive look. In one scene, Eddie is leafleting a local tattoo parlour in the run up to 159

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the carnival, and follows Jake inside. He watches him being tattooed in the parlour’s mirrors, through which Jake’s body is broken by the tight framing and by the mirrors’ reflections and is also rendered passive and maso-
chistic in the act of being tattooed. Eddie’s gaze is suddenly met by Jake’s (assaultive gaze), upon which he reacts nervously, drops his leaflets and
clumsily leaves the store. Eddie’s initially fetishizing gaze is confronted and, instead, he finds himself fetishized; as he returns to the object of spectacle, his impaired gaze is rendered vulnerable in the face of Jake’s more ‘authentic’ masculinity. Eddie’s failure to ‘see’, his symbolic blindness, impedes his sexual gratification. He fails to see when people find him attractive,
when Jake returns his interest and when his friends have been killed and
yet, ironically, it also eventually saves him from Devil Daddy. The film’s
final confrontation involves a prolonged scene in which Devil Daddy, hav-
ing incapacitated Jake, corners Eddie, and removes Eddie’s appearance of
normality (his glass eye) with his tongue, making clear his blindness in a
symbolic castration. Eddie’s lack of sight comes to represent his symbolic
lack of ‘I’, his failure to possess a sense of self and his status as a failed (masculine) subject within patriarchy, but his possession of a glass eye also helps operate as an object of phallic imposture. Thanks to his ‘normalising’

glass eye prosthetic, Eddie covers over his lack: his wounded eye socket,
his impaired vision, his unattractiveness as a result of this disfigurement and his failure to possess an apparently ‘normative’ masculinity. Despite

Eddie’s best attempts at ‘seeming to’ possess the assaultive gaze in his utilisation of masculine ‘tools’ (knives and guns) to protect himself and Jake from the Devil Daddy in the film’s final confrontation, he eventually shoots and kills his assailant, not through careful aim, but by aiming squarely
at Jake – Devil Daddy’s hostage. Eddie’s impaired vision and consequent
lack of depth perception (he is symbolically superficial in this sense being unable to read beneath the surface or comprehend more than outward
appearance and in his failure to ‘cruise’) causes his poor aim. Rather than encouraging him to use his good eye to attempt a better shot at his captor, Jake recognises his partner’s bent vision and implores Eddie to aim at himself, crying out: ‘Shoot me!’ perhaps revealing Jake’s desire for masochis-
tic wish-fulfilment. One could argue that in his masochistic identification with Jake as victim, who tells Eddie to ‘do the right thing’ and accept his

‘broken gaze’, Eddie fails to master the active, assaultive gaze.

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

In Hellbent, tables appear to be turned when Jake’s biker figure (previously coded as more traditionally masculine than Eddie) is incapaci-
tated by Devil Daddy and becomes dependent on Eddie for survival; in short, he becomes the ‘damsel in distress’ to Eddie’s newfound hero figure. Having denied him in their foreplay, Jake finally allows Eddie to kiss him in reward for his success; thus Jake is feminised and Eddie becomes
the (albeit symbolically wounded) heroic male. Traditional gender ste-
reotypes, at this point at least, appear to remain in operation. Hellbent’s sting is the failed dispatch of the castrating Devil Daddy who, in the final frame, is seen alive and still in full possession of Eddie’s glass eye (with its illusion of phallic empowerment) between his orally castrating and
cannibalising teeth.

If Eddie, as Final Boy, possesses any gaze at all by the denouement,
it appears to be one that is reactive, masochistic and culturally gendered
as feminine. Upon close inspection, what appears to be a castration and
re-assimilation of the phallus (Eddie’s eye) into the ‘eye of the beholder’

by the hyper-patriarchal Devil Daddy, proves to be yet another illusory
transaction. Unlike many other monster/killers of slasher horrors, Devil

Daddy does not possess an assaultive (or indeed a reactive) gaze. There is
little or no subjective camera or ‘killer eye’ in Hellbent and Devil Daddy fails to recognise the true masculinity of Tobey in drag; as Tobey states in the film he is, like Eddie, ‘a superficial faggot’. Whether the gay male spectator identifies with Devil Daddy as queer killer or Eddie as Final Boy (as is expected), he identifies with a drive for phallic empowerment that remains
fruitless. In the first instance, identification with Devil Daddy is hampered by the lack of subjective camera shots and, in the latter, the gay male spectator may initially experience a shameful identification with Eddie’s femi-
ninity and via an investment with his plight for masculine survival the gay male spectator finds a way of disavowing this association with feminine
passivity. Consequently, in identifying with Eddie’s acceptance of his ‘difference’ in revealing his wound to Jake, the gay male spectator is simul-
taneously rendered active in Eddie’s passivity as both wounded victim

(feminine) and rescuing hero (masculine). Eddie’s temporary ‘coming out’,
in displaying his ‘difference’ and ‘lack’ to his lover Jake, makes him passive (via this receptive wound) yet in his embrace of an eye-patch, upon which

Jake comments ‘You look like a pirate’, simultaneously re-casts Eddie as

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another stereotyped, active masculine bad boy. It remains to be seen, how-
ever, whether this new costume is another means of ‘covering up’ Eddie’s superficiality and feminine ‘lack’.

Sleeping with the Enemy?

It remains clear then that the central tenet of Gaysploitation horror is the valorisation of heterosexually coded macho masculinity. In addition, the
sub-genre opts to revere masculine femininity over feminine masculinity,
whether in the form of straight-acting performance, in the perpetuation of
straight male conversion fantasies, or the celebration of active, penetrating masculinity. Gay writer John Rechy has argued that the performance of
machismo achieves the same purpose as female impersonation: ‘the queen
protects herself by dressing in women’s clothes and the bodybuilder pro-

tects himself in muscles – so called men’s clothes’. 57 Does the conflation of symbols of heterosexual masculinity with the promiscuity (and implied
feminine masochism) of homosexual desire truly achieve a destabilisation
of the traditional image of masculinity? Gaysploitation horror, as typified in Hellbent, may well reverse the gender of its victims, but it effectively demonstrates the same disavowal of femininity that many slasher horrors
are accused of, and even more so in the gender reversal of the slasher films’

traditionally surviving character, the Final Girl who, in Hellbent, becomes a Final Boy. Both excessive femininity (here represented by gay male effeminacy, drag) and masculinity visualise the gay male horror spectator’s oscillation between not-masculine and not-feminine. This is further confused
by the eroticised multiplication of death scenes that objectify male victims in Gaysploitation horror, a move away from the overwhelming number of
women victims in typical slasher horror with which they are closely affili-
ated. The death scenes in Gaysploitation horror are unlike those shown in
traditional slashers, as Clover states of typical slashers:

The death of a male is nearly always swift; even if the victim
grasps what is happening to him, he has no time to react or
register terror. He is dispatched and the camera moves on. The
death of the male is moreover more likely than the death of the
female to be viewed from a distance, or viewed only dimly […]

or, indeed, to happen off-screen and not be viewed at all.58

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Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

But in Gaysploitation horror, male slaughter supplants the eroticised
female death, relegating the female victim off-screen or implicit. The spectacle of killing men is largely presented as an erotic penetration fantasy, with the victim’s macho masculinity both valorised and threatened. One
could be mistaken for reading the extinguishing of oppressive, heterosex-
ist machismo as radical; however, if the ‘death’ of machismo exists within

Gaysploitation horror this does not necessarily symbolise its destruction.

The equation of ‘killing with fucking’59 would suggest that the murdering of machismo instead symbolises rather more of an erotic fantasy, of bedding
and/or becoming macho men. Unlike the gay male spectator’s parodic valorisation of Carrie’s powerfully abject femininity (as discussed in chapter
two), the masculine drag of Hellbent does not function as a parody alone, but also operates to bring the gay male spectator closer to the erotic object with which he erotically (dis)identifies. In his over identification with heterosexist machismo, straight-acting stereotypes and traditional masculinity,
the gay male spectator’s desire for the erotic masculine object also becomes a desire to be it, via a symbolic (and sometimes literal) incorporation of the heterosexual male love object. 60 For the most part, in Gaysploitation Horror film and television, assimilation occurs at surface level only (in
wearing the clothes and behavioural traits of heterosexist machismo), or
in conversion fantasies (in bedding straight men). Gaysploitation horror
trades in the erotic tease of macho performance, whereby the viewer can

(dis)identify with ‘straight acting’ gay masculinity and they can enjoy the illusion of sleeping with the enemy and the (similarly illusory) promise of accessing phallic potency that it symbolises. 61 Conversely, via identification with the same men as victims on screen, the gay male spectator can
also masochistically enjoy being penetrated (killed) by phallic males, in a narcissistic fantasy of symbolically becoming, fucking and being fucked by
an idealised masculinity.

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6

Pride and Shame:

Queer Horror Appropriation

The horror genre’s penchant for remakes, sequels, adaptations, appropria-
tions and intertextual references clearly provides pleasures for its fans and in particular appeals to the queer spectator. Yet, as I have already set out in
chapters 2 and 3 in relation to queer Carrie appropriation, while the ‘performative’ appropriation of gender and genre allows for self-assertion that draws attention to the constructed-ness of mainstream generic and heteronormative gender forms; it can also operate as a form of self-divestiture.

The jouissance implied in this self-loss is not only afforded to the subject via masochistic identification but also via an immersion in the active pursuit of appropriation, performance, adaptation and generic layering.

Writing about the ‘vampiric’ or parasitic nature of adaptation and
appropriation, Linda Hutcheon (2006) suggests that the pleasures of nar-
rative repetition and re-presentation lie in the fact that, ‘we retell and show again and interact anew with stories over and over [and] in the process they change with each repetition and yet they are recognizably the same’. 1 This recognisable different-but-sameness is resonant with what Leo Bersani
calls the homogeneity of homo-ness in same sex desire, understood by
him as, ‘a desire for the same, from a perspective of a self already identified as different from itself’.2 Queer horror’s compulsion to repeat Gothic 164

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation
aesthetics and excessive gender performance reveals a desire to play textual

‘dress up’. Indeed, there is much ‘covering up’ here, not only in the sense of the sub-genre’s presentation of coy partial nudity (particularly in the case of David DeCoteau’s works), but also in the masking of the shame associated with homosexuality.

Hutcheon’s vampiric or parasitic metaphor of adaptation echoes Richard

Dyer’s consideration of the self-loathing bloodsucker as a metaphor for
homosexual guilt. The vampiric ‘borrowing’ of other texts, of other genres
and styles and of gender, are certainly celebratory but are also imbued with a sense of shame and an emphasis on an attraction-repulsion binary that is
at the heart of queer horror. Dyer has suggested that much of the feel of the apologia for homosexuality, particularly in Gothic horror literature regardless of whether it is written by gay or straight writers, has been a mix of distaste for homosexuality with a recognition that it cannot be resisted and that the gay male subject confesses: ‘I don’t know why I want to do these
disgusting things, but I do and I can’t stop myself and there’s no real harm in it. ’3 In his article, ‘Shame on You’, Bersani references the 2003 ‘Gay Shame’

conference at the University of Michigan at which the gathered academics

concluded that ‘gay shame serves as the foundation for gay pride’.4 He adds that gay-shame theorists suggest that feeling shame is an inherent part of
gay subjectivity, ‘in a society that trains us from an early childhood to think of homosexuality as unnatural and even criminal’. He further concludes that the AIDS crisis and potential contraction of disease via sex only further
reactivated ‘at least some of the shame that even the proudest gay men probably felt when they first discovered their sexual tastes’. 5 Gay pride, Bersani elucidates, is a direct result of, and recognition of, a still existing underlying shame in one’s homosexuality. While I have argued over the course of this
book that queer horror, in its developing and increasingly explicit representations of homosexuality, allows for a more open portrayal of gay life, I have also repeatedly noted that the horror genre also works to rework its repressive tendencies. The multi-layered triumphant excesses of queer horror film and
television arguably work to mask gay shame, ‘covering up’ gay men’s anxieties about their own problematic masculinities as viewed from a heteronor-
mative stance. However the performative, and seemingly revered, pleasures
of the genre that reverberate clearly throughout the texts discussed here also 165

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draw attention to the lure of self-referential ‘role-play’. For example, this is seen initially in the trans-sex identification of drag- Carrie performances discussed in chapter 1; and later in the digital layering and superimpositions of Carrie, LA Tool and Die and the other moving image texts within Indelible, discussed in chapter 2. It its also present in the adoption of straight-acting machismo that is widespread in Gaysploitation horror film and television
or in the sub-genre’s cultural borrowing from canonical and cult horror. It is even literally present in the fancy dress ‘worshipful parody’ of machismo and Tom of Finland-types in Hellbent (2004).

In addition, I have written in detail elsewhere on Bruce LaBruce’s queer
interpretations of the zombie figure in his films Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and LA Zombie (2010)6 as key additions to the development of queer horror traditions. LaBruce’s films’ ‘fake zombies’ reference
a fashionable trend within popular culture, which celebrates the figure of
the zombie in events, theatrical performance, installation art and liter-

ary parodies.7 In Otto; or, Up With Dead People, the eponymous central protagonist’s (Jey Crisfar) ‘authenticity’ as a zombie is often highlighted and called into question as Otto states of himself, ‘I was a zombie with an identity crisis’. LaBruce’s film contains a blurring of worlds where diegetic and extra-diegetic zombie actors mingle with ‘real’ zombies. The central
focus of LaBruce’s zombie films is to parallel zombie-ism with the ‘undead’

promiscuity of gay cruising culture: ‘it really is pretty much like night of the living dead. People are in a kind of somnambulist, zombie-like state;

people are in a sexual trance almost. It’s not really about the individual’.8

LaBruce’s self-reflexive and parodic narrative offers a critique of the banal deadness of gay male subcultures, particularly those of the very homogenous clubbing scene in Berlin.

Otto is considered by the film’s non-zombies to be indistinguishable
from other gay zombies in the diegesis, but within a gay fake-zombie subculture, he is considered ‘different’ and is thus further marginalised. The film’s clichéd radical feminist filmmaker Medea (Katarina Klewinghaus)

comments, ‘there was something different about Otto, something
more… authentic’. Otto’s ‘authenticity’ can also be read in terms of his difference, not only from humans but from the other zombie-actors too.

Still, there remains an ambiguity as to whether he is more proficient at
acting than Medea’s other ‘zombies’; is he really a zombie, or merely a

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Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

Figure 6.1 Francois Sagat in LA Zombie (2010).

psychotic who believes he is a zombie? Nevertheless, Otto’s longing is to
follow the ‘smell of human density’ and to be accepted into a commu-
nity of others like himself. In the film’s opening sequence, he hitchhikes to Berlin, attracted by ‘some overpowering smell…the smell of flesh …

Berlin’, only to find it hard to identify and fit in with the community that he comes across.

LaBruce’s LA Zombie (2010) builds on the director’s foray into zombie pornography and extends the concept of the disenfranchised wandering
zombie to focus on a homeless gay alien zombie (porn star Francois Sagat)

who, in the opening titles of the film, is seen emerging from the ocean after apparently crash landing off the coast of Los Angeles. In various disconnected sexual encounters, Sagat’s zombie comes across (literally and figu-
ratively) the recently deceased and effectively fucks them back to life via his alien-black semen’s life-giving qualities. Again, the zombie is presented 167

Queer Horror Film and Television
ambiguously and the film deliberately leaves the viewer uncertain as to
whether Sagat’s unnamed alien is an actual zombie or whether the zombie
incarnation of the homeless character that Sagat plays is seen as part of his own schizoid self-image. LaBruce achieves this ambiguity via juxtaposing
hard-cuts between a human-looking Sagat and the zombie-Sagat (who is
overly made up in lurid green, black and blue make-up and body paint).

The exaggerated visualisation of the alien zombie’s make-up and Sagat’s
oversized hyper-muscularity (fig. 6.1) also augments the suggestion of both zombie and masculinity-as-performance, while simultaneously working to
feminise the monster (via the draggy make-up and his swollen breasts). As
the film progresses, Sagat’s zombie’s face gradually becomes almost oblit-
erated by the continual growth of his out-sized vampire-like incisors. The
projection of Sagat’s excessively Othered zombie (an alien zombie at that)

via the phallic, increasingly extruding teeth represents a narcissistic desire to consume and be nourished by the hypermasculine. Unlike the cannibal
zombies of Otto; or, Up With Dead People, who long to orally assimilate and consume machismo, Sagat’s already-hypermasculine zombie seems sated
and engorged by it. The alien zombie’s body becomes the end product of
consumption: a grotesquely unsatisfied hypermasculine ‘ideal’ in the form
of a zombie-phallus that is clearly ‘performed’.

Having previously touched on the collapse of identification and desire
present in queer horror’s presentation of desirable masculine forms, my
consideration of the ‘out’ gay or queer zombie in film and television develops this conflation of identification/desire. This slippage is depicted specifically via the grotesquely comic representation of the gay zombie’s desire
to consume and cannibalise masculinity, but also to adopt a ‘look’ in order to ‘fit in’ not only to heteronormative structures but to frequently alienating gay male subcultures too. So too, then, the homogenous nature of the
zombie horde also bears parallels with the ‘homo-ness’ inherent in homo-
sexuality. As such, the zombie allows for a critique both of the often cruel, divisive nature of the gay scene and its symbolically ‘dead’ cruising culture.

Whilst on the one hand, the figure of the zombie can symbolise a mon-
strous queerness, alternatively it can offer a subversive identification to the queer spectator as a counter-cultural icon.

