Queerness and queer horror — which is to say horror that is about or aestheticizes queerness, otherness, sexual deviancy, as experience, metaphor, dream, and nightmare — are embedded in the history of the genre, from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula to James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. From a masked killers (one of which uses a dildo knife) to genderqueer dolls, the films selected for this program elaborate upon and extrapolate from queerness not merely as identity but as aesthetic impulse, rooted in subversion, confrontation, camp, an understanding of queerness as a tool to challenge, or deconstruct, normative ideas in art and society. Drenched in blood, paranoia, and forbidden desire, horror is queer down to the bone.
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Stranger By The Lake
- 2013 Movie
- 2.5/5
Sometimes someone is so hot it doesn’t matter that they’re a murderer, right? Drawn to a nude beach with the promise of a good tan, cool water, and a bustling cruising spot, Franc (Pierre Deladonchamps) soon develops an obsession with a mustachioed daddy (Christophe Paou) whose beauty shimmers in the water. But bodies soon start appearing on the beach, alarming the local (straight) authorities and leading them to said handsome devil. Wrought with intense taut atmosphere and nerve-shredding suspense, sex and death were never so deliriously intoxicating.63Stranger By The Lake 2013 Movie •2.5/5French erotic thriller drama film written and directed by Alain Guiraudie.Sometimes someone is so hot it doesn’t matter that they’re a murderer, right? Drawn to a nude beach with the promise of a good tan, cool water, and a bustling cruising spot, Franc (Pierre Deladonchamps) soon develops an obsession with a mustachioed daddy (Christophe Paou) whose beauty shimmers in the water. But bodies soon start appearing on the beach, alarming the local (straight) authorities and leading them to said handsome devil. Wrought with intense taut atmosphere and nerve-shredding suspense, sex and death were never so deliriously intoxicating.
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Inland Empire
- 2007 Movie
- 3.7/5
Filmmaker David Lynch has long been a chronicler of the rot beneath the green grass of suburbia and the obliterating sadness behind the Hollywood lights, but Inland Empire might be his magnum opus marrying the two. An actress (Laura Dern) ready for comeback in her career takes on a new role for a movie that’s a remake of a cursed and never completed film. As she begins production, the terror of the past begins to haunt the set and in turn, her psyche. A mesmerizing, off putting dovetail into LA as a purgatory for lost souls and meat-grinder for the (queer) women brave enough to try to make their dreams come true, Lynch pushes his aesthetics to the limit with a terrifying and nightmarish vision of the City of Angels.
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Hellraiser
- 1987 Movie
- 4.1/5
One of the most disturbing films to blur the line between pleasure and pain, the Clive Barker adaptation of tortured bodies and souls gave culture the horror icon of Pinhead and nine sequels, with an upcoming reboot on the way. A puzzle box is a key to the doorway to Hell, as characters accidentally conjure aberrant creatures in leather getups whose only job is to cause, and revel in, the extreme suffering of whoever opens the box. Expliciti and outre, the film has become a legendary entry into the horror canon, not least of all becuase of its innovative ability to find the erotic in the harrowing.
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The Neon Demon
- 2016 Movie
- 3.4/5
The director of Drive saps Los Angeles of its blood and instead shoots it like a place of empty consumption in his horror satire of just how cutthroat you have to be to survive as a model. Filmed with a sharpness and stillness that depicts the city as an uncanny nightmare, new girl with uncompromising beauty on the block Jesse (Elle Fanning) climbs her way up the ladder leaving other models with enough envy that they might even kill for it. Atmospheric, slick, and morbidly funny, The Neon Demon shows us a girl eat girl world.
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Jennifer's Body
- 2009 Movie
- 3.5/5
Toxic femininity gets a makeover by Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama in their cult classic tale of a bad female friendship. Drenched in black humor and sinking its razor sharp teeth into teen movie conventions, Megan Fox brings subversive wit to her role as the hottest cheerleader at school who gets saddled with a curse that turns her a boy-eating monster. Then again, that wasn’t so different from before; now it’s just more literal. Her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) disapproves but must, too, reevaluate the nature of their friendship more broadly. Well, heads will roll.