Jeffrey Sconce (2013) states that, in a ‘post-Uncanny’ age, the zombie
is perhaps the most obvious among Western culture’s dead metaphors and

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Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation
undead allegories where obvious difference, dilapidation and (un)familiar-

ity is worn on the skin9, literally. I want to suggest that the gay zombie is a visibly ‘out’, yet sympathetic, monster who has difference worn or writ
out upon his skin and flesh which works, paradoxically, both to margin-
alise him and to assimilate him into the horde. With the signs of horrific
difference displayed and layered upon the surface of the monster’s skin,

Otherness can be clearly identified and either rejected by or assimilated
into normativity. Judith Halberstam (1995) also points out that the Gothic
text plays on surface and layering as fragile, a false indicator of the subject’s apparent wholeness. According to Halberstam, the horror film’s presentation of torn skin reveals the fragility of constructed identities that are ripped apart in monstrous mutilation. In this sense the gay zombie is a visibly ‘outed’ monster forced to inhabit its decaying flesh (as a costume) for eternity so that zombie can ‘be watched’, rendered visible and set apart in order to protect others from infection and conversion. 10

The performative aspects of LaBruce’s gay zombie films again draw
attention to the self-reflexive and often parodic pleasures of queer hor-
ror film and television, whereby difference can either be masked or fore-
grounded. LaBruce’s preoccupation with political and sexual identities and, above all, with ‘performance’ suggests that for him all identities are ‘performed’; in this he takes a great deal of influence from the philosophical
perspective of Jean Genet. In The Reluctant Pornographer (1997), LaBruce discusses Genet’s self-identification as a criminal and a thief as being inherently linked to his first understanding of his own homosexual desires:

For the classic homosexual sissy […] the relationship to a
sturdy, scrappy maleness is never a simple matter. The boy who
is an effeminé […] may respond to an older boy […] but he
responds not as a heterosexual boy with a trumpet of comradely
feistiness, but rather with breathless, charmed fascination and
alternating waves of attraction and fear. The boy ‘steals’ the ges-
tures of his idol. He repeats the beloved’s expressions, models
his actions on those of his friend […] The first act of homo-
sexual love then, is impersonation, but since he knew of the
taboo, Genet links the guilt of theft to the guilt of homosexual-
ity, which is another way of stealing, another form of forbidden

appropriation.11

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Queer Horror Film and Television

Leo Bersani also discusses of the works of Genet and Andre Gide, in their
valorising of the ‘Gay Outlaw’ type that LaBruce valorizes. Bersani’s Gay

Outlaw is both outcast from the heteronormative dominant culture and
also from within various marginalised queer sub-cultures and, as a result,
is intensely eroticised. He argues that,

Genet is basically uninterested in any redeployment or resig-
nification of dominant terms that would address the domi-
nant culture […] parodistically excessive miming of that
culture’s styles and values […] his embrace of criminality is
designed to transform a stigmatizing essence imposed upon
him by others into a freely chosen destiny (as if he were
stealing from the community [or communities] that [have]

excluded him). 12

Bersani’s reading of Genet also suggests the queer appropriation or
stealing of ‘normative’ masculinity via a valorisation of seemingly
straight machismo that, he argues, is adopted as a means of disavow-
ing femininity. I have already argued that this is most obviously seen
in the ‘straight acting’ style of DeCoteau’s films, in Hellbent’s parodic worship of masculine cliché and in LaBruce’s use of the über-masculine
zombie skinhead mode. Central to this work is the anxiety related to gay
men’s troubled, ‘almost mad identification’ with the phallus or mascu-
linity in its symbolic form (as heterosexual). For Bersani, the phallus is
a symbolic feature that only macho men are able to access and the gay
male worships the phallus by disidentifying with it. In ‘Is the Rectum
a Grave?’ Bersani states that, ‘the internalized phallic male [is] an infi-

nitely loved object of sacrifice’13 ([1987] 2010: 30). In zombie-narratives like LaBruce’s, this is often turned comically literal (in the gut-fucking
or heart-fucking scenes of Otto; or, Up With Dead People and LA Zombie respectively), or it is also worn on the surface as ‘performance’ via the
adornment of ‘normative’ machismo. Bersani continues in his inter-
pretation of the ‘Leather Queen’ gay stereotype (discussed by writers
such as John Rechy and Jeffrey Weeks) who adopts a gay-macho style.

Bersani rejects Weeks’ (1995) radical understanding of the figure’s oxy-
moronic potential to ‘gnaw at the roots of a male heterosexual iden-

tity’14 given that ‘leather and muscles are defiled by a sexually feminized 170

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

body’.15 Bersani highlights the lure of the parody of the macho-style that is only partly successful in critiquing gay machismo in that it remains
largely an ‘internal affair’. Chapter 1’s study of camp parodies (by way of drag-Carrie performance) concurs with Bersani’s notion that ‘the gay
male bitch de-sublimates and desexualises a type of femininity glamor-
ised by movie stars whom he lovingly assassinates with his style’. He con-
tinues that the appeal of the adoption of machismo may at first ‘appear’

as parody (as discussed in chapters three and four) but, in fact, reveals

‘a yearning towards machismo’ precisely due to its ability to sexually
excite. Furthermore, Bersani warns that ‘the dead seriousness of the gay
commitment to machismo means that gay men run the risk of idealiz-
ing and feeling inferior to certain representations of masculinity on the

basis of which they are in fact judged and condemned. ’16

Though gendered performance remains a key and recurring conven-
tion of queer horror, it is perhaps too reductive to suggest that masculinity is the only trait that is borrowed and appropriated across the sub-genre. It is precisely the act of appropriation, of borrowing and of stealing identity, that is central to the pleasures of queer horror for the gay male spectator.

I want to connect together queer horror’s propensity for (as Bersani [1987]

puts it) ‘mad identification’17 and its yearning towards an appropriation of both gender and genre traits and conventions as a method of confront-ing gay shame. I want to conclude this study with an analysis of two key
recent horror television serials in order to identify the ways in which queer appropriation is a both central thematic and aesthetic component of the
emerging queer horror sub-genre.

Firstly, BBC Three’s UK TV horror series In the Flesh (2013-present) offers a similar (if intrinsically British) take to LaBruce’s films on the trend of the zombie Other as victim of religious, sexual and moral persecution. The
central undead protagonist, Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS) sufferer

Kieren (Luke Newberry), is a young bisexual who returns after the ‘rising’

to his religiously devout and morally conservative small Yorkshire village
of Roarton only to suffer further discrimination. Secondly, the anthology

Gothic horror series American Horror Story (FX, US 2011-ongoing), produced and written by Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy (an out gay man),
appropriates a number of horror texts drawn both from television and cin-
ema. Each season contrives to present a self-contained story while utilising 171

Queer Horror Film and Television
the same stable of actors and actresses (much like a theatre ensemble) playing different characters in a recognisably excessive and grotesquely camp
style. Both shows, to a greater or lesser extent, exude a queer sensibility in their explicit focus on alternate sexualities, but also perpetuate the penchant for the ‘performative’ via their emphasis on shifting and fluid iden-
tities, and the inclusion of ‘drag’ or ‘dress up’ within their narratives. In both shows, the tendency towards cultural borrowing extends even further
in their use of intertextual cinematic and televisual references to iconic
works of horror and the Gothic.

Kitchen Sink Zombies: In the Flesh

LaBruce’s aforementioned gay zombie satire Otto; or, Up With Dead People concludes with the final shots of its eponymous anti-hero hitchhiking on a
country highway. Framed by a suggestively queer rainbow in the sky, Otto
speaks directly to camera (and in voice-over) on his symbolically suicidal
decision:

“I really didn’t know what my destination was.

But something told me to head north.

The cold doesn’t bother me, in fact, I find it comforting,

It preserves my flesh. Maybe I’ll find more of my kind up there and learn
to enjoy the company.

Maybe I will find a whole new way of death.”

LaBruce’s film suggests that death does not provide a way out from suf-
fering and isolation and that it is neither an end nor an answer. This is
precisely where the (decidedly less hardcore) zombie drama series In the Flesh takes up. Set in a ‘post-rising’ near future, the series follows Kieren Walker as a young man whom, having committed suicide, rises from
the dead (along with a significant proportion of the undead population)

only to be rehabilitated by the government. Much like LaBruce’s Otto, In The Flesh reimagines zombie-ism as a neurological disorder and one that can be treated and contained. The series marks a growing trend in representations of the zombie on screen as a sympathetic Other18 and writer/
creator Dominic Mitchell declares his appreciation and his penchant for

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identifying with the zombie icon as the main inspiration for the creation
of In the Flesh: ‘ “bad zombie movies” [frequently feature] the survivors appear[ing] to enjoy blowing the heads off zombies with “macho glee” ’.19

Mitchell laments instead: ‘that poor lad was somebody’s son, somebody’s
brother, somebody’s friend and neighbour. How inhumane to shoot him in
the head just because of what he’s become. He’s fresh from the grave; he’s in a very primitive state and needs brains to survive; it’s not his fault the kinds of brains he needs to live on are organic human ones.’20

In the series, the undead are renamed as (the more politically cor-
rect) ‘PDS sufferers’ and are forcibly re-civilised by having their drive to eat human flesh suppressed with the use of medication (neurotryptaline
injected into the spinal chord) and are required to undergo a series of
therapy sessions to enable them to being to feel emotions once more. In
order to blend back into society after the nightmare of the ‘rising’ (which saw human victims devoured in the thousands by revitalised corpses),
the reformed PDS sufferers are required to wear flesh-toned foundation
mousse and ‘normative’ contact lenses in order to cover up their scarred
and/or rotting flesh and to hide their cold, milky eyes. Not only does this connect with the performativity of the zombie figure discussed earlier, but it also reverses LaBruce’s depiction of zombie drag as a means of sub cultural assimilation and instead revisits the concept of ‘fitting in’ and assimilating to a wider, normative society. Here zombies are forced to hide their true visage and desires and to medicate to prevent non-normative desires

(to cannibalise others); in essence they are required to cover up and mask
their true nature. The rehabilitation is not only physical but psychological too, giving rise to parallels with mental illness and other elements of human nature that are deemed ‘different’ from an implied norm. Making matters
more queer is Kieren’s bisexuality which is often deemed more of a taboo
than his zombie-ism (he remains largely closeted throughout season one)

and which, it turns out, is a key factor in his decision to take his own life in the time before ‘the rising’.

In the Flesh has Kieren concealing both his bisexuality, and his
sexual relationship with similarly closeted local soldier Rick Macy

(David Walmsley). In season one, having returned home to the small,
narrow-minded and religiously devout town of Roarton, Kieren retrieves
a stash of photographs and love letters from Rick that are concealed

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under the floorboards in his bedroom. His relationship with the soldier
is slowly revealed to the viewers who eventually come to understand
that that Kieren’s undead status is a result of him having previously com-
mitted suicide, unable to cope with the news that Rick had been killed
by an IED while on military tour in Afghanistan. Very much in the same
vein as LaBruce’s Otto, the figure of the zombie in In the Flesh exists as a paean to a disenfranchised queer youth, with the added irony of having
to ‘fit in’ a second time, both as a PDS sufferer and as a bisexual. The concept hints at a suffering even beyond death. Kieren and his love for Rick is later ‘outed’ when Rick ‘returns’ (from his tour and from death) as a
fellow PDS sufferer, but one who is encouraged to remain closeted, both
as undead and as gay, due to his troubled relationship with his bigoted
father Bill (Steve Evets). In The Flesh is a text that is clearly wrought with shame and guilt; Cathy Johnson rightly points out that ‘Kieran’s guilt,
therefore, is twofold – guilt for the deaths he caused in his untreated
zombie state and for the pain he caused his family by taking his own

life.’21

In essence, the central love story of season one’s narrative evokes a

Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy of mortality. True to form, this queer horror text embraces the concept of zombie as a metaphor for the ‘Otherness’

of sexual difference and casts aside the limits of a symbolic understand-
ing by rendering explicit (to the audience at least) Kieren and Rick’s
non-normative sexualities. Writer Dominic Mitchell responds to wider
critical appreciation of the show’s LGBTQ characters, arguing that Kieren’s sexuality is more fluid than fixed:

I know there’s this debate raging, is Kieren gay? Is he straight? Is
he queer? and all that, and I personally hate labels: PDS suffer,
the Redeemed, Undead, Rotter…all those labels, which are put

on people as well, I wanted to tackle.22

The more furtive queerness of season one is built upon in season two via
the flourishing of Keiren’s sexuality, particularly via the relationship with undead ‘prophet’ Simon (Emmett J Scanlan) whose sexuality Mitchell is
more confirmed about: ‘Of course Simon’s gay. I always imagined that

Simon was gay. He wasn’t bi, he wasn’t transsexual, Simon, for me, is a gay character so he was just like ‘This is great’. 23

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Mitchell argues that the show’s presentation of sexual unspecificity
is part of the industry’s recognition that television shows that are clearly labelled gay can often find themselves being marginalised in terms of the show’s characters but in terms of its programming running the risk of
excluding its potential to appeal to wider audience demographics. Mitchell
states that this was possibly the case for the reception of the show in North America: ‘if we get tagged with the “gay zombie” thing…for Americans

there are some very hot button issues religion, sexuality…’24 By eluding labels concerning sexuality the show can appeal to a broad audience on a
marketing level, in that being suggestive rather than explicit is seen as less confrontational. Perhaps this suggests that, like the unspecified ‘queerness’

of many of the early Gaysploitation Horrors discussed in chapter 3, In The Flesh’s ‘avoidance of labels’ runs the risk of an outright confrontation with the transgressive.

What is perhaps most interesting about In the Flesh concerning its
place within a queer horror pantheon, is its tendency to appropriate and
borrow the aesthetics, themes and narratives of influential texts. Mitchell himself draws attention to the series’ inspirations, even perhaps as a selling point: ‘they [the BBC] got this very bleak, existential drama… We always
said it was what would happen if Alan Bennett and Ken Loach got together

and did a zombie show’. 25 Yet regardless of the show’s critical acclaim, the lure of appropriated imagery, genres, aesthetics and narratives is still strong. The series’ textual references are further described by Johnson as
having ‘a pared down aesthetic – shot in hues of grey and brown – more
kitchen sink drama than the zombie gore-fest of The Walking Dead […]

also tinged with moments of dark comedy’. 26 The show arguably layers the more intense Gothic sequences of zombie consumption in the mundane,
socially conscious, domestic qualities of British Social Realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That movement, noted for the authorial celebration of its writers (such as John Osborne, Keith Waterhouse and Shelagh

Delaney) as well as its directors (Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger), is
also famed for the foregrounding of a kitchen sink aesthetic, in that the
ordinary takes precedence over the extraordinary. The conventions of the movement echo throughout In the Flesh’s ( ITF) visual style, the fictional setting and across its narrative. Firstly they tend to focus on a working
class milieu in a run-down, usually northern British locale, the name of

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the fictional ex-mining town of Roarton in ITF both evokes aggressive dissent and resembles the name given to the risen undead by the town’s
humans: ‘rotters’). There are also references to social change, ITF highlights among many things: the slow death of religion, rising unemployment,
mental health problems such Post Traumatic Stress Disorder suffered by
young soldiers sent to war in the Middle East, and the problems surround-
ing the increased acceptance of homosexuality to name a few. British Social Realist films also foreground generational differences and frustrations and, more centrally, the plight of the ‘Angry Young Man’ trying to break free
of intellectual, class-based and familial restraints, searching for love, or through seeking fame and success. The parallels with the cultural stereotype of the Angry Young Man of the 1950s and the Angry (Undead) Young

Man of ITF are obvious. British Social Realist films such as Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Mornin g (1960) and Billy Liar (1963) feature the observation of a young, disillusioned working class male protagonist struggling to survive in his provincial surroundings. This cultural stereotype of the 1950s was born out of a generation of disillusioned, post-war young men, living in relative poverty, their intellects undervalued and having to take seemingly worthless jobs while not being offered the
opportunity to prove themselves.

Arguably, Kieren represents the Angry Young Man of more recent
times experiencing a similar disillusionment with a society and an econ-
omy that offers very little hope, perhaps suffering its own slow death.

The show borrows from numerous ‘kitchen sink’ films from the era. For
example, Kieren’s return to Roarton after his rehabilitation as a PDS suf-
ferer draws tragi-comic parallels with Billy Liar in particular, the eponymous protagonist of which (Tom Courtenay) benefits from the safety of
the domestic sphere yet is effectively imprisoned by his family. Kieren’s
thwarted attempt to leave home in order to flee to the more liberal and
accepting Paris to live as an artist in episode one of season two can be
paralleled with Billy’s failed attempt to leave for London with girlfriend

Liz (Julie Christie) to set up life in Swinging London as a comic writer. The relationship between Billy and Liz clearly influences the flirtatious banter between Kieren and Amy throughout the series, but it is perhaps more
evocative of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1961), which picks up British Social Realism’s focus on the decade’s ‘youth problem’ but from a

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female perspective instead. More specifically, Richardson’s film also con-
fronts contemporary social taboos such as homosexuality in central char-

acter Jo’s (Rita Tushingham)27 close relationship with gay best friend Geoff (Murray Melvin) as they both attempt to raise Jo’s baby together. The focus on marginalised and sexually-Othered youth and the frustration of young working class men and women from kitchen sink drama clearly resounds
throughout Mitchell’s socially relevant writing.

In the Flesh’s tribute to the British New Wave films of the 1950s/60s arguably appropriates social realist style for its own purposes. Generically, the series openly wears its kitchen sink aesthetics in order to evoke the
same social critique of British culture, but the homage also works to fore-
ground ‘Britishness’ as a selling point to overseas’ audiences. Similarly there is a contradiction present in the slippage between paying worshipful acco-lade to British cinema, for a desire to ‘be like’ also requires a layering-up of styles and allusions that become so explicit that they draw attention to the work that appropriation does to mask or to ‘cover up’ identity and,
perhaps, originality. This is something that is explicitly referenced in the series itself, via the narrative’s encouragement of PDS sufferers to appear

‘normal’ by covering up their true undead visage with flesh toned make-up and contact lenses. In covering up, at times the PDS sufferers often look
more uncanny than they do out of their human visage. Their skin takes on
a curious orange pallor and their brown contact lenses seem mismatched
and unnatural. By emphasising the show’s inclination to appropriate
extra-diegetically and pay aesthetic homage alongside the undead charac-
ters’ performance of normativity, the layers of cultural borrowing rise to the surface. This leads to the development of the diegetic ‘outing’ of the characters (as both queer and their obvious rotting appearance) in season two as
the character of Simon encourages his cultish, devout followers, including

Kieren, to be proud of their ‘true nature’, removing the layers of make-up
and their inhibitive ‘costumes’ and going out in public taking pride their
genuine appearance.

The show arguably uses its textual and narrative play with layers in
order to develop its focus on marginalised groups (either based on class or sexuality) rising up to protest against political, cultural and sexual oppression – whilst simultaneously foregrounding levels of textual influence. As

I have already argued, if there is an inherent guilt/shame in being gay, then 177

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borrowing and performing become part of a compulsion to ‘cover up’ in
order to assimilate into an implied norm. Yet, conversely, the performative excess of textual layers that I set out as conventions of queer horror film and television also often work to ironically foreground and to celebrate
difference. They operate to draw attention to the unoriginality of the text and, furthermore, expose the constructed and scripted gendered bodies
represented therein and thus queer horror texts function to disrupt tex-
tual stability and to highlight the unoriginality of all cultural texts and identities.

Murder and mise-en-abîme in American

Horror Story

Cult anthology television series American Horror Story is, perhaps, the most unabashedly performative queer horror text of recent years that celebrates textual outfitting via its visual and sonic references and homage
to iconic horror films. Sarah Gwenllian-Jones (2002) points out the queer
potential of cult television phenomena:

Cult television series are already ‘queer’ in their constructions of
fantastic virtual realities that must problematise heterosexuality

[…] It is the cult television series itself that implicitly ‘resists’

the conventions of heterosexuality; the slash fiction stories writ-
ten by some of its fans render explicit this implicit function and,
more importantly, are a reflection of cult television’s immersive

and interactive logics. 28

Cult, queer-oriented series like American Horror Story ( AHS) arguably combine ‘immersive and interactive’ traits in their performative and
self-referential structures. Further to Gwenllian-Jones’ point, cult television often queers the rigidity of heteronormativity via its presentation of camp, alternative sexuality, excess, and immersive performance. The jouissance afforded in immersion, in losing oneself in another text or in overi-
dentification, is clearly something that AHS celebrates outrageously. Each series has its own (largely self-contained) narrative, is set in a particular time period and features a returning cast of players (akin to the ensemble
theatre troupes discussed in chapter 2) each playing different roles in each 178

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

season. 29 In her discussion of Gothic television, Helen Wheatley remarks on the ‘open-ended soap style narrative’ of Gothic soap opera (she focuses
specifically on the long-running US show Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–71)) that ‘lends itself well to the Gothic as a genre of uncertainty’.30 Wheatley confirms that part of the pleasure of the Gothic lies in the horror of continuation and the failure of containment of its narrative, so although the anthology concept of AHS requires some form of closure at the end of each season, by re-casting the ensemble players in the following seasons in different roles, the show’s camp horror continues.

Season One, retrospectively subtitled ‘Murder House’, can arguably be
seen as a pilot experiment in excessive and hysterical Gothic layering and
cultural borrowing that sets the tone and standards for the following series.

The premise of the season is an initially familiar one. In true The Amityville Horror (1979) style, psychotherapist Ben (Dylan McDermott) and his wife Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton), along with their troubled young daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga), relocate to a large house in LA after Ben is
caught having an affair with one of his female students. Typically according to genre expectations, the house is haunted with the spirits of its previous owners, as well as the multitude of people who have died within its walls.

The reappearance of the house’s ghostly inhabitants show them interacting
implicitly and explicitly with the new owners. As the episodes progress,
the sheer volume of spirits increase layer upon layer bringing their own
stories in unannounced flashbacks that often blur into the present and even other ghosts’ pasts, compounding the Gothic strata. Dawn Keetley (2013)

describes ‘Murder House’s’ aesthetic as ‘entropic’31:

Repetition drives the series, as stories – lives – accumulate in the
deathless confines of the Murder House, each generation lay-
ered upon, literally impressed by, those that came before them.

The past rewrites the present, exerting an inexorable shaping
force […] Such are the central stories of the house, repetitions
of central themes – murderous doctors, adulterous men, dead

and monstrous children, husband-killers, and suicides. 32

Across the following seasons, AHS uses the conceit of its period context to confront and play with the oppression of both racial and sexual

‘Others’ throughout recent American history. Series two, AHS: Asylum, 179

Queer Horror Film and Television
is largely set in 1964 Massachusetts and focuses on the patients, doc-
tors, nurses and nuns who occupy Briarcliff Mental Institution. Though
largely limited to this time period, the series intercuts scenes from the
present, featuring the emergence across both time periods of the show’s
central serial killer Bloody Face (played by Zachary Quinto and Dylan

McDermot respectively). Hoping to expose the institutional abuse at

Briarcliff meted out by punitive Jessica Lange’s Sister Jude, the second
season follows central protagonist Lana Winters (Sara Paulson) a clos-
eted lesbian journalist held against her will by Sister Jude at the asy-
lum who threatens to ‘out’ her (homosexuality then considered both
criminal and pathological). Winters becomes entangled in several
overlapping sub-plots including alien abduction, ex-Nazi mad scien-
tists, demonic possession and exorcism, however the central storyline
involves her discovery of Bloody Face’s true identity as one of the insti-
tute’s psychiatrists. The episode ‘Spilt Milk’ (SE2 E11) demonstrates the
show’s playful commentary on the oppressive legislation against gay and
lesbian citizens in the US. After her escape from her wrongful incarcera-
tion, Lana meets her friends in secret as she mourns her murdered lover,

Wendy (Clea Duvall), in the mortuary. Framed via a constricting and
contorted fish-eye lens, the women gather in the stark white corridor of
the morgue. The lines created by the stacked caskets extend and bend
around the group almost imprisoning them. When they are interrupted
by the searing flashbulbs of the hounding paparazzi, Lana warns her
friends of being ‘outed’ too, so bitterly encourages them to leave should
they not wish to be associated with ‘this Sapphic reporter’.

Season three, AHS: Coven, is largely set in present-day New Orleans and follows a coven of Salem witches led by Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange)

and their on/off war with the resident voodoo witches led by Marie Laveau

(Angela Bassett). Alongside its contemporary milieu, the series features
numerous flashbacks to the 1830s, the 1910s and the 1970s as it follows the supposedly immortal witches through an extended timeline. In terms of its
explicitly queer content, Coven features flamboyantly diminutive ‘queen’

Quentin Fleming (played by out gay actor Leslie Jordan) as a key mem-
ber of the Witches’ Council, and Spalding (Dennis O’Hare) as the witches’

butler, a visually grotesque, transvestite character who takes to secreting 180

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation
himself in his attic room hosting tea parties with a collection of dolls while wearing women’s clothing.

The embrace of queer difference is perhaps most obviously present in
season four, AHS: Freak Show. Centrally set in 1952 in Jupiter, Florida, the series concentrates on one of the last freak shows in the United States put together and run by fading starlet, the German émigré Elsa Mars (Jessica

Lange). Both the concept and character types are clearly borrowed from
the iconic cult horror Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), ranging from ‘pin-heads’, reptile women, a bearded lady, a strongman and woman and a
hermaphrodite. In terms of the range of non-normative body types fea-
tured in the show, the fourth season of AHS is perhaps the most explicitly queer. This season’s camp performativity is palpable in the introduction
of regular performance slots in which various characters entertain and
sing on and off-stage. Lange’s fading diva is an obviously draggy send-up
of Marlene Dietrich’s star persona complete with her thick, exaggerated

Teutonic accent, peroxide blonde wig and androgynous pant-suits. Mars’

comically sung delivery of the show’s many cover versions (including

David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars? ’ (1971)) continues the pastiche of Dietrich’s trademark off-key singing voice. The show draws further attention to this
camp performance by referring explicitly to Dietrich in the dialogue, Mars
insisting that she, in fact, is the progenitor of Marlene’s iconic Hollywood style which, she claims, ‘that bitch’ stole from her. Freak Show also features numerous gay male characters ranging from repressed gay ‘Strongman’

Dell Toledo (Michael Chiklis), whose same-sex desires are indulged in
underground gay bars and whose self-hatred is clearly indicative of the cultural repression rife in 1950’s McCarthyist America. He is blackmailed by a travelling gay con-man Stanley (Denis O’Hare) who threatens to ‘out’ Dell
to the circus and his family. The season also features a guest appearance
by ‘out’ gay actor Matt Bomer as Andy, a gay male trick who Dell falls for.

Dell’s self-loathing is clearly representative of the period’s stigma towards homosexuality; at one point, Andy asks Dell ‘Who are you hiding from?

You’re already a Freak!’, to which Dell replies ‘But no-one knows I’m one of them!’ As a strongman, Dell’s freakish difference is not writ-out visibly and therefore he is able to blend into normative society, but this also represents Dell’s refusal to admit his own difference, both sexually and socially.

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Andy is later dismembered brutally by the show’s main antagonist,
mummy’s boy Dandy Mott (Finn Wittrock), in a scene that clearly relies
heavily on erotic coding. In the episode ‘Pink Cupcakes’ (SE 4 E5), Dandy
is shown in an erotic montage working out in his nursery-like bedroom

(complete with outsized rocking horse and crochet lawn) wearing white
underwear. The scene is reminiscent of that from Mary Harron’s film
adaptation of American Psycho (2000), whose own narcissistic protagonist psychopath Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is framed similarly in side
profile, medium shot, performing push-ups and sit-ups whilst wearing
only white Y-fronts. Like the scene from Harron’s film, the sequence also
feature’s Dandy’s narration in voice-over which comments on his existence
as both an emotional void and a symbol of idealised US masculine identity: And this body is America, strong, violent and full of limitless
potential.

My arms will hold them down as they struggle, my legs
will run them down as they flee, I will be the U.S. Steel of mur-
der. My body holds a heart that cannot love. When Dora died

I looked right into her eyes and felt nothing.

Dandy narcissistically parallels himself with iconic (and queer-oriented) actors of Golden Age Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s such as Montgomery Clift: ‘I was destined to be the greatest actor of all time, Monty Clift? If I had been in A Place in the Sun, George Stevens would’ve had me do the walk to the electric chair shirtless’. The scene not only references Patrick Bateman’s performance of ‘human emotion’ from American Psycho but also highlights the show’s emphasis on acting: ‘I mailed away for one of those Charles Atlas exercise routines they advertise in the back of the Superman comics, and I practised acting faces in front of the mirror: sad, happy, moody. But mother wouldn’t let me.

I hate her!’

The sequence ends with Dandy picking up Dell’s lover Andy and return-
ing back to his Gothic caravan hidden in the woods with the implied
intention of having sex with him. Like Dell, the character of Dandy as
spoilt-child cliché is perhaps indicative of the period’s fear and denial of sexual difference. Dandy protests, ‘I’m not a fruit!’, before asking Andy
if they could both undress while back to back and then ‘see what magic
happens’. This provides Dandy with the chance to undress and put on his

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borrowed mask from serial killer clown Twisty (John Carroll Lynch). As
they turn back to face each other, with Dandy wearing the grotesque mask.

Leaping on Andy and pinning him to the ground, Dandy frantically stabs
at him multiple times in an excessively erotic frenzy, both men wearing
nothing but their white underwear. As Andy dies his face is captured in
close up, panting heavily with an orgasmic expression on his face. From a
low angle, the camera then pans up Dandy’s semi-naked body as he touches
his toned abdomen, now sweating and spattered with the trick’s blood cap-
turing him in a suggestive post-coital tableaux.

Indeed, there is much pleasure to be had here in AHS’ presentations of excess, not only in the series’ presentation of horrific gore, but also
in its claustrophobic layering of plots. The spectator is overcome, and
often overloaded, with textual and narrative stimuli which include: mul-
tiple characters (both dead and alive); narrative echoes; flashbacks and
flash-forwards. In addition, there are an exhausting amount of cross-textual and cinematic references that can be seen in the show’s mise-en-scène, its
character types, its plot-lines and even in its soundtrack. At times, such

Gothic appropriation is so intensely layered that it becomes too much to
bear and seems almost hysterical. As the season draws to an end, the mul-
tiple, overlapping storylines are concluded, characters are killed off one
by one and the thrust of the narrative signals a regression to an exhausted and spent state of post-coital stasis at the season’s finale, before enjoying a rebirth of sorts, in uncanny form (typically familiar but unfamiliar) in
the following seasons.

Murder House’s marketing campaign perhaps most successfully sum-
marises the show’s treatment of ecstatic queer Gothic appropriation that
offers both a celebratory pride in performativity and a repressive mask-
ing of (barely) concealed shame. AHS’ textual layering is represented in the nostalgic portraiture iconography of the FX teaser poster campaign

(see Fig. 6.2). In it, the Harmon family are exposed behind faded, peel-ing, Victorian-style wallpaper torn back to reveal the broken plaster-
board beneath and the new owners beyond that, hinting at a ‘return of

the repressed’33 theme, whereby masking and repression ultimately fails.

Further posters in the series reveal more and more of the interior of the
house and its inhabitant characters who are introduced through the sea-
son. The composition and aesthetic of the piece is clearly reminiscent of the 183

Queer Horror Film and Television

Figure 6.2 The AHS poster for season 1 Murder House (FX 2011).

mise-en-abîme (often translated as a placing into the abyss, or into infinity) of the famous Diego Velásquez painting Las Meninas (1656) (Fig. 6.3) itself a Gothic-inspired depiction of courtiers of the Royal Family in 17th

Century Spain. The artist’s deliberate eschewing of fixed perspective and
labyrinthine use of frames within frames clearly influences AHS’ stylistic pretensions and thematic concerns. The very same approach is taken in the
show’s opening titles that resemble the grimy, patchwork Gothic of Seven (David Fincher, 1995) (obviously so, given they are also created by titles

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Figure 6.3 Velasquez’ Las Meninas (1686).

artist Kyle Cooper’s company Prologue). The opening sequence operates
to initiate the viewer into the breakneck pace of borrowing and fast-paced
editing that is to come.

The sequence presents a bricolage of various Gothic imagery includ-
ing: ghoulish vintage photographs which appear to melt via an overexpo-
sure in to the textual layers of images; spot-lit attics and basements with cracked floors whose concealing darkness is never fully illuminated; over-abundant jars crammed with embalmed animal and human organs and
foetuses on dusty mad-scientist-style shelves and floating slow-motion
shots of virginal white bridal or christening gowns against a pitch black
background. Such images are interspersed with flash-cuts to various dirt-
ied, surgical trays spattered with blood, Gothic pictures of brides, hands

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holding bloodied garden shears, and burning pictures of young children.

The images are held back to allow for the actors’ names to flash embla-
zoned in white on black in an imposing Rennie Mackintosh-influenced
font. All these images are played over an almost non-existent theme tune,
save a low ponderous bass that stops and starts throughout, which eventu-
ally gives way under a cataclysm of snarling, almost digital interference
style, noises that merge together almost causing visual interference with
the images we see. The titles clearly intimate a layering of Gothic pasts and make suggestions of skeletons in the closet or of familial repression of the recent past of American life. They hint at the hypocrisies of middle class
living, of a capital-obsessed America with a fragile veneer of respectability that conceals a multitude of secrets and sins.

Cultural borrowing and pastiche continues to be rife throughout AHS, particularly in its first two seasons. In Murder House, there are narrative allusions to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Entity (1982) in Vivian’s demonic impregnation and there are visual parallels between Vivian
and to Samantha Eggar’s monstrously impregnated mother, Nola, from

David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). Familial isolation and the onset of Ben’s madness are taken from The Shining (1980), as is the presentation of ghostly doppelgänger twins. The Bakhtinian heteroglossia34 of AHS
continues in the show’s nostalgic quoting of recognisable audial motifs
and scores from iconic horror films ranging from Bernard Hermann’s
soundtracks to Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) and Twisted Nerve (Roy Boutling, 1968) (here doubly referenced via its re-appropriation in Kill Bill Vol.1 (Tarantino, 2003)). The jukebox of horror scores that is AHS’ soundtrack continues with borrowings from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993), Pino Donnagio’s lyrical score from Carrie (1976) and Philip Glass’ distinguishable score from Bernard Rose’s Candyman

(1992) to name but a few.

I want to argue that AHS presents a surfeit of the penchant for performance within queer horror that develops from LGBTQ culture’s queering
of binary gendered norms that Judith Butler terms ‘performativity’. Butler
argues that the supposed biology of binary gender is constructed via the
repetition of acts and behaviours where social performance creates gender,
a performance which imitates culturally prescribed, yet impossible, ideals.

In Gender Trouble (1990), she exemplifies this performativity in:

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[…] acts, gestures and desire [that] produce the effect of an
internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of
the body…such acts, gestures, enactments generally construed,
are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that
they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufac-
tured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discur-

sive means. 35

Focusing on the fragility of gender performance, Butler asserts that the
possibilities for a transformation of identity can be found in a ‘failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition’.36 This notion of the fragile surface coupled with the foregrounding of that same surface performance
in order to draw attention to the constructed-ness of cultural identity is
precisely what AHS utilises in its parodic costumery and intertextual references. Arguably, the show draws deliberate attention to the pleasures of camp performance via its presentation of excess in self-aware mise-en-scène, exaggerated acting and textual play, so much so that the show’s
unoriginal repetition works precisely because of this failure to convince as entirely original or, as Butler puts it, a ‘failure to repeat’.

Butler continues that performativity is born out of closeness between
identification with and desire for the loved object, here I want to interpret this here as either a loved queer icon, a horror film or an erotic male object: To identify is not to oppose desire. Identification is a phan-tasmatic trajectory and resolution of desire; an assumption
of place; a territorializing of an object which enables identity
through the temporary resolution of desire, but which remains

desire if only in its repudiated form. 37

Here the notion of the ‘assumption of place’ or the ‘territorializing of an object’ allows for an interesting take on textual borrowing and appropriation of identity in queer horror. I want to suggest that the appeal of
adaptation and appropriation centres on the pleasures that the loss of self (and the shame associated with queerness specifically) affords the subject
in the jouissance of ecstatic appropriation. Earlier in this chapter, I apply Bersani’s understanding of gay male ‘mad identification’ with machismo to
the appeal that lies at the heart of queer horror and, furthermore, that this takes the form of a disidentification (that is, a successful and, yet, failed 187

Queer Horror Film and Television
identification). I want to extend this to suggest that the appeal of performative queer horror is also due to an obsessive nearly ‘mad identification’ with the character types, gestures, music, narrative and the aesthetics that are borrowed from the genre, and that there is an insatiable compulsion to
repeat such adaptation and appropriation over and over. Kamilla Elliott
writes that Gothic parodies often ‘play with Gothic conventions, film
forms and audiences […] modernize them, position themselves as sequels

[…] change character genders, sexual orientations, nationalities, religions and species.’ She continues that ‘the attention parody draws to film forms
heightens awareness of their constructedness and, by extension, the discur-

sive constructedness of the Gothic’. 38 To reiterate, the OED defines parody as ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect […] an imitation or version of some-

thing that falls short of the real thing’. 39 However, contemporary studies of parody contest ‘standard dictionary definitions’40 suggesting that ‘parody’

is no longer confined to a low mockery of high art and no longer requires

‘ridiculing imitation’41 and instead operates to deconstruct meaning. While the appeal of AHS clearly lies in its own recurring self-reflexivity, the show’s compulsion to repeat (in terms of its homage, its appropriation and
in its ongoing seasonal ‘resets’) connects with Hutcheon’s comments on
the pleasures offered by adaptation. In AHS the characters and the setting

‘change with each repetition and yet they are recognizably the same’42, this effectively creates a familiar/unfamiliar mise-en-abîme effect both within each season and across each season. AHS’ capacity to appropriate cultural forms, and its tendency towards repetition and imitation, arguably operate
to oppose essentialism. It does this by highlighting the constructedness of genre, of gender and of identity per se but it also functions to deconstruct that meaning

The Name Game, Self-Loss and the

Queering of Identity

The critical success of AHS has arguably been down to the show’s capacity to showcase bravura performances from its female cast members, most

notably Jessica Lange. 43 Lange’s self-conscious performances across the 188

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

Figure 6.4 The Name Game performance from AHS: Asylum
seasons as Constance, Sister Jude, Fiona and Elsa Mars are self-contained
within the narrative of each season but, in their excessiveness, each one
bleeds into the next whilst echoing previous incarnations in earlier epi-
sodes. There is a sense that in drawing attention to shifting character
identities played by the same actors and actresses, the show explicitly
draws attention to performativity and, specifically, to the connections to
drag (both male and female) that both Judith Butler (1993) and Carole

Anne-Tyler (1991) also draw upon. Such performances are often comi-
cally grotesque caricatures and are excessively masqueraded in the show
via the use of obvious make-up, foregrounded period costume and clearly
discernible variation in accent and dialect.

The appeal of shifting and non-normative identities for the queer spec-
tator, whether they are defined by alternative sexuality, the fluidity of gender or the difference associated with foreign nationality or unusual body
types, is clearly a strong lure. Identification occurs not only the presen-
tation of Otherness but, in rendering one’s stereotypical traits excessive, they also comment on the obviously manufactured nature of identity itself.

One key scene from AHS: Asylum best summarises the genre-busting,
anti-essentialist appeal of AHS and, I would argue, is an inherent element of queer horror per se. The episode ‘The Name Game’ (SE2 E5) draws 189

Queer Horror Film and Television
attention to the queer Gothic’s potential for performative pleasures and
outrageous camp in its presentation of a (not-so-well) choreographed
dance scene that seems incongruous in the season as its only diegetic musi-
cal number (a cover of ‘The Name Game’ by Shirley Ellis (1965)). It occurs
at a point in the narrative when the electroconvulsive therapy meted out
to Sister Jude (Lange) has led her to forget her own identity. While sit-
ting almost comatose in the asylum’s recreation attic, she is encouraged
by fellow patient Lana Winters (Paulson) to remember her name, giving
way to the elaborate routine in which the inmates and wardens of the
asylum exaggeratedly perform a dance routine to the song (see fig. 6.4).

Various characters’ names from the show are effectively ‘queered’ via the
lyrics’ recurring rhymes. Jude invites the gathered crowd to take part in the song’s queer identity play: ‘Come on everybody! I say now let’s play a game, I betcha’ I can make a rhyme out of anybody’s name. The first letter of the name, I treat it like it wasn’t there.’ With each repetition of a featured name, the first letter is replaced with the same consonants:

Lana-Lana, bo-Bana

Bana-Bana, fo-Fana

Fee-fi, mo-Mana

Lana!

Judy-Judy, bo-Budy

Budy-Budy, fo-Fudy,

Fee-fi, mo-Mudy

Judy!

The scene is presented as pure fantasy and its style eschews the dishwater
grey and brown palette of the asylum’s spaces in favour of a more vibrant
saturated colour scheme, alongside a camp nostalgia that is present in Jude’s bright sky-blue mini-dress and 60s kitsch blonde tresses. The sequence features speedy intercutting between multiple cameras, often framed in Dutch
angles. Through its Glee-style sense of wild abandonment, the sequence highlights the show’s critique of fixed identity and emphasises an ecstatic pleasure to be found in that fluidity, creating new, yet repetitive, identities in a playful, child-like performative fashion. In effect, ‘The Name Game’

190

Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation
perfectly represents the appeal of the self-loss afforded by dis-identification, in over-identification, in cross-gender identification and in the kind of performativity that is the central tenet of queer horror. The multi-layered,
self-reflexive, soapy excesses of AHS offer a proud celebration of difference; they also operate to mask shame or to cover up anxieties (particu-
larly for gay men) around their own problematic masculinities, which are
continually associated with shameful femininity. Often gay masculinity is
portrayed as indefinite and transmutable so as not to suffer the ‘shame’ of a fixed homo sexual identity equated with the feminine. The emphasis on performance in queer horror allows for a concurrently worshipful appreciation and a dis-identification with both feminine and masculine ideals.

If, historically, gay masculine identity has been conflated with the shameful aspects of femininity, then they can be disavowed and arguably expelled
via either masquerade-style over-identification with the excessive feminine image, or via the adoption of drag. So too in the parody of ‘borrowing’ a
hyperbolised version of its apparent binary opposite – normative macho,
heterosexual masculinity – gay masculine identity can also be exposed as
constructed.

To conclude, according to Ellis Hanson (2007), there is little doubt-
ing the Gothic genre’s often queer treatment of ‘our [the queer communi-

ties’] anxieties, our traumas, our panics and our repressed desires’.44 He
continues that Gothic’s investment in ‘often paranoid and shame-addled
pleasures […] interrogates the oppositions that have traditionally charac-
terized sexual politics, in particular such familiar oppositions as hetero-
sexuality/homosexuality, masculine/feminine, sex/gender, closeted/out,
centre/margin.’ Though the Gothic succeeds in its traumatic engagement
with paranoid structures around sexuality and horror, Hanson argues that

‘it can also [offer] a raucous site of sexual transgression that undermines its own narrative efforts at erotic containment’.45 The radical potential of queer horror series such as In the Flesh and especially in the Gothic entropy of American Horror Story, lies in their propensity to embrace, via multiple dis-identifications, the void of non-identity.

191

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

This study’s chief intention was to investigate the queer uses of horror in recent film and television. Accepting that horror film’s allegorical and metaphorical values have long been utilised to symbolise heterosexual fears of homosexual ‘Others’, I set out on a quest to understand the employment
of the monstrous metaphor in an era in which homosexuality, at least in

Western culture, has become increasingly acceptable but only according to
heteronormative standards. In the modern queer horror text, homosexual-

ity does not lurk in the ‘shadowy realm’1 of inference; instead it presents itself in varying degrees of visibility, often breaking free from the limiting associations with monstrosity that heteronormativity imposes upon it. Yet
as Leo Bersani puts it, the very same prospect of increased visibility runs the risk of assimilating difference, whereby gays ‘de-gay […] themselves in the very process of making themselves visible’2. A closer look at the representation of homosexuality in queer horror film and television reveals a
gay masculinity which finds itself troubled by associations with shameful
femininity; but also the assimilation of threatening sexual difference into a safe homonormativity has resulted mainly in the adoption of hypermasculine performance and the apeing of heteronormative values.

My analysis of those queer horror texts that emphasise a monstrous
homosexuality reconnects with Benshoff’s concluding warning that while 192

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

‘the monster queer may be a sexually, alluring, politically progressive figure

[…] s/he is still a social threat that must be eradicated’. 3 However this study also reveals the celebratory pleasures offered to queer, gay and lesbian
viewers in identifying oppositionally with monstrous characters (often
coded as sexually ambiguous) who threaten the norm (examples include

Carrie, Otto and Keiren). It has also demonstrated that the queer utilisa-
tion of horror at times flips the monstrous metaphor to make it represent
right-wing homophobia. While heteronormativity still prevails in queer
horror, it often develops into a bourgeois homonormativity.

Although this book’s central focus has been on horror (and its varied
sub-genres: the slasher and the splatter film, the body horror, the zombie
film/television serial, Gothic soap operas), the genre’s influence on other generic forms is extensive. Accordingly, this study’s consideration is much wider in scope, moving from classical horror cinema to theatrical appropriation and more esoteric forms like the experimental short. It also takes in niche and cult genres such as exploitation cinema and camp television
serials, as well as more complex hybrids that fuse pornography with polit-
ical satire, and the more oblique and suggestive representation of horror in the art film. This study’s close readings of queer horror texts from cinema, theatre and television may hopefully contribute valuable new insights into
the nature of contemporary gay male identity. What comes to light, ini-
tially, is that the appeal of the horror genre for the gay male spectator offers similar ‘remasculinising’ pleasures to those that Peter Hutchings concludes are available to the (assumed straight) male spectator after a temporary
feminisation. Yet, for the gay man, homosexuality’s associations with fem-
ininity extend beyond those very temporary unpleasures experienced by the straight male spectator. As such, the oscillating processes of identification offered by queer horror texts provide a method of working through
the cultural stigma of feminised gay masculinity, whereby the gay subject
becomes more of a man at having endured and suffered through the masochistic spectacle of horror.

Chapter 1 considers Brian De Palma’s Carrie as a key text in this investigation into queer uses of horror. Analysis of Stephen King’s 1974 original novel and the original 1976 film adaptation reveals that their narratives,
themes and visual forms are particularly appealing for gay male specta-
tors. The consumption of the classic horror film and gay men’s strong

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Queer Horror Film and Television
identification with Carrie as a marginalised sexual Other, ‘outing’ her sexuality to her oppressive mother, proves a powerful starting point for an
analysis of the transformative pleasures that the horror genre holds for the gay spectator. This is demonstrated in the queer theatrical and cinematic
appropriations of De Palma’s work. In queer horror gay men utilise the
masquerade, as analysed by Joan Riviere and Mary Ann Doane, to perform
exaggerated gender traits (both feminine and masculine). This suggests an
oscillation between a rejection of any association with shameful feminin-
ity and a powerful identification with the female subject and her repressed place within patriarchal, heteronormative structures. At once, the gay male spectator of horror film experiences an empathetic connection with the
feminine, whilst also desperately wanting to be recognised as ‘not woman’.

Queer appropriations of Carrie foreground femininity’s masquerade and then exaggerate it to the point of the grotesque as a means of fending off
gay effeminacy via excessive cross-gender performance. The gay man’s
desire for remasculinisation can be seen in an ironic performance of failed femininity which masks his failed masculinity. This is often done at the
expense of the female identities being parodied. Yet Carrie’ s pointed narrative, which deals with burgeoning sexual difference and of coping with
the powers embodied in that difference, clearly resonates with the gay male spectator as a celebration of Otherness.

The wealth of Carrie adaptations and cinematic references throughout queer horror extends to Chapter 2’s exploration of Charles Lum’s experimental video Indelible. The work provides evidence of a complex negotiation by the gay male subject of a masochistic jouissance, at once feminising and re-masculinising by its dis-identification with abject femininity.

Reviewing Carrie and the other film texts cited in Indelible from a contemporary perspective summons up a nostalgic contemplation of a pre-AIDS
period in gay male culture. The horror and pornographic film sources
reveal a simultaneous un/pleasure in remembering a gay male hedonism
that is now, indelibly, scarred by AIDS. As such, the fusion of genres sets the template for the formal and aesthetic elements of queer horror. The
consequent attraction and repulsion in regard to the gay male body con-
nects it with that of the eviscerated body of the horror film. Lum’s contemplation of Carrie’ s chief symbol of the feminine abject (menstrual blood) is conflated with an understanding of the gay masculine abject (semen).

194

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

The film both celebrates it and warns of its potential to pollute, literally in the spread of sexually transmitted disease and also as a cultural symbol of sexual Otherness. Once again, Indelible also reveals a desperate wish for a distancing from shameful femininity in its presentation of the hypermasculine Gage Men and in the remasculinising trauma of indulging in the
horrifically alluring pleasures of unprotected gay sex. Indelible represents gay male anxieties around alienation within the community, specifically
via Lum as an HIV positive gay man who does not practice anal sex. In
this sense, queer horror provides a vehicle through which to enunciate
gay men’s personal and cultural anxieties around isolation and shame. The
experimental form of the film allows for a genre-led contemplation of the
elements of horror that appeal to gay men. The appropriation and parody
of its tropes can be seen in Indelible’ s textual ‘dress up’, worn in the composite layers seen in the drag theatrical variations Carrie inspires.

Chapter 3 and 4’s analysis of the emerging Gaysploitation horror sub-genre points to its origins in exploitation cinema but suggests that the gay male directors whose works are discussed not only exploit gay masculinity but also adopt and rework the metaphorical conventions of the horror film for their own ends. The works discussed in this chapter clearly share
the low-budget, aesthetically minimal qualities of the factory-produced
sub-genre. The parodic appropriation of slasher conventions is perhaps
their most obvious trope, foregrounding the sub-genre’s softcore eroticism
to change the gender of the typically objectified female and fetishise the
male body. The framed out murders of female victims are supplanted by
the eroticised deaths of almost exclusively male victims, further conflating sex with death. The sub-genre’s comic sexualising of this violence suggests that the chief appeal of the horror genre for the gay spectator may lie in its eroticising of trauma.

The absence of women across Gaysploitation horror reveals more
about its representation of masculinity. While the films and television series discussed deal in cultural stereotypes that exploit their attractive young male leads, this also extends to a sub-cultural critique of gay masculinities.

Gaysploitation horror reveals fears of an ageing, clonish homogeneity. Its
portrayal of gay masculinity moves from the homoerotic to implicit homo-
sexuality to explicit portrayals of gay men; its narratives idealise a macho, straight-acting masculinity in which gayness becomes incidental. At times,

195

Queer Horror Film and Television
as in October Moon, Gaysploitation overtly deals with the gender anxieties of gay men within hetero – and homonormative ideologies that impose
femininity upon them.

Gaysploitation horror such as David DeCoteau’s The Brotherhood and

Here! TV Gothic horror soaps Dante’s Cove and The Lair point to a homoerotic aesthetic that privileges straight-acting masculinity and often reveals a desire to bed straight men. This dissertation’s consideration of gay directors working in the seemingly reactionary confines of exploitation cinema,
concludes that the reception of Gaysploitation often encounters compara-
ble problems to the female-directed sexploitation films that Pam Cook dis-
cusses. Working within exploitation conventions that trade in stereotypical and often oppressive images of gender and sexuality, queer horror’s excessively obvious presentation of stereotyped homosexuality, consciously or
unconsciously, draws attention to this unrealistic and unnatural construc-
tion. More recent Gaysploitation horror films, such as A Far Cry From

Home, Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror and Socket, depart from this gender conformity to focus on oppressive heterosexist structures of contemporary

Western culture that still demonise homosexuality. The increasing num-
bers of queer horror film releases in recent years and their unapologetic (if not unproblematic) portrayal of gay male characters in lead roles clearly
point to a more progressive representation of homosexuality in the genre.

Chapter 5 extends this consideration of Gaysploitation horror’s potential to reveal, and therefore challenge, naturalistic stereotypes of gay
masculinity often represented in more mainstream cinema. It discusses

Hellbent’s appropriation of the slasher horror formula and its character types, including the Final Boy. Etheredge’s film demonstrates queer horror’s almost complete removal of women, with its satirical take on Clover’s female survivor allowing the chaste and conservative Eddie (Dylan Fergus)

to come to terms with his homosexuality and effectively re-masculinise
himself via symbolic phallic empowerment. The film also offers the poten-
tial for a critique of imposed heteronormative gender forms with its satirical exaggeration of the Tom of Finland-inspired stereotypes. Yet, while queer horror can take a parodic distance from its portrayal of performative masculinity even this joke machismo raises further questions about gay
men’s ‘worshipful tribute’ to straight masculinity.

196

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

Chapter 6 argues that while queer horror grows evermore explicit in its representations of homosexuality and allows for a more open portrayal of
contemporary gay life; the horror genre also works to channel its repres-
sions. The multi-layered excesses of the horror form mask gay shame, ‘cov-
ering up’ gay men’s anxieties about their own problematic masculinities.

The performative, self-referential, and seemingly celebratory, pleasures
of the genre resound throughout this study: in the trans-sex identifica-
tion of drag- Carrie performance in chapter 1; via the digital layering and superimpositions of Carrie, LA Tool and Die and the other moving image texts within Indelible that are discussed in chapter 2; in the adoption of straight-acting machismo and parody/pastiche of influential horror film
styles in Gaysploitation horror; the fancy dress parody of machismo in

Hellbent; in the faux-zombies of Otto, the zombie-assimilation in In the Flesh and the pantomime-play of American Horror Story.

This overview of the continuing emergence of a queer horror aes-
thetic has revealed a trend in gay men’s use of the horror genre’s tropes
and conventions between 2000–14. I recognise that this study of just over
a decade’s films is bound by time constraints and offers only a snapshot
of gay male anxiety in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Its sample is also limited to a consideration of Western horror cin-
ema and might well encourage future investigation into other cinema’s
representations of homosexuality in horror and increasing developments
in television horror. Where homosexuality in horror may once have been
portrayed allusively, recent representations have moved towards more
explicit depictions of sexuality. Queer horror has turned the focus of fear upon itself, on its own communities and subcultures. If the horror genre’s
function is to represent ‘the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses’4, then I want to conclude similarly that the queer horror sub-genre works to configure the struggle for recognition
of all that gay culture represses or oppresses. Queer horror depictions of the monster have become more complex and monstrous tropes no longer
assume a heterosexual norm. Instead, they now represent aspects of mas-
culinity that perturb gay men. Once homosexuality is rendered explicit,
the horror genre demands a new outlet for its contemplation of repressed
anxieties and fears.

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Queer Horror Film and Television

Although the monstrous metaphor still exists in queer horror, it is now
configured to represent gay men’s fears. Firstly, it suggests their fear of association with shameful femininity that is based on heterosexist assumptions of their failed masculinity (something which the eroticising of hypermasculinity further underlines). It also symbolises gay men’s anxieties
about fitting into a ‘deadening’ gay subculture that privileges bourgeois
homogeneity, conformist gym-body ideals and a valorisation of youth. It
highlights a post-AIDS guilt that continues to impose itself upon a gay culture still haunted by the epidemic. Most importantly, queer horror’s most
recent reworking of the monster figure to symbolise homophobic Others
points towards the fragility of the conditional acceptance of homosexuality as defined by heteronormative standards. While this inversion may suggest a celebratory ownership of the horror genre’s conventions, the afore-
mentioned instances of homophobic right-wing ‘monsters’ in queer horror
worryingly reflect a swelling of the same intolerance in real life. Queer
horror’s swing away from its classic predecessors may well only indicate a
temporary shift in the demonising of homosexuality.

198

Notes

Introduction

1 See for instance: Robin Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’

in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods II (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985 [1979]), pp. 196–205; Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988) pp. 47–72; Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 324–40; Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

2 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 6.

3 For the purposes of this study, ‘homosexual’ should be understood as a subject who is ‘sexually attracted to people of one’s own sex’ ( Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 717). Previously used in a derogatory sense, the term ‘gay’ began to be used in the 1960s by gay men as a counter-cultural celebration to the existing sexual categorisations that demonised homosexuality and naturalised heterosexuality. The OED defines gay in adjectival terms as ‘related to or used by homosexuals’, but also refers to 199

Notes to Pages 2–7
a more antiquated definition as ‘light-hearted and carefree’. As a noun the definition is more specific, ‘a homosexual, especially a male homosexual’ (p. 832), I also want to understand ‘gay’ as referring implicitly to gay male but recognises that in some wider contexts it can be used of both homosexual men and women. Queer has multiple definitions; the OED lists the definitions from

‘strange; odd’ to ‘slightly ill’ with its origins deriving from the sixteenth century German ‘quer’ meaning oblique or perverse (p. 1442). In recent adage,
queer was not used colloquially to define homosexuality until the late nineteenth century and has moved from a pejorative term to a re-appropriation
of it as a more celebratory term of identification to non-normative sexuality.

It should be noted that its usage as a deliberately offensive term still exists concurrently. Currently, queer should not be understood as an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity, but more so as a politically infused rejection of normalising structures that refuses to fix identity on a subject on the basis of biological sex and binary gender opposites.

4 Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 274.

5 Whitney Davis, (ed.), Studies in Gay and Lesbian Art History (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), p. 2.

6 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 256.

7 Robert J. Corber, and Stephen Valocchi, Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Bodmin: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), p. 4.

8 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998), p. 565.

9 Robin Wood, ‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’ in Film Comment 14/1

(January – February 1978), p. 13.

10 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 32.

11 Bersani, Homos, p. 43.

12 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack On Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), p. 179.

13 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? , p. 179.

14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 173.

15 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p. 141.

16 The OED 2nd ed. (2003) defines parody as ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect […] an imitation or version of something that falls short of the real thing’ (p. 1281). As opposed to ‘pastiche’ which it defines as ‘an artistic work in style that imitates that of another work, artist or period’ (p. 1287).

17 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1987]), p. 29.

200

Notes to Pages 7–12

18 Jose Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 91.

19 Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean Bertrand, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2004), p. 312

20 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 13.

21 Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 191.

22 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 15.

23 For example see: Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Peter Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’ in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (eds), You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

24 Bruce LaBruce and Jason Paul Collum both indicate in personal interviews the application of Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) to their respective films: LA Zombie (2010) in relation to ‘unheimlich’ sexual practices of the reanimating gay zombie figure; and in October Moon (2005) and November Son (2008), Collum utilises his own understanding and teaching of Freud’s work (as a university lecturer in film theory at the University of Wisconsin) into the direction of his disturbing dreamscapes.

25 Robin Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’ in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods II (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985

[1979]), p. 197.

26 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 198.

27 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 200.

28 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 201.

29 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 199

30 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 201.

31 Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 204.

32 Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 51.

33 Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’, p. 57.

34 Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 324.

35 Hanson, ‘Undead’, p. 325.

36 Hanson, ‘Undead’, p. 331

37 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 4.

201

Notes to Pages 13–22

38 Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, p. 139.

39 Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, p. 9.

40 Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, p. 26.

41 Halberstam’s study is largely given over to a queer reading of its symbolic potential (for example in Leatherface’s (Gunnar Hanson) fluid gender in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). The Silence of the Lambs is one of the only films in Halberstam’s book that makes a point of highlighting its monster’s bisexuality explicitly via the character of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).

42 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 2.

43 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 15.

44 Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 15.

45 Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Modern Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996 [1984]), p. 20.

46 Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, p. 22.

47 Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, p. 23.

48 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 12.

49 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 14.

50 The veiled, campy line, ‘we belong dead’ delivered to Dr Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger) by the creature (Boris Karloff) in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is a tongue-in-cheek recognition of their shared monstrosity.

51 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 16.

52 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 13.

53 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 274.

54 Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, p. 239.

55 Harry M. Benshoff, ‘“Way to Gay To Be Ignored: The Production and Reception of Queer Horror in the Twenty-First Century’ (2015) in John Edgar Browning
and Caroline Joan S. Picart (eds) Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) pp. 131–45.

56 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’

in Mandy Merck (ed.), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 234.

57 Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, 4th edn. (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 446.

1 ‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

1 Gary Bettinson, ‘Resurrecting Carrie’ in Wickham Clayton (ed.), Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 131–46.

202

Notes to Pages 24–33

2 Stephen King, Carrie (London: New English Library, Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), pp. 2–114.

3 King, Carrie, pp. 115–231.

4 King, Carrie, pp. 235–42.

5 My definition of epistolary is, ‘a story written in the form of letters, or letters with journals’, taken from Margaret Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 322–3.

6 Leigh A. Ehlers, ‘ Carrie: Book and Film’ in Literature/Film Quarterly 9/1 (1981), pp. 32–3, notes Carrie’s many literary antecedents, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) with the use of letters, diaries, transcriptions of wax disc recordings and newspaper reports.

7 King, Carrie, pp. 164–5.

8 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 4.

9 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, pp. 103–7.

10 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 106.

11 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 103.

12 Peter Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’ in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (eds), You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), p. 91.

13 Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’, p. 90.

14 Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2004), p. 244.

15 Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’, pp. 91–2.

16 Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’, p. 92.

17 Klaus Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, Men and Masculinities 3/4 (2001), p. 375.

18 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 384.

19 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 388.

20 Hutchings, ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’, p. 92.

21 Although I may transpose such theories onto Carrie, it should be noted that the film is not a traditional slasher. The film has two Final Girls, Carrie and Sue Snell, one of whom, Carrie, can only be considered as a hybrid of victim-hero and monster; in which case, the film also has two monsters.

22 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 389.

23 Stephen King cited in Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 3.

203

Notes to Pages 33–39

24 For critical writings on De Palma’s Carrie see: Carol J. Clover, ‘Carrie and the Boys’ in Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror

Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993); William Paul, Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and

Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) and Shelley Stamp Lindsey, ‘Horror, Femininity and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 329–45.

25 King, Carrie, pp. 40–1.

26 Sandor Ferenczi, ‘The Nosology of Male Homosexuality’ in Sex in Psycho-Analysis: Contributions to Psychoanalysis (New York: Dover Publications, 1956 [1916]), p. 266.

27 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ in Hendrick M. Ruitenbeek (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1966 [1929]), p. 212.

28 Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, p. 213.

29 Mulvey argues that the female spectator, being denied a cinematic gaze in both a diegetic and extra-diegetic sense, has to become a metaphorical transvestite in order to identify with male protagonists and phallocentric framing on screen to afford herself a look or a gaze by proxy.

30 Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity (or entitled Femaleness)’ in An Outline on Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 2003 [1933]), pp. 102–3.

31 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’

in Mandy Merck (ed.), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 228.

32 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 234.

33 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 235.

34 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 235.

35 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 234.

36 Shelley Stamp Lindsey, ‘Horror, Femininity and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 288.

37 Stamp Lindsey, ‘Horror, Femininity and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty’, p. 289.

38 Linda Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’ in Patricia Erens (ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 137–62.

39 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18.

40 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 151.

204

Notes to Pages 39–46

41 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 152.

42 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 240.

43 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 156.

44 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 144.

45 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 154.

46 Jacques Lacan, ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 1998 [1978]), p. 104.

47 Harry Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’ in Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (eds), The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 13.

48 Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, p. 18.

49 Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, p. 17.

50 Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, p. 17. Brod discusses a repressed anality in the very term ‘masculinity’, ‘[a] more ‘feminine’ anal eroticism, a repression also linked to the suppression of homosexuality. The masculine mask is worn in order to achieve a normative performance-oriented phallic heterosexual male sexuality.’

51 Williams, ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, p. 151.

52 Montrelay, Michele, ‘Inquiry into Femininity’, m/f 1 (1978), pp. 91–2.

53 Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, p. 234.

54 Stamp Lindsey, ‘Horror, Femininity and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty’, p. 289.

55 See, for instance, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis in Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1971).

56 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and his Films 2nd edn (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1985), p. 122.

57 Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and his Films, p. 122.

58 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 139.

59 Larry S. Ledford, review of Carrie – The Musical, 1988; available online: http://
helensdelicious.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/surprise-surprise-terry-hands-blood.

html (accessed 25 October 2015).

60 Ken Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), p. 352.

61 Ken Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, p. 352.

205

Notes to Pages 46–52

62 A recent revival of Carrie – The Musical was staged by MCC Theater in March 2012 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Despite opening with favour-able reviews, the production closed in April 2012. Most recently, a short
revival of the musical has also been staged at London’s Southwark Playhouse in May 2015.

63 Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, p. 354.

64 Becky Ebenkamp, ‘You Make Me Sick!’, The Prism: San Francisco Fashion and Culture, June 1996; http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/pubs/prism/
jun96/29.html (accessed 25 October 2015).

65 Tony Vaguely, personal interview, 2007.

66 Vaguely, personal interview, 2007.

67 Sister Dana Van Iquity, ‘Carryin’ on with Carrie’, San Francisco Bay Times, 11

January 1992; available online: http://sfbaytimes.com/category/entertainment/
sister-dana-sez/ (link no longer working).

68 David Cerda, taken from press release for ‘Scarrie the Musical’; available online:

http://carriefansite.blogspot.co.uk/2007/06/scarrie-musical-press-release

.html (accessed 3 November 2015).

69 Erik Jackson, taken from Jackson’s script of ‘Carrie’, personal copy obtained December 2006.

70 Sherry Vine, interview with Sherry Vine, Genre Magazine, 12 January 2006

(link no longer working).

71 Erik Jackson, personal interview with Jackson by email, 15 November 2007.

72 Jackson, personal interview with Jackson by email, 15 November 2007.

73 Jackson, personal interview with Jackson by email 15 November 2007. Jackson reveals that ‘The cult status of the musical infuses my own adaptation, especially since I was doing the play in a way that embraced the camp aspects that the musical failed to.’

74 Jackson, personal interview with Jackson by email, 15 November 2007.

75 Vaguely, personal interview, 2007. In the interview, Vaguely defends the ambiguous elements of The Sick and Twisted Players’ Carrie: ‘Gay men have always appropriated images of strong outsider women for camp purposes. Also, they are fascinated/repelled by women’s bodies (or girl cooties, if you will)…

No one was guilty [of misogyny], and no regrets over it. I’d say it’s the men who don’t identify with Carrie are the misogynists. Note: In several of our productions females did drag to play male roles!’.

76 Queer horror film parodies of Carrie include: Another Gay Movie (2006) which features a fantasy sequence in which a gay couple are crowned ‘Queens of the Prom’ dragged up as Carrie and Tommy having a a bucket of semen, rather
than blood, pulled onto them; I Was A Teenage Werebear! (2011) by gay filmmaker Tim Sullivan which features a young college student (Brent Corrigan)

whose repressed homosexual desires erupt, turning him into a young monster
bear-cub; Carrie’s opening shower scene is parodied as a gay werebear is abused by jocks while they chant ‘plug-him-up!’.

206

Notes to Pages 53–62

77 Carole-Anne Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 33

78 Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’, p. 33.

79 Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’, p. 33.

80 Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’, p. 54.

81 Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’, p. 44.

82 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 388.

2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

1 Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 879.

2 Charles Lum, personal interviews in person/via social media, various dates 2004–5.

3 Cited on Lum’s website: www.clublum.com (accessed 25 November 2015)

4 Lum’s use of superimposition, one image taking precedence over another is extensive. To clearly define the image which retains the higher clarity (by no means indicating its importance, but drawing the viewer’s attention to a specific image), I will define the images in layers: the primary layer will be referred to as ‘superimposed’ over; the secondary layer will be described as ‘sub-imposed’

under the former. They each, at times, visually dissolve over and underneath each other and, therefore, they are interchangeable.

5 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

6 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1987]), pp. 3–30.

7 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 11.

8 Sean Abley documents that Joe Gage is also known as Tim Kincaid and throughout the 80s was also a prolific horror and sci-fi director in Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press Inc., 2013), pp. 216–21.

9 Gary Morris, ‘Keep On Truckin’ An Interview with Joe Gage’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 31 October 2003; http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/gage.php

( accessed 25 October 2015).

10 Barebacking derives its name from equestrian pursuits of riding horses without a saddle, and perhaps draws on the maschismo that this wild equestrian culture is associated with. It is interesting to note that the practice of barebacking, while not solely confined to the act of seeking deliberate infection with the HIV virus is, to some extent, limited to the sexual orientation of its participants. It is an exclusive subculture extended only to gay male sexuality.

207

Notes to Pages 65–82

11 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 1.

12 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 71.

13 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10–11.

14 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

15 Tim Dean, ‘Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving’, Massachusetts Review 49/1&2 (2008), pp. 80–94.

16 Dean, ‘Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving’, p. 81.

17 The definition of outlaw draws from Leo Bersani’s understanding of the transgressive gay male ‘Outlaw’ as portrayed in the works of Jean Genet and Andre Gide discussed in Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 113–81; p. 215.

18 Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 138.

19 Dean, ‘Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving’, p. 86.

20 Dean, ‘Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving’, p. 85–6.

21 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.

22 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 75.

23 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, p. 70.

24 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 7.

25 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 14.

26 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1987]), p. 3.

27 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 19.

28 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

29 Thomas Laquer’s Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003) considers a largely Victorian cultural view of masturbation as a ‘polluting’ disease with infectious potential, both bodily and affecting the subject’s mental state of mind.

30 (Briefel, 2005: 24).

31 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

32 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

33 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 28.

34 Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), Introduction XVI.

35 Lum, personal interviews, 2004–5.

36 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 3.

208

Notes to Pages 82–96

37 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 16.

38 Carole-Anne Tyler, ‘Boys will be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 40.

39 See for example, Van Dyck, The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (after 1621), Mantegna, St. Sebastian, (1457–8), Botticelli, St. Sebastian (1474), Perugino, St. Sebastian (1493–4), Ribera, St. Sebastian (1630).

40 See for instance T.S. Eliot’s pre-war poem ‘Love Song Of St. Sebastian’, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Suddenly Last Summer (Manciewitz, US

1958); and Derek Jarman’s film of the St. Sebastian story, Sebastiane (GB 1976).

T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of St. Sebastian’ is also featured in an article by Richard, A. Kaye, “A Spendid Readiness for Death: T.S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian and the First World War” in Modernism/Modernity Vol. 6

No. 2 April 1999, pp. 107–34.

41 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 63.

3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and

Gaysploitation Horror

1 Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

2 Pam Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen 17/2 (Summer 1976), p. 123.

3 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, pp. 123–4.

4 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 21–2.

5 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, p. 123.

6 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, p. 124.

7 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, pp. 124–5.

8 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, p. 126.

9 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 229.

10 David DeCoteau, personal telephone interview May 2006.

11 Web blogs like http://billylovesstue.blogspot.com, (accessed 25 October 2015), a blog for ‘homos who love horror (and the non homos who love them)’ praise the film and it has achieved notoriety within US gay magazine publications as XY and Bound and Gagged.

12 Grizzly Rage (2007) was co-produced by the Sci-Fi Channel; DeCoteau’s latest queer retellings of the Edgar Allen Poe short stories and his series of 13:13 serial horrors (2011–ongoing) are entirely financed by Here! TV.

13 Figure taken from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232908/business (accessed 25 October 2015).

209

Notes to Pages 97–106

14 Rapid Heart Pictures, a subsidiary of Regent Pictures initially began advertising it catalogue of films as ‘celebrations of the male form’ on their website: http://
www.rapidheart.com/about/ (accessed 30 November 2015).

15 DeCoteau, personal interview 2006.

16 Taken from the Region 1 import DVD jacket for Voodoo Academy (2000).

17 DeCoteau, personal interview 2006.

18 Small1022, ‘IMDB comments for Ring of Darkness (2004), [IMBD] Available at
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372803/ (accessed 25 October 2015).

19 Horroribe_Horror_Films from Outer Mongolia, ‘IMDB comments for The Brotherhood IV: The Complex (2005), [IMBD] Available at http://www.imdb

.com/title/tt0445236/ (accessed 25 October 2015).

20 Undeadmachine669, ‘IMDB comments for The Brotherhood (2001), [IMBD]

Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265105/ (accessed 2 January 2006).

21 DeCoteau, personal interview, 2006.

22 Such a formation serves to display an equal line up of both male and female characters, suggesting a non-gender-biased pattern of slayings. The triangular pattern also re-situates homoerotic relations between men legitimised by the presence of a woman – converting it into a homoerotic/homosocial triangle.

23 DeCoteau, personal interview 2006.

24 Lee Anna Mariglia, ‘I want to suck your…blood?! Queer Vampires, 1980’s American Politics, and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys’, Eye Candy, 2006;
http://eyecandy.ucsc.edu (accessed 25 October 2015).

25 However the films are just as much defined by their inclusion of a ‘certain type’

of female figure – the ‘fag-hag’ or ‘fruit fly’ (a straight woman who remains close friends with gay men without any sexual intimacy but with physical closeness) – as they are by the exclusion of femininity.

26 King-To Yeung, Mindy Stombler and Renee Wharton, ‘Gay and Greek: The Identity Politics of Gay Fraternities’ in Social Problems 47/1 (February 2000), p. 141.

27 Their study considers Delta Lambda Phi, the first gay run fraternity set up in 1986 in Washington D.C. The fraternity is open to all ‘gay, bisexual and progressive men’ and was formed with the mission statement: ‘To enhance the quality of life among Gay, Bisexual and Progressive Men by providing dignified and
purposeful social, service and recreational activities’. Taken from the fraternity’s website: www.dlp.org

28 Anthony W. James, ‘The Defenders of Tradition: College Social Fraternities, Race and Gender 1845–1980,’ PhD Dissertation, University of Mississippi

(1998), p. 20.

29 Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes toward a ‘Political Economy’

of Sex’ in Rayne Rapp Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210.

210

Notes to Pages 106–118

30 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1–2

31 Elizabeth Young, ‘Here Comes the Bride: Wedding, Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 314.

32 Young, ‘Here Comes the Bride: Wedding, Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein’, p. 315.

33 DeCoteau, personal interview 2006.

34 Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003).

35 Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body (Guildford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 48.

36 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, p. 123.

4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

1 Taken from Here! TV’s website: http://www.heretv.com/news/here-tv-celebrates-

10-years (accessed 30 November 2015).

2 James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee, Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives 7th edn (Seattle, WA: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), p. 221.

3 The show has featured only a few out gay male leads, including Charlie David (Toby) and, recently in Season 3, Reichen Lehmkuhl (Trevor).

4 I discuss the hysterical melodramatics of Queer Gothic Soap in more detail in: Darren Elliott-Smith, ‘ ‘‘Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik”: Unearthing Gay Male Anxieties in Gothic Soaps Dante’s Cove (2005–2007) and The Lair (2007–2009)’

in Michael Stewart (ed.), Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 96–113.

5 David Buchbinder’s definition of the term in ‘StraightActing: Masculinity, Subjectivity and (Same-Sex) Desire’ in Masculinities and Identities (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), is based upon the web-based phenomenon
of Straightacting.com, an internet dating forum that eschews feminine behaviour in men. Buchbinder applies the concept of performance and Butler’s notion of performativity to gay male behaviour and suggests that there is a longstanding homo/hetero binary via which the homosexual male identity negotiates with
cultural structures of male-oriented power.

6 Jason Paul Collum, personal interview via email correspondence, November 2007.

7 One review calls upon viewers to ‘consider it Gay-tal Attraction’, Louis Fowler, Colorado Spring Independent. Taken from October Moon’ s website http://www

.octobermoonthefilm.com/reviews.htm (accessed 12 October 2012).

8 Collum, personal interview November 2007.

211

Notes to Pages 119–135

9 Sean Abley, John Carrozza & Doug Prinzivalli, Interview taken from the director’s commentary track on the DVD of Socket, (2007).

10 Abley, DVD Interview, 2007.

11 See, for instance, writings on Cronenberg’s monstrous narratives on the human body turning upon itself such as Mark Browning, David Cronenberg: Author or Film-maker? (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2007).

12 In Rabid (1977), Rose (Marilyn Chambers) is injured in a motorcycle accident, and a subsequent skin graft underneath her arm leaves her scarred with a vagina-like opening and an increasing sexual voracity which infects her victims with the same insatiable lust.

13 See Cynthia Freeland’s article ‘Penetrating Keanu: New Holes but the Same Old Shit’ in William Irwin (ed.), The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Co, 2002), pp. 205–15, which discusses eXistenZ alongside The Matrix (1999) as male penetration fantasies.

14 Elizabeth Young, ‘Here Comes the Bride: Wedding, Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 314.

15 The performance of femininity here is an extra-cinematically queer one, since the role of Dr. Emily Anderson is played by trans-gendered actress

Alexandra Billings and is explicitly referenced in the film’s ‘Making Of ’

featurette.

16 Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ in On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1984 [1915]), p. 126.

17 Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press Inc., 2013), p. 230.

18 Tim Sullivan, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 223.

19 Sullivan, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 224.

20 Sullivan, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 223.

21 Sullivan, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 226.

22 Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 15.

23 Alan Rowe Kelly, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 16.

24 Rowe Kelly, Interview taken from Sean Abley, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors, p. 16.

212

Notes to Pages 136–146

5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

1 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 35.

2 Etheredge first termed Hellbent as such during his online campaign via Fangoria and the film’s website, in which he appealed to fans to come up with the title for the ‘first gay slasher film’ this is noted in Greg Reifsteck, article ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, Fangoria Issue. 238 (November 2004), pp. 78–81.

3 Pam Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen 17/2 (Summer 1976), p. 57

4 Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, p. 55.

5 In the screener notes for the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2005, an interview with Paul Etheredge states that Hellbent was created to fill a gap in the ‘gay market […] for more mainstream type movies’.

6 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, p. 78.

7 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, p. 79.

8 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1956 [1922]).

9 Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 11.

10 Etheredge, taken from Hellbent’s website: www.hellbent-movie.com/index.php

(accessed 30 November 2015)

11 In the DVD’s Making of Featurette, actor Hank Harris admits his own reservations were unfounded as a straight actor once he found out that the other actors were all straight and consequently were ‘playing gay’.

12 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, p. 80.

13 Micha Ramakers, Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity and Homosexuality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 38–9.

14 Ramakers, Dirty Pictures, pp. 38–9.

15 Ramakers, Dirty Picutres, pp. 134–5.

16 Ramakers, Dirty Pictures, p. 81.

17 Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 133–4.

18 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 43.

19 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, p. 80.

20 October Moon’ s drag figure is a two-faced, bitchy peripheral figure named

‘Chantal’ (Chad J. Morrell) who threatens the closeted gay male with a fear of exposure.

21 Sigmund Freud, ‘The History of an Infantile Neurosis’ in The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases (London: Penguin, 2002 [1918]), p. 240.

22 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, p. 277. My parentheses.

23 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, pp. 276–7.

24 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, p. 283.

213

Notes to Pages 146–152

25 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, p. 282.

26 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, p. 263.

27 Freud, ‘A History of an Infantile Neurosis’, p. 240.

28 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 111.

This is not to state that Freud’s paternal figure in the Wolf Man case was indeed a homosexual or that the father figure seduced the patient. Bersani simply maps the dynamic between Freud’s Primal father/son to gay male relationships that may reflect younger gay male subjects’ desire for more mature, symbolically paternal gay male types.

29 Leo Bersani, Homos, p. 111.

30 Leo Bersani, Homos, pp. 111–12.

31 Leeches! features a punitive Coach character who forces steroids on his young swim team charges; Voodoo Academy’s Reverend Carmichael controls and voyeuristically spies on his young religious trainees and Wolves of Wall Street features Eric Roberts as a lupine head of a demonic law firm, who only takes on attractive male employees. October Moon features an absent but influential father figure as it is revealed that killer Eliot’s father left his mother for another man; Socket features a daddy and bear-cub relationship, and in Bruce La Bruce’s Otto; or Up with Dead People young zombie Otto barely-remembers his own father as he stares at the meat carcasses in his
butcher shop window.

32 ‘Chronus’ father Uranus feared being overthrown by his children and confined them inside Gaia; upon being born, ‘Chronus’ castrated his father Uranus in revenge. Together with his sister Rhea, ‘Chronus’ ruled over the Titans but, repeating his father’s fear of being overthrown, ‘Chronus’ ate his children one by one, save Zeus who eventually deposed his father. Taken from Roy Willis
ed. World Mythology (Reference Classics) by (London: Duncan Baird Publishing 2006), pp. 129–30.

33 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, p. 79.

34 Leo Bersani, Homos, p. 122.

35 Reifsteck’s ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’ continues that ‘Eddie […] is what Etheredge-Ouzts describes as his ‘Final Girl character’. ‘He’s a ‘guy from a police family who is a little uptight, but has a fascination with the bad boys on the Strip’, p. 79.

36 Riefsteck, ‘Queer Eye for the Dead Guy’, pp. 79–80.

37 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, pp. 85–6.

38 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 86

39 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 48.

40 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 103.

41 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 45.

214

Notes to Pages 152–163

42 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 51.

43 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 60.

44 Klaus Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, Men and Masculinities 3/4 (2001), p. 386.

45 Here Rieser references the work of Christopher Sharrett, ‘The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant Ed., (University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 254–72.

46 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 388.

47 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, p. 359.

48 Rieser, ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, pp. 377–9.

49 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, pp. 166–7.

50 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 167.

51 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 173.

52 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 175.

53 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 206.

54 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6–18.

55 D.N. Rodowick, ‘The Difficulty of Difference’ in Wide Angle Vol. 5 (1982), p. 7.

56 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 187.

57 John Rechy in Patrick Higgins, ‘Gay Sunshine: Interview with John Rechy’ in A Queer Reader, (New York: The New Press, 1994 [1978]) p. 250.

58 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, p. 35.

59 Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, pp.

177–8.

60 Freud and Lacan’s interpretations of identification in relation to oral male homosexual cannibalistic fantasies, via Diana Fuss’s article ‘Oral Incorporation: The Silence of the Lambs’ (1995) are mapped out in Darren Elliott-Smith ‘Gay Zombies: Consuming Masculinity and Community in Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or Up With Dead People (2008) and LA. Zombie (2010)’, in Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones (eds) Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead (Jefferson, NC MacFarland, 2014), pp. 148–72.

61 I discuss the queer appeal of the incestuous straight relationship between the demon slaying Winchester Bros in the television horror series Supernatural at length in Go be gay for that poor, dead intern’: Conversion Fantasies and Queer Anxieties in TV’s Supernatural”, in Supernatural: TV Goes to Hell (Ed. Stacey Abbott and David Lavery), (McFarland, 2011), pp. 105–11.

215

Notes to Pages 164–171

6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

1 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2006), p. 177.

2 Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body (Guildford; New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 59.

3 Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Susannah Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 63.

4 Leo Bersani, ‘Shame on You’ in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips (eds), Intimacies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 35.

5 Bersani, ‘Shame on You’, p. 32.

6 See for instance: ‘Death is the New Pornography!’: Gay Zombies and Hypermasculine Cannibalism in Queer Horror in Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and TV. Ed Leon Hunt (I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 148–171 and

‘Gay Zombies: Consuming Masculinity and Community in Bruce LaBruce’s

Otto; or Up With Dead People (2008) and LA Zombie (2010)’, Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead (eds) Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones (MacFarland, 2014), pp. 140–58.

7 These include social website www.crawlofthedead.com which advertises zombie pub crawls and marches, including Iowa’s City Zombie March, the Zombie Walk in London and Canada and World Zombie Day, London, October

2008. The zombie is figured in art exhibitions, undead still-life and performance art with LaBruce recently exhibiting his ‘Untitled Hardcore Zombie

Project’ at the Soho Theatre, London in 2009. Literary appropriations include Seth-Grahame Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books, 2009).

8 Michelle Castillo, ‘Rotten to the Core’, New York Press, 26 May 2010. Available at: http://www.nypress.com/rotten-to-the-core (accessed 25 October 2015).

9 Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Dead Metaphors/Undead Allegories’ in Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson (eds), Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014), p. 95.

10 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 139.

11 Bruce LaBruce, The Reluctant Pornographer (New York: Gutter Press, 1997), p. 16.

12 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 152.

13 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1987]), p. 30.

14 Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 191.

15 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 15.

216

Notes to Pages 171–179

16 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 30.

17 Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, p. 30.

18 See, for instance, Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine, 2013), Maggie (Henry Hobson, 2015) and the television series I Zombie (The CW 2015-ongoing).

19 Cathy Johnson, ‘The Return of the Undead: The Walking Dead, In the Flesh and Les Revenants’ (31 October 2013) in Critical Studies on Television (CST

Online) available at: http://cstonline.tv/the-return-of-the-dead (accessed, 30 November 2015).

20 Dominic Mitchell, ‘BBC Writers Room’ (26 February 2013) available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/86bf7cf4-ec01-301b-
be37-3165706ab47e (accessed 23 June 2015).

21 Johnson, ‘The Return of the Undead’.

22 Louise Mellor, ‘Dominic Mitchell interview: what’s next for In the Flesh?’ (8th June 2014) available at: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/in-the-flesh/30824/
dominic-mitchell-interview-whats-next-for-in-the-flesh (accessed 8 August 2015).

23 Mellor, ‘Dominic Mitchell interview: what’s next for In the Flesh?’. Evidence is suggested in the show’s mise-en-scène: A Morrissey poster is displayed in Simon’s bedroom and Morrissey’s own bisexuality can be argued to inflect
the show’s more fluid treatment of ambiguous sexuality. Again this resounds with Mitchell’s own personal feelings of exclusion growing up in a small village community: ‘I was the black sheep of the village because I wore cardi-
gans and listened to Morrissey… I remember giving this guy a mix CD and
his father going crazy about it. There was no bad language on it, it was just not seen as macho.’

24 Mellor, ‘Dominic Mitchell interview: what’s next for In the Flesh?’.

25 Stephen Kelly, ‘ In the Flesh: “If Alan Bennett and Ken Loach did a zombie show” ’, 19 April 2014 available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/
features/in-the-flesh-if-alan-bennett-and-ken-loach-did-a-zombie-show-9269709.

html (accessed 8 August 2015)

26 Johnson, ‘The Return of the Undead’.

27 Tushingham also notably appears in In the Flesh throughout season two as the religiously repressive Mrs. Lamb at which point the references to British Social Realism become more obviously an homage.

28 Sara Gwenllian-Jones, ‘The Sex Lives of Cult TV Characters’, Screen 43 (2002), pp. 89–90.

29 Recurring actors include: Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, Lily Rabe, Evan Peters, Denis O’Hare, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Emma Roberts.

30 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 148.

31 Dawn Keetley, ‘Stillborn: the Entropic Gothic of American Horror Story’, Gothic Studies 15/2 (2013), p. 97. Keetley goes on to state that AHS: Murder House 217

Notes to Pages 179–192
manifests ‘what I call the entropic Gothic: its trajectory is only toward exhaustion and stasis […] As entropy transforms energy from useful to useless and ordered to disordered, that energy […] finds its perfect metonymic incarnation in the ‘black hole’ of Constance’s womb.

32 Dawn Keetley, ‘Stillborn: the Entropic Gothic of American Horror Story’, p. 97.

33 Robin Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’ in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods II (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985

[1979]), p. 197.

34 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee.

(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 87–121. Bakhtin maintains that speech and complex cultural discourse across all genres is mixed through and through with heteroglossia (an other’s speech, and many others’ words, appropriated expressions) and are therefore polyphonic (“many-voiced,” incorporating many voices, styles, references, and assumptions not a speaker’s “own”).

35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 173.

36 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p. 141.

37 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 99.

38 Kamilla Elliott, ‘Gothic-Film-Parody’ in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 223–4.

39 Oxford English Dictionary ( OED), Second Edition 2003, p. 1281.

40 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2006), p. 5.

41 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 40.

42 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 177.

43 Lange has been nominated in each successive year of the Primetime Emmy Awards for her performance in AHS since the show’s premiere in 2012. She has won for both Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Mini-Series or a Movie for AHS in 2012 and Outstanding Actress in a Mini-Series or a Movie for AHS: Coven in 2014.

44 Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 174.

45 Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’, pp. 175–6.

Off-Cuts and Conclusions

1 Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 15.

2 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 32.

218

Notes to Pages 193–197

3 Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 256.

4 Robin Wood, ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’ in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods II (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985

[1979]), p. 201.

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231

Selected Filmography

1313: Haunted Frat (2011, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA) 666: Kreepy Kerry (2014, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, Jack Sholder, New Line Cinema/Heron Communications/Smart Egg Pictures/Second Elm

Street Venture, USA)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, Chuck Russell, New Line Cinema/Heron Communications/Smart Egg Pictures/Third Elm

Street Venture, USA)

A Taste of Honey (1961, Tony Richardson, Woodfall Film Productions, UK) Alien (1979, Ridley Scott, Brandywine Productions/Twentieth Century-Fox Productions, USA/UK)

American Horror Story (2011–ongoing, FX Network, USA)

American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron, Am Psycho Productions/Edward

R. Pressman Film/Lions Gate Films/Muse Productions/P.P.S. Films/

Quadra Entertainment/Universal Pictures, USA)

Amityville Horror, The (1979, Stuart Rosenberg, American International Pictures/Cinema 77/Professional Films, USA)

Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy (1999, David DeCoteau, Kremlin Films, USA) Another Gay Movie (2006, Todd Stephens, Luna Pictures/Piloton Entertainment/

Velvet Films, USA)

232

Selected Filmography

Beach Babes from Beyond (1993, David DeCoteau (as Ellen Cabot),

TorchLight Entertainment, USA)

Beach Party (1963, William Asher, American International Pictures/Alta Vista Productions, USA)

Beastly Boyz (2006, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, Canada/USA) Billy Liar (1963, John Schlesinger, Vic Films Productions/Waterfall Productions, UK)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, Francis Ford Coppola, American Zoetrope/

Columbia Pictures Corporation/Osiris Films, USA)

Breed Me (1999, Paul Morris, Treasure Island Media, USA)

Breeding Season (2006, Paul Morris, Treasure Island Media, USA)

Bride of Frankenstein, The (1935, James Whale, Universal Pictures, USA) Brood, The (1979, David Cronenberg, Canadian Film Development

Corporation/Elgin International Films Ltd/Mutual Productions Ltd/

Victor Solnicki Productions, Canada)

Brotherhood, The (aka I’ve Been Watching You) (2001, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures/Regent Entertainment, USA)

Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, The (2001, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA)

Brotherhood III: Young Demons, The (2003, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA/Canada)

Brotherhood IV: The Complex, The (2005, David DeCoteau, Insight Film Studios/Insight Films, Canada)

Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment/

Propaganda Films, USA)

Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma, Red Bank Films, USA)

Carrie (2013, Kimberly Peirce, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Screen Gems/

Misher Films, USA)

Chillerama! (2011, Adam Green/Joe Lynch/Bear McCreary/Adam Rifkin/

Tim Sullivan, ArieScope Pictures, USA)

Creature from the Black Lagoon, The (1954, Jack Arnold, Universal

International Pictures, USA)

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (2006, Chris Diani, Seattle Theatre Project, USA)

Curse of the Puppet Master (1998, David DeCoteau (as Victoria Sloan), Full Moon Entertainment, USA)

233

Queer Horror Film and Television

Curse of the Queerwolf, The (1988, Mark Pirro, Pirromount Productions, USA) Dante’s Cove (2005–7, Sam Irvin, Here! TV, USA)

Dark Shadows (1966–71, ABC, USA)

Deliverance (1972, John Boorman, Warner Bros./Elmer Enterprises, USA) Dracula (1931, Tod Browning, Universal Pictures, USA)

El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978, Joe Gage, HIS Video, USA)

Entity, The (1982, Sidney J. Furie, American Cinema Productions, USA) eXistenZ (1999, David Cronenberg, Alliance Atlantis Communications/

Canadian Television Fund/The Harold Greenberg Fund/The Movie

Network/Natural Nylon Entertainment/Serendipity Point Films/

Téléfilm Canada/Union Générale Cinématographique, Canada/UK)

Fatal Attraction (1987, Adrian Lyne, Paramount Pictures, USA)

Final Link, The (2000, Chi Chi LaRue, All Worlds Video, USA)

Final Stab (2001, David DeCoteau, Cinema Home Video Productions/City Heat Productions/Sidekick Entertainment, USA)

Flesh (1968, Paul Morrissey, Factory Films, USA)

Frankenstein (1931, James Whale, Universal Pictures, USA)

Freaks (1932, Tod Browning, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA)

Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros./Georgetown Productions Inc./Sean S. Cunningham Films, USA)

Frightening, The (2002, David DeCoteau, Amsell Entertainment/City Heat Productions/Rapid Heart Pictures, USA)

Fury, The (1978, Brian De Palma, Frank Yablans Presentations/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, USA)

Gallery of Fear (2012, Alan Rowe Kelly/Anthony G. Sumner, Southpaw Pictures/Tinycore Pictures, USA)

Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, The (2007, Jaymes Thompson, MoDean Pictures, USA)

Grizzly Rage (2007, David DeCoteau, Peace Arch Entertainment Group, Canada)

Halloween (1978, John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures/Falcon International Productions, USA)

Hell Night (1981, Tom DeSimone, BLT Productions/Media Home

Entertainment, USA)

Hellbent (2004, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts, MJR Films/Sneak Preview

Entertainment, USA)

234

Selected Filmography

High School Musical (2006, Kenny Ortega, Disney Channel/Salty Pictures/

First Street Films, USA)

Hills Have Eyes, The (1977, Wes Craven, Blood Relations Co., USA)

House of Usher, The (1960, Roger Corman, Alta Vista Productions, USA) House of Usher (2008, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA)

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957, Herbert L. Strock, Santa Rosa

Productions, USA)

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011, Tim Sullivan, ArieScope Pictures, USA) I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957, Gene Fowler Jr., Sunset Productions (III), USA)

In the Flesh (2013–15, BBC Three, UK)

Indelible (2004, Charles Lum, USA)

Insidious (2010, James Wan, Alliance Films/IM Global/Haunted Movies, USA/Canada)

Kansas City Trucking Company (1976, Joe Gage, HIS Video, USA)

Kill Bill: Vol.1 (2003, Quentin Tarantino, Miramax/A Band Apart/Super Cool ManChu, USA)

Killer Eye, The (1999, David DeCoteau (as Richard Chasen), Full Moon Entertainment, USA)

LA Tool and Die (1979, Joe Gage, HIS Video, USA)

LA Zombie (2010, Bruce LaBruce, PPV Networks/Dark Alley Media/

Wurstfilm, USA/Germany)

Lair, The (2007–9, Fred Olen Ray, Here! TV, USA)

Leather Jacket Love Story (1997, David DeCoteau, Leather Jacket

Productions/Goldeco Pictures/Here Studios, USA)

Leeches! (2003, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures/Sidekick Entertainment, USA)

Look Back in Anger (1959, Tony Richardson, Orion/Woodfall Film Productions, UK)

Lost Boys, The (1987, Joel Schumacher, Warner Bros., USA)

Matrix, The (1999, The Wachowski Brothers, Warner Bros./Village Roadshow Pictures/Groucho II Film Partnership/Silver Pictures, USA/Australia)

Mommie Dearest (1981, Frank Perry, Paramount Pictures, USA)

Mummy, The (1932, Karl Freund, Universal Pictures, USA)

Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, Image Ten/Laurel Group/Market Square Productions/Off Color Films, USA)

235

Queer Horror Film and Television

Nightbreed (1990, Clive Barker, Morgan Creek Productions/Seraphim

Films, USA)

Nightshadows (2004, J.T. Seaton, USA)

Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (1922, F.W. Murnau, Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal/Prana-Film GmbH, Germany)

November Son (2008, Jason Paul Collum, B+BOY Productions, USA)

October Moon (2005, Jason Paul Collum, B+BOY Productions/Red Films

Inc., USA)

Old Dark House, The (1932, James Whale, Universal Pictures, USA)

Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008, Bruce LaBruce, Jürgen Brüning

Filmproduktion/Existential Crisis Productions/New Real Films,

Germany/Canada)

Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell, GB)

Phantom of the Opera, The (1925, Rupert Julian, Universal Pictures, USA) Pit and the Pendulum, The (1961, Roger Corman, Alta Vista Productions, USA)

Pit and the Pendulum, The (2009, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA)

Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock, Shamley Productions, USA)

Psycho Beach Party (2000, Robert Lee King, New Oz Productions/Red

Horse Films/Strand Releasing, Australia/USA)

Rabid (1977, David Cronenberg, Canadian Film Development

Corporation/Cinema Entertainment Enterprises Ltd./Cinépix/Famous

Players Film Company/The Dilbar Syndicate, Canada)

Raven, The (2007, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures, USA/Canada) Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Nicholas Ray, Warner Bros., USA)

Ring of Darkness (2004, David DeCoteau, ACH/Christopher Filmcapital/

Regent Entertainment, USA)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, William Castle Productions, USA) Saturday Night and Sunday Mornin g (1960, Karel Reisz, Woodfall Film Productions, UK)

Scream (1996, Wes Craven, Dimension Films/Woods Entertainment, USA) Shining, The (1980, Stanley Kubrick, Warner Bros./Hawk Films/Peregrine/

Producers Circle, USA/UK)

Silence of the Lambs, The (1991, Jonathan Demme, Strong Heart/Demme Production/Orion Pictures, USA)

236

Selected Filmography

Slumber Party Massacre (1982, Amy Holden Jones, Santa Fe Productions (I), USA)

Socket (2007, Sean Abley, Dark Blue Films/Velvet Candy Entertainment, USA)

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau,

Beyond Infinity/Empire Pictures/Titan Productions, USA)

Speed Demon (2003, David DeCoteau, Rapid Heart Pictures/Sidekick

Entertainment, USA)

Stella Dallas (1937, King Vidor, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, USA)

Student Nurses, The (1970, Stephanie Rothman, New World Pictures, USA) Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974, Tobe Hooper, Vortex, USA)

Them! (1954, Gordon Douglas, Warner Bros., USA)

Trash (1970, Paul Morrissey, Filmfactory, USA)

Twins of Evil (1971, John Hough, The Rank Organisation/Hammer

Films, UK)

Twisted Nerve (1968, Roy Boutling, Charter Film Productions, UK)

Velvet Vampire, The (1971, Stephanie Rothman, New World Pictures, USA/

Philippines)

Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, USA) Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg, Canadian Film Development

Corporation/Famous Players/Filmplan International/Guardian Trust

Company/Victor Solnicki Productions, Canada)

Virgin Witch (1972, Ray Austin, Tigon British Film Productions/Univista Productions, UK)

Voodoo Academy (2000, David DeCoteau, USA)

Wild One, The (1953, Laslo Benedek, Stanley Kramer Productions, USA) Wolves of Wall Street, The (2002, David DeCoteau, ACH/Christopher

Filmcapital/Regent Productions, USA)

Women in Revolt (1971, Paul Morrissey, Score Movies Ltd, USA)

237

Index

abjection 9, 64–5, 66–7, 69, 70
anxieties:

Abley, S. 19, 118–19, 126, 132
ageism 118

Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay
audience 101–2

Horror Filmmakers, Actors and
castration 146–7

Authors (2013) 126
emasculation 115, 122

Socket (2007) 118–19
eXistenZ (1999) 121

acceptance 5, 135

Far Cry From Home, A (2012) 134

adaptation 33, 164, 188, 194
gay males 85, 137, 143, 153, 170, 195

adolescent males 31, 32, 151–2
gay masculinity 17

‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure’

gay subcultures 3, 57, 89

(1989) 35–6

Hellbent (2004) 149

AIDS 12, 18, 194, 198
homosexuality 114

Carrie (1976) 18, 57

Lum, C. 82

gay male culture 194
masked 191

gay males 57, 198
passivity 119

gay subcultures 83
shame 197

homosexuality 12
vampires 98

Indelible (2004) 63, 64, 66, 77
appropriation:

Lum, C. 79, 87

American Horror Story

shame 165

(2011–present) 181, 183, 186, 188

St. Sebastian 85

Hellbent (2004) 196

threats 58
identity 187

allegory 23, 89, 155

Indelible (2004) 195

American Horror Story (2011–present):

In the Flesh (2013–present) 175–6

appropriation in 171–2, 188
queer horror 164, 170, 171

Asylum 189f6.4
slasher films 195

murder in 178, 180

Asylum 189f6.4

poster season 1 184f6.2
audience:

success of 188
adolescent males 31

anal penetration 78, 80

DeCoteau, D. 95, 101–2

238

Index

exploitation cinema 91, 99–100
visibility 192

gay males 89

Weeks, J. 170–1

horror films 110, 151

Between Men: English Literature and

horror genre 28, 194

Male Homosocial Desire (1985)

identification 163, 193

105–6

Indelible (2004) 63
bodily fluids 65, 71, 87, 194–5

In the Flesh (2013–present) 175,
body modifications 120f4.2, 121

177

‘Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay

male body 102–3

Drag’ (1991) 52–3

melodrama 38

Breed Me (2006) 67–8

Rothman, S. 92

Breeding Season (2005) 67–8

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 14, 106, Beach Babes from Beyond (1993) 94

107

Benshoff, H.M. 1–2, 4, 13–16, 90, British Social Realism 176–7

111, 192

Brotherhood, The (2001) 96, 102, 104, definitions 4

105f3.1, 107, 196

homosexuality 1–2, 13–14

Butler. J. 45, 186, 190

monsters 192–3

Gender Trouble (1990) 6–7, 186–7

Monsters in the Closet (1997) 2

Othering 14–16
camp 52–3, 54, 191

queer horror 111

Carrie 86f2.6, 193–4

‘Way too Gay to be Ignored: The

Carrie (1974) 18, 24–6, 33–4, 84, 193

Production and Reception of

Carrie (1976) 17, 22, 56, 75, 84, 116,

Queer Horror in the Twenty-First

129, 186

Century’ (2015) 16–17, 90
blood 65

Bersani, L. 5, 7–9, 20, 59, 82, 142

Chris 75f2.3

Gay Daddy 146–7
cult 22, 46

gay masculinity 7, 8, 86
excess 44

gay sex 108
fragmentation 59

Genet, J 170
gay male anxiety 17–18

homogeneity 164
horror genre 27

Homos (1995) 5–6, 144, 149

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011)

homosexuality 142

129

‘Is the Rectum a Grave? ’ (1987) 59,
identification 32, 43

77–8, 170
imagery 84f2.5

phallus 81

Indelible (2004) 56, 58, 60f2.1, 74

psychoanalysis 9
masquerade 37–8, 54

sex 82
narrative 194

sexuality 8–9
phallic imagery 81

‘Shame on You’ (2008) 165
presentation 33–4

symbolism 87
queer horror 193

239

Queer Horror Film and Television

sexuality 70–1, 78

Creed, B. 9, 69, 81

telekinesis 44–5

Monstrous Feminine, The (1993) 65

Carrie (1996) 47f1.1, 48
cult 22, 46, 97

Carrie (2006) 48–9, 50f1.3, 51–2
cult television series 178

Carrie – The Musical (1988) 46
cultural performance 53

Carrozza, J. 119
cultural text 24

Socket (2007) 119

Curse of the Puppet Master (1998) 95

castration 145, 146–7, 160

Cerda, D.:

Da Vinci, L.:

Scarrie – The Musical (2005) 48

Last Supper, The (1495–98) 71

‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 112–13, 196

Homosexuality, Homosexuality as

De Palma, B. 34, 66

Vampirism’ (1988) 11

Carrie (1976) 24, 26–7, 33

Chillerama! (2011) 127–30

Dean, T. 67–8, 83

Chodorow, N.:

death:

Reproduction of Mother,

Gaysploitation horror 143–4, 163

Psychoanalysis and the Sociology

Hellbent (2004) 162

of Gender, The (1978) 40

In the Flesh (2013–present) 173–4

‘Chronus’ 147–8

Otto; or Up With Dead People

Clover, C.J.:

(2008) 172

adolescent males 54
representation 87

audience 28, 100
sex 79, 195

De Palma, B. 27
symbolism 29

eyes 157–8
time 148–9

Final Girl 136, 150–2, 154, 155

DeCoteau, D.:

horror films 1, 20
audience 100–2

horror genre 93

Beach Babes from Beyond (1993) 94

masochism 9, 159

Benshoff, H.M. 16

pornography 60

Brotherhood, The (2001) 96, 196

slasher films 91, 153, 162

Collum, J.P. 115–16

symbolism 70
cross-gender masquerade 95, 107–8

Collum, J.P. 115–16

Curse of the Puppet Master (1998) 95

October Moon (2005) 118
exploitation cinema 110

colour 70–1, 73
femininity 94–5

comedy 51, 126–7, 129–30
fraternities 103

‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and

Gaysploitation horror 91, 94

Lesbian Experience’ (1980) 4
gendered triangles 106–7

context 53, 62–3
homoeroticism 102

Cook, P. 90, 91–2, 110, 137

Killer Eye, The (1999) 95

Corman, R. 94, 108

Leather Jacket Love Story (1997) 95

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (2006)

monsters 97

126–7

Poe, E.A. 108–9

240

Index

pornography 97–8
ejaculation 80, 82

queer horror 19

El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977) 61

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball
emasculation 115, 118, 122

Bowl-O-Rama (1988) 94
epistolary 203n5

Voodoo Academy (2000) 96
eroticism:

definitions:

Carrie (1976) 74

abjection 64–5
death 149, 162–3

compulsory heterosexuality 4
gay males 85

epistolary 203n5

Gaysploitation horror 163, 195

exploitation cinema 19

Hellbent (2004) 142–3

fetishistic scopophilia 158–9

HIV 68

Gaysploitation horror 93
homosexuality 89

heteronormativity 5
horror films 59

homonormativity 6
hypermasculinity 94

hypermasculinity 8

Indelible (2004) 58, 59

indelible 56

Rapid Heart Pictures 99–100

masochism 29

St. Sebastian 85

parade 42

Etheredge-Ouzts, P.:

parody 188

Devil Daddy 149

queer 4

Final Boy 156

repression 10
gay horror 16

stereotypes 138

Hellbent (2004) 20, 136, 138–9, Devil Daddy 147, 148f5.4, 149, 150,

142

161
queer horror 196

Diani, C.:

excess 44, 63, 190

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon
eXistenZ (1999) 120–1

(2006) 126–7
exploitation cinema:

Disidentifications (1999) 7
audience 99

Doane, M.A.:

conventions 93

female spectators 39

Cook, P. 90

identification 35–6

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 113

masquerade 41, 194

Gaysploitation horror 110, 195

sexual identity 36–7

Hellbent (2004) 138

symbolism 43–4

Katz, E. 19

transvestism 44
parody 126

Dyer, R. 1, 13–14, 138, 165

‘Children of the Night: Vampirism

Falchuk, B.:

as Homosexuality, Homosexuality

American Horror Story
as Vampirism’ (1988) 11

(2011–present) 171–2

‘Vampires in the (Old) New World:

Fall of the House of Usher, The (1839)

Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles’

108

(1994) 11–12

Fangoria 137–8, 139

241

Queer Horror Film and Television

Far Cry From Home, A (2012) 131, 132,
gaze 159

133f4.3, 196

Hellbent (2004) 136

father figures 144–50
identification 29

fellatio 73–4, 78–9, 81, 105f3.1
male spectators 31

femininity:

monsters 154

anxieties 119
slasher films 32, 151–3

Carrie (1976) 33, 43

Final Link, The (2000) 59, 62, 81,

castration 147

85

DeCoteau, D. 94–5
fragmentation 59, 63, 86

eradication 94

Frankenstein (1931) 11

failure 46

Freud, S. 144–50:

fear 198

‘Femininity’ (1933) 35–6

Final Girl 152, 154, 155–6

History of Infantile Neuroses,

fraternities 103–4

A (1918) 144–6

gay males 23, 59, 80, 196
masochism 29

gay masculinity 192
penetration 147

Gaysploitation horror 162
psychoanalysis 9

Hellbent (2004) 143
sadomasochism 125

homosexuality 115, 193
theory of psychosexual development

homosociality 107

39–40

identification 83

Wolf Man case 144–6

Indelible (2004) 84, 87–8

Full Moon Pictures 94, 96

invisibility 138

Fury, The (1978) 56, 59, 65, 85,

masquerade 54, 194

86f2.6, 87

Othering 52

parody 52, 171

Gage, J. 78

phallic power 82–3

El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977)

presentation 34

61

representation 111

Kansas City Trucking Company

zombies 168

(1976) 61–2

‘Femininity’ (1933) 35–6

Gallery of Fear (2013) 132

feminisation 28, 117

Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, The

fetishism 139–40, 149, 158, 195

(2007) 131–2, 196

fetishistic scopophilia 158–9

Gay Daddy 146–7

Final Boy:

gay identity 5

Final Girl 155
gay male culture 117, 130, 136, 137,

gaze 159

166, 194

Hellbent (2004) 136, 150, 155–6, 161, gay male spectators:

162, 196

Carrie (1976) 193

Final Girl:

excess 63

adolescent males 54
femininity 194

Clover, C.J. 28

Final Girl 152–3

242

Index

gender 84

Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, The

Hellbent (2004) 162

(2007) 131

identification 51, 54, 55
gay masculinity 111

gay males:

Hellbent (2004) 136

anxieties 143, 195
homosexuality 196

Carrie (1976) 23, 27
homosociality 107

Carrie (2006) 50

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011)

Carrie – The Musical (1988) 46

127, 130

DeCoteau, D. 102
masculinity 162

femininity 52, 59, 196
narrative 94, 143

Gaysploitation horror 89
queer horror 190–1

identification 7, 31, 40–1, 153–5

Socket (2007) 119, 122

identity 193
sub-genre 89

masculinity 107
symbolism 155

masquerade 42, 43
trends 134

power 29–30
gaze 156, 157–8, 161

queer horror 196
gender:

representation 5, 45
binary gender 186

safe sex 79

Final Girl 151, 152

sexual identity 37
fluidity 155

shame 171
gay male spectators 84

society 68

Gaysploitation horror 195

St. Sebastian 84–5
gendered triangles 106

stereotypes 110

Halberstam, J. 12–13

subjectivity 137

Indelible (2004) 58, 75–6

gay masculinity:

masochism 80

aspirations 8
performance 7, 95, 164–5

DeCoteau, D. 110
power 113–14

femininity 192
slasher films 31

Gage, J. 62

Gender Trouble (1990) 6–7, 186–7

Gaysploitation horror 93–4

Genet, J 169, 170

presentation 111, 113, 191

Gothic television 179, 183,

representation of 3, 6–7

185–6

visibility 138
guilt 122, 165, 174, 198

gay subcultures 3, 57, 67–8, 80, 94, 130

Gwenllian-Jones, S. 178

Gaysploitation horror:

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 113

Halberstam, J. 1, 169

death 143–4

Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the

DeCoteau, D. 94

Technology of Monsters (1995)

defined 19, 93

12–13

exploitation cinema 195

Hanson, E. 1, 191

father figures 144–50

‘Undead’ (1991) 12

243

Queer Horror Film and Television

Hell in a Handbag Productions 48
homosexuality:

Scarrie – The Musical (2005)

acceptance of 135

49f1.2
adolescent males and 32

Hellbent (2004):

AIDS 12

Devil Daddy 148f5.4, 150

American Horror Story

Eddie’s glass eye 157f5.5

(2011–present) 181–3

Etheredge-Ouzts, P. 20, 136
anxieties 114

father figures 147
colour 71

femininity 162

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 113

Final Boy 155–6

DeCoteau, D. 97

narrative 142–3, 149
demonisation 16

parody 140f5.1, 141f5.2
eroticism 89

slasher films 196
femininity 115, 193

stereotypes 140–1

Freud, S. 145, 146

Tobey 143f5.3

Gaysploitation horror 134, 195

Here! TV 96, 112, 196
guilt 122

heteronormativity 4, 5, 103, 173
homophobia 131

heterosexuality 31, 94
homosociality 107

History of Infantile Neuroses, A (1918)

horror films 2, 13

144–6
horror genre 1

HIV:

masculinity 141

eroticism 68
masochism 124

impact 57
masquerade 34

Indelible (2004) 77, 87
monsters 15, 192

Lum, C. 56

Othering 11

pollution 79
presentation 91

pornography 83
queer horror 111, 196, 197

representation of 125
representation 10

semen 67
sexual identity 106

sexual practices 81
shame 165

threats 58
stigma 4, 7, 103, 181

homoeroticism:

vampires 12

Brotherhood, The (2001) 105
visibility 5, 68

DeCoteau, D. 98, 102, 107

Western society 198

Gaysploitation horror 89
homosociality 106, 107

horror films 110
horror films:

masculinity 196
appeal of 31

October Moon (2005) 116–17
audience 110, 151–2

Rapid Heart Pictures 97
cultural gendering in 80

women 106
eroticism 59

homophobia 131, 135, 193
eyes 157

Homos (1995) 5–6, 144, 149

Halberstam, J. 169

244

Index

masochism 28–9
gay males 7, 153

monsters 16
horror films 169

Othering 1, 10

Indelible (2004) 83

Rieser, K. 54
male spectators 27

horror genre:

monsters 193

audience 100, 194

Othering 190

Carrie (1976) 27
transvestism 45

Clover, C.J. 93
identity:

function 197
abjection 64–5

gender 75–6

American Horror Story

Gothic television 179, 191

(2011–present) 190

homosexuality 1
cultural performance 53

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011) 130
fluidity 172

influence 193
gay males 193

pornography 60–1
horror films 14, 17

queer reception 89
queer horror 178

repression 197
sexual identity 13

House of Usher, The (2008) 109
symbolism 43

Hutchings, P. 9, 28–9, 30, 54, 193
transformation 187

hypermasculinity:

imagery 71, 72f2.2, 73, 84f2.5,

defined 8

85, 185–6

eroticism 94

In the Flesh (2013–present) 171, 172–4, Hellbent (2004) 138, 139

175–6, 177

HIV 68, 83

Indelible (2004):

Indelible (2004) 195

AIDS in 66

performance 192
bodily fluids 65, 194–5

Rapid Heart Pictures 99, 108

Carrie 24

zombies 168
editing process of 62–3

femininity in 88

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011)

freeze frame 60f2.1

126, 127–30
gender 83

identification:

identification 83

American Horror Story
imagery 72f2.2, 73, 84, 85

(2011–present) 191

Lum, C. 18–19, 56–7, 87, 194

appropriation 171
narrative 64

audience 28, 35, 163
oral pleasure 76f2.4

Carrie (1974) 25
oral sex 78

Carrie (1976) 43
phallus 81

desire 168, 187
pornography 69

Final Girl 152–3
queer horror 59

gay male spectators 51, 54, 154–5,
shame 82

161
symbolism 70, 71

245

Queer Horror Film and Television

Interview with the Vampire (1976) 114

Laplanche, J. 8, 9, 29

‘Introduction to the American Horror

Last Supper, The (1495–98) 71

Film’ (1979) 10–11

Leather Jacket Love Story (1997) 95, 97

invisibility 111, 138

Leeches! (2003) 94

‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987) 59,

Les Meninas (1656) 184, 185f6.3

77–8, 170

Lost Boys, The (1987) 102

Lum, C.:

Jackson, E.:

abjection 69, 70

Carrie (2006) 48–52
anxieties 82

James, A. 103–4

Carrie (1976) 60

Facts.suck (2005) 79

Kansas City Trucking Company (1976)

gay pornography 79

61
gender 75–6

Keetley, D. 179

HIV 87

American Horror Story

Indelible (2004) 18–19, 24, 56, (2011–present) 179

61, 194

Killer Eye, The (1999) 95
music 77

King, S.:

phallic imagery 81

audience 28
pollution 66–7

Carrie (1974) 18, 24–6, 27, 33, 193
religious iconography 85

Carrie (2006) 4
unsafe sex 68

presentation 34

Klewinghaus, K.:

machismo 162, 171

Otto; or Up With Dead People
male body 102–3

(2008) 166
male spectators 27, 29–30

Kristeva, J. 9, 64–5, 69, 70

Mandelbaum, K.:

Not Since Carrie (1998) 46

LA Tool & Die (1979):

Marcuse, H.:

anal penetration 79

One Dimensional Man (1964) 10

fellatio 74
masculinity:

imagery 71, 85

Brotherhood, The (2001) 102

Indelible (2004) 56, 59
cross-gender masquerade 54

Lum, C. 62
fraternities 103

LA Zombie (2010) 20, 167f6.1
gay male culture 137

Laaksonen, T. 139–40
gay males 107

LaBruce, B. 166, 168

Gaysploitation horror 162

LA Zombie (2010) 20
homoeroticism 196

Otto; or Up With Dead People (2008)

homosexuality 141

20, 172

Indelible (2004) 77, 84

Reluctant Pornographer, The
masquerade 41–3

(1997) 169
monsters 197–8

Lair, The (2007–9) 112, 114–15, 196
parody 115

246

Index

Rapid Heart Pictures 99

Carrie (1976) 18

representation 171, 195

DeCoteau, D. 96–7

slasher films 154

Devil Daddy 149

stereotypes 196
fear 198

symbolism 7, 170
femininity 143

zombies 168

Final Girl 154

masochism:

fraternities 103

Bersani, L. 146
gay marriage 131

cultural gendering 80
gay zombies 169

defined 29
homosexuality 15, 192

feminine 28
horror films 16

fetishistic scopophilia 159–60
identification 153

Final Boy 161

Othering 14

gay male spectators 154
queer horror 197–8

gaze 158
representation 11, 13

Hellbent (2004) 160
sexuality 2

homosexuality 124
slasher films 32

horror films 14

Socket (2007) 119, 123–4

Indelible (2004) 79, 194
symbolism 13

penetration anxieties 121–2
zombies 168

psychoanalysis 9

Monsters in the Closet (1997)

Socket (2007) 124, 125–6

2, 13

masquerade:

Monstrous Feminine, The (1993) 65

American Horror Story

Montrelay, M.:

(2011–present) 190

‘Inquiry into Femininity’ 43–4

Carrie (1976) 37–8

Morris, P.:

cross-gender masquerade 95

Indelible (2004) 62

Doane, M.A. 36–7

Treasure Island Media 67

Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, The

Mulvey, L.:

(2007) 131–2

‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure’

masculinity 41–3

(1989) 35–6

performance 54

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative

queer horror 194

Cinema’ (1975) 38, 157

Stella Dallas (1937) 38–9

Muñoz, J.:

Tyler, C.-A. 53

Disidentifications 7

masturbation 74, 79

Murnau, F.W.:

Medea see Klewinghaus, K.

Nosferatu: Eine Symphone Des

misogyny 51, 52, 82

Grauens (1922) 11

Mitchell, D.:

Murphy, R.:

In the Flesh (2013–present) 172–5

American Horror Story

monsters:

(2011–present) 171–2

Brotherhood, The (2001) 102
music 76–7

247

Queer Horror Film and Television

narrative:

Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay

American Horror Story

Horror Filmmakers, Actors and

(2011–present) 190

Authors (2013) 126

Carrie (1974) 25–6

Carrie (1976) 194
parade 41, 42

eXistenZ (1999) 121
parody:

Far Cry From Home, A (2012)

camp 52–3

133–4
defined 188

Gaysploitation horror 89, 94,
exploitation cinema 126

134, 143

Far Cry From Home, A (2012) 132–3

Hellbent (2004) 137, 142, 149
femininity 52

Indelible (2004) 64, 87

Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror, The

Rapid Heart Pictures 98–9

(2007) 131–2

slasher films 154

Gaysploitation horror 195

Socket (2007) 125

Hellbent (2004) 136–7, 140f5.1, Nosferatu: Eine Symphone Des Grauens

141f5.2, 163

(1922) 11

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011) 128

Not Since Carrie (1998) 46
identity transformation 187

Indelible (2004) 195

October Moon (2005) 115, 116, 117f4.1, machismo 171

118, 143, 196
masculinity 115

Old Dark House, The (1932) 107
queer horror 169, 196

One Dimensional Man (1964) 10

Peeping Tom (1960) 157

oppression 149, 177, 179, 197
penetration 121–2, 146–7, 163

oral sex 78, 79, 80
performance 53, 95, 186, 189–90, 192

Othering:

phallus:

Carrie 194
defined 8

Carrie (2006) 49
gay daddy 147

femininity 33
hypermasculinity 99

gay zombies 169
imagery 77

horror films 1, 10

Indelible (2004) 81

identification 190
monsters 14

Indelible (2004) 195
phallic imagery 81

monsters 14, 153
power 82

oppression 179
symbolism 170

Rapid Heart Pictures 98

Phantom of the Opera, The (1925) 14

representation 10–11, 45

Picture of Dorian Gray, A (1890) 114

slasher films 32, 55, 154

Pit and the Pendulum, The (1842) 108

women 52

Pit and the Pendulum, The (2009) 109

zombies 168, 172, 174

Poe, E.A.:

Otto; or Up With Dead People (2008)

Fall of the House of Usher, The

20, 166, 172

(1839) 108

248

Index

Pit and the Pendulum, The (1842)

appropriation 170, 187

108

Far Cry From Home, A (2012) 132,

Raven, The (1839) 108

133f4.3

pollution 65–6, 79, 195
father figures 147

Pontalis, J-B. 8, 29
gender performance 164–5

pornography:

gendered performance 171

DeCoteau, D. 97–8

Gothic television 190–1

gay males 79
homosexuality 192, 196, 197

Gaysploitation horror 91

I Was a Teenage Werebear! (2011)

heterosexuality 94

127

horror genre 60–1
identity 178

Indelible (2004) 62, 69, 76

Indelible (2004) 59

symbolism 68
masquerade 194

zombies 167–8
parody 169

power:

performativity 187–8

Carrie (1974) 33
popularity 90

Carrie (1976) 32
psychoanalysis 9–21

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 112–13
sub-genre 126

ejaculation 82
zombies 166

gay masculinity 114
queer references 46

Hellbent (2004) 150
queer theory 3–4

homosociality 106

male spectators 29–30

Rabid (1977) 119–20

penetrative sex 80

Ramakers, M. 139–40, 141

relationships 123

Rapid Heart Pictures 96, 97, 98–100, 102

Powers of Horror (1982) 64–5

Raven, The (1839) 108

presentation:

Raven, The (2007) 109

Carrie (1974) 33–4
relationships 122–3

gay masculinity 111, 113, 191

Reluctant Pornographer, The

Gaysploitation horror 91

(1997) 169

homosexuality 196

Representation of:

women 92
anxieties 121

Prinzivalli, D.:

death 87

Socket (2007) 119
father figures 147

Psycho Beach Party (2000) 94
femininity 111

psychoanalysis 8, 9–21, 34
gay males 5, 85, 137

gay masculinity 3, 6, 113

queer appropriations 3, 22, 24
homophobia 193

queer horror:

homosexuality 1, 2, 15, 165,

American Horror Story

192, 196

(2011–present) 178, 186
horror films 13

anxieties 195
identity 43

249

Queer Horror Film and Television

masculinity 77, 171, 195
semen 65–7, 68–9, 70

monsters 11
sexual content 57, 64

Othering 10–11
sexual identity 13, 36–7, 106

stereotypes 140–1
sexual practices 81

symbolism 10
sexuality:

women 122
assumptions 4

zombies 172

Bersani, L. 146

repression 10, 11, 87–8, 197

Carrie 193–4

Reproduction of Mother, Psychoanalysis

Carrie (1976) 37, 64, 70–1, 78

and the Sociology of Gender, The

DeCoteau, D. 95

(1978) 40
exaggeration 142

‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic’

fear 192

(1978) 5
fluidity 172

Rice, A.:

gay males 78

Interview with the Vampire (1976) 114

Gaysploitation horror 93

Rich, A.:

Gothic television 191

‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and

Hellbent (2004) 139

Lesbian Experience’ (1980) 4
hierarchy 6

Riefsteck, G.:

horror films 1–2

Fangoria 137–8
horror genre 197

Rieser, K.:

Indelible (2004) 58, 63, 71

Clover, C.J. 155

In the Flesh (2013–present) 174–5

Final Girl 153

Leather Jacket Love Story (1997) 97

horror films 32, 54
non-normative sexualities 3–4

slasher films 154

Rapid Heart Pictures 99

slasher horror 31

Representation of 13–14

Riviere, J. 194

Wood, R. 10

‘Womanliness as Masquerade’

shame:

(1929) 34–5
anxieties 197

Rodowick, D.N. 158–9
homosexuality 165, 171

Rothman, S. 91–2, 110, 137

Indelible (2004) 82, 195

Student Nurses, The (1970) 92

In the Flesh (2013–present) 174

Velvet Vampire, The (1971) 92
masked 191

oppression 177–8

sadomasochism 125, 150

‘Shame on You’ (2008) 165

Sagat, F. 167f6.1, 168

Sick and Twisted Players, The 47f1.1, 48

Scarrie – The Musical (2005) 48, 49f1.2

Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 12

Sconce. J. 63, 168–9

Simpson, M. 141–2

Sedgwick, E.K.:

Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the

Between Men: English Literature and

Technology of Monsters (1995) 12

Male Homosocial Desire (1985)

slasher films:

105–6
appropriation 195

250

Index

audience 28
shame 165

death 162

Sullivan, T.:

Final Girl 151

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon

gay male spectators 153

(2006) 126–7

Gaysploitation horror 90
symbolism:

Hellbent (2004) 136
abjection 69

moralism 149
castration 82

narrative 154

Dante’s Cove (2005–7) 113

Othering 55
death 29, 163

Rieser, K. 31
dreams 145

Socket (2007):

ejaculation 80, 87

Abley, S. 118–19

Final Girl 154, 155

body modifications 120f4.2,
gay male spectators 55

121
gaze 158, 159

Gaysploitation horror 196
identity 43–4

gender 123

Indelible (2004) 70

gendered triangles 122
masculinity 162, 170

narrative 125
menstruation 79

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-
monsters 13, 15, 198

Rama (1988) 94

Othering 1, 45

St. Sebastian 84–5
phallus 7, 81, 105

Stamp Lindsey, S. 37, 44–5
pornography 68

status 122–3
representation 10, 13–14

Stella Dallas (1937) 38–9, 43
sadomasochism 124

stereotypes:

sexual identity 13

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon
vampires 11–12

(2006) 127

defined 138
telekinesis 44–5, 86–7

exaggeration 190
terminology 4, 199–200n3

exploitation cinema 92, 137

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974)

gay males 110

12

Hellbent (2004) 138, 161

Theatre Couture 48, 50f1.3

In the Flesh (2013–present) 176–7
theory of psychosexual development

Laaksonen, T. 140

39–40

masculinity 196
threats 1, 70, 87, 149

stigma 3–4, 7, 57, 103, 181
title sequence 184–6

Student Nurses, The (1970) 92
transvestism 44, 52, 84, 180–1

sub-genre 19, 89, 93, 111, 126

Treasure Island Media 62, 67

subjectivity:

Twins of Evil (1971) 12

gay male spectators 155

Tyler, C.-A. 54, 82, 190

gay males 43, 78, 80, 137

‘Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of

Indelible (2004) 84

Gay Drag’ (1991) 52–3

251

Queer Horror Film and Television

‘Undead’ (1991) 12

Western society:

Universal Horror Films 14
gay male culture 130

gay males 5

Vaguely, T. 46–8
homosexuality 192, 196, 197, 198

Valocchi, S. 5
repression 10

vampires:

Whale, J.:

Brotherhood, The (2001) 104–5

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 106,

homosexuality 12

107

Lair, The (2007–9) 114

Frankenstein (1931) 11

Rapid Heart Pictures 98

Old Dark House, The (1932) 107

Socket (2007) 119, 124

‘When the Woman Looks’ (1984) 14

symbolism 11–12

Wilde, O.:

‘Vampires in the (Old) New World:

Picture of Dorian Gray, A (1890) 114

Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles’

Williams, L. 38, 39–40

(1988) 11–12

Stella Dallas (1937) 43

Velásquez, D.:

‘When the Woman Looks’ (1984) 14

Les Meninas (1656) 184, 185f6.3

Wolf, J.:

Velvet Vampire, The (1971) 92

Hellbent (2004) 137

Videodrome (1983) 120

Wolf Man case 144–6

Vidor, K.:

Wolfe, S.:

Stella Dallas (1937) 38

Hellbent (2004) 137–8

Vine, Sherry:

‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929)

Carrie (2006) 48

34–5

Virgin Witch (1972) 12
women 34, 52, 92, 106, 122

visibility:

Wood, R. 1, 13–14

bodily fluids 65

‘Introduction to the American

gay and lesbian studies 3

Horror Film’ (1979) 10–11

gay male culture 111

‘Responsibilities of a Gay Film

gay masculinity 138

Critic’ (1978) 5

homosexuality 5, 68, 192

Working Man trilogy 61

imagery 71–2

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Young, E. 106, 107, 122

(1975) 38

Voodoo Academy (2000) 95–6
zombies:

voyeurism 159–60

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon

(2006) 126–7

‘Way too Gay to be Ignored: The

In the Flesh (2013–present) 171, 172

Production and Reception of Queer
gay zombies 169

Horror in the Twenty-First Century’

Othering 174

(2015) 16, 90
pornography 167–8

Weeks, J. 8, 170–1
queer horror 166

252

Document Outline

- Cover
- Half-title
- Endorsement
- Series information
- Title page
- Imprint page
- Table of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction

- 1 ‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

- Narratives Working Forwards: Carrie’s Mutable Origins

- Carrie as ‘Final Girl’ and the Heterosexual Presumption

- ‘You’re a Woman now…!’: Femininity and Masquerade

- The Masculine Masquerade

- Carrie’s Trans-Sex (Dis)Identifications

- 2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

- Indelible (adj.)
- ‘The things that boys do to each other’
- Abjection, Blood and Semen

- ‘After the blood comes the boys’: Phallic Panic in Indelible

- Broken men, male vulnerability and the cathartic spectacle

- 3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and Gaysploitation Horror

- David DeCoteau: Gaysploitation horror-‘lite’?

- 4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

- Gender Wars: Dante’s Cove (2005–7) / The Lair (2007–9)

- Emasculation anxieties and top/bottom politics in October Moon (2005) and Socket (2007)

- Screaming Queens: 50s Queer Creature-Feature Parody

- A Far Cry from Acceptance

- 5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

- Hypermasculine Parody in Hellbent

- The Devil Daddy and Father Figures in Gaysploitation Horror

- Daddy’s Final Boy
- The Final Boy’s ‘Broken Gaze’
- Sleeping with the Enemy?

- 6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

- Kitchen Sink Zombies: In the Flesh

- Murder and mise-en-abîme in American Horror Story

- The Name Game, Self-Loss and the Queering of Identity

- Off-Cuts and Conclusions

- Notes

- Introduction

- 1 ‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

- 2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

- 3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and Gaysploitation Horror

- 4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

- 5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

- 6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

- Off-Cuts and Conclusions

- Bibliography
- Selected Filmography
- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Half-title
- Endorsement
- Series information
- Title page
- Imprint page
- Table of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction

- 1 ‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

- Narratives Working Forwards: Carrie’s Mutable Origins

- Carrie as ‘Final Girl’ and the Heterosexual Presumption

- ‘You’re a Woman now…!’: Femininity and Masquerade

- The Masculine Masquerade

- Carrie’s Trans-Sex (Dis)Identifications

- 2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

- Indelible (adj.)
- ‘The things that boys do to each other’
- Abjection, Blood and Semen

- ‘After the blood comes the boys’: Phallic Panic in Indelible

- Broken men, male vulnerability and the cathartic spectacle

- 3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and Gaysploitation Horror

- David DeCoteau: Gaysploitation horror-‘lite’?

- 4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

- Gender Wars: Dante’s Cove (2005–7) / The Lair (2007–9)

- Emasculation anxieties and top/bottom politics in October Moon (2005) and Socket (2007)

- Screaming Queens: 50s Queer Creature-Feature Parody

- A Far Cry from Acceptance

- 5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

- Hypermasculine Parody in Hellbent

- The Devil Daddy and Father Figures in Gaysploitation Horror

- Daddy’s Final Boy
- The Final Boy’s ‘Broken Gaze’
- Sleeping with the Enemy?

- 6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

- Kitchen Sink Zombies: In the Flesh

- Murder and mise-en-abîme in American Horror Story

- The Name Game, Self-Loss and the Queering of Identity

- Off-Cuts and Conclusions

- Notes

- Introduction

- 1 ‘Queering Carrie’: Appropriations of a Horror Icon

- 2 Indelible: Carrie and the Boyz

- 3 The Rise of Queer Fear: DeCoteau and Gaysploitation Horror

- 4 Shattering the Closet: Queer Horror Outs Itself

- 5 Gay Slasher Horror: Devil Daddies and Final Boys

- 6 Pride and Shame: Queer Horror Appropriation

- Off-Cuts and Conclusions

- Bibliography
- Selected Filmography
- Index