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Seed Of Chucky
- 2004 Movie
- 2.5/5
The wisecracking, foul mouthed anthropomorphic Good Guys entered a new era in the previous entry, Bride of Chucky, newly betrothed to his lover Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) and with a, ahem, cutting sense of humor. Chucky creator and now director Don Mancini gives the wedded couple a new challenge: parenthood. As the two balance raising a child, and as that child explores their gender identity, they wreck havoc in Hollywood, with Tilly herself getting dragged into the killer family affair. With a camp sense of humor and plenty of butchering to go around (as well as a cameo from John Waters), Seed of Chucky balances bizarre family dynamics, ruthless industry skewering, and a sincere adoration for being true to yourself. Even if that means you’re a serial killer whose soul is trapped in a doll.
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High Tension
- 2005 Movie
- 3.4/5
A staple of the viscerally graphic movement of Francophone cinema called New French Extremity, which gave the US’s torture porn wave a run for its money, High Tension is a hellscape of blood, guts, and… lesbian envy? A psychopathic trucker polishes off a family farm one by one in increasingly sadistic ways while the two female friends staying there fight for their lives and their sanities. Indelible in its blood spattered imagery and taut pacing, its queer desire occupies a space between the terrifying and the thrilling.
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The Fly
- 1986 Movie
- 4.1/5
While George Langelaan’s original 1957 short story, and its 1958 film adaptation of the same name, comfortably fit within a cinema of Cold War paranoia along with its cousin Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it was hard to ignore David Cronenberg’s update of scientific hubris gone wrong being a reaction to and an allegory of the AIDS crisis with its 1986 release. Goldblum’s transformation into a human/fly hybrid is laced with melancholy, Cronenberg’s acumen for understanding the physicality of the body (and its disintegration), and its limits, and melding that with both emotion and intelligence at its peak.2.1KThe Fly 1986 Movie •4.1/5Science fiction-horror film directed and co-written by David Cronenberg.While George Langelaan’s original 1957 short story, and its 1958 film adaptation of the same name, comfortably fit within a cinema of Cold War paranoia along with its cousin Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it was hard to ignore David Cronenberg’s update of scientific hubris gone wrong being a reaction to and an allegory of the AIDS crisis with its 1986 release. Goldblum’s transformation into a human/fly hybrid is laced with melancholy, Cronenberg’s acumen for understanding the physicality of the body (and its disintegration), and its limits, and melding that with both emotion and intelligence at its peak.
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Saint Maud
- 2021 Movie
- 3.4/5
In shadow and darkness, Rose Glass’ Saint Maud blends ecstasy and terror, divine and blasphemous in bewitching ways. The mysterious Nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) lives with little more than her devotion to God, but her newest patient (Jennifer Ehle) tests her faith in unexpected ways. As she and her new ward, a former dancer, challenge one another’s sense of goodness, Maud spirals out of control, both of their understanding of what is of the body and what is of the spirit spinning into a realm neither are prepared for.77Saint Maud 2021 Movie •3.4/5British psychological horror film written and directed by Rose Glass...In shadow and darkness, Rose Glass’ Saint Maud blends ecstasy and terror, divine and blasphemous in bewitching ways. The mysterious Nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark) lives with little more than her devotion to God, but her newest patient (Jennifer Ehle) tests her faith in unexpected ways. As she and her new ward, a former dancer, challenge one another’s sense of goodness, Maud spirals out of control, both of their understanding of what is of the body and what is of the spirit spinning into a realm neither are prepared for.
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Let The Right One In
- 2008 Movie
- 4.5/5
The vampire has long been an easy stand-in for the Other and allegory for queerness: the blood, the eternal yearning, the social and political fear. But Tomas Alfredson take on the fanged creature, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, transforms the figure into not one of fear but one of adolescent tragedy, following the blossing romance between a 1980s Stockholm tween and the genderqueer vampire who lives next door. At once deeply felt in its tenderness and terrifying in its depiction of social ostracization, Let the Right One In is an immaculate study of queer love against the odds.
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Knife + Heart
- 2019 Movie
- 3/5
In 1970s Paris, a gay porn director (Vanessa Paradis) has a lot on her plate: she’s going through a tumultuous breakup with her editor ex, she feels the pressure to make a new and more inventive film, and her cast is being murdered off one by one by a masked killer. In bold reds and blues and neon soaked night scenes, Yann Gonzalez’s ode to Italian giallo is stained with references to Cruising and one of the ultimate testaments to how cinema makes bottoms of us all.12Knife + Heart 2019 Movie •3/5Horror-thriller film directed by Yann Gonzalez, who co-wrote the...In 1970s Paris, a gay porn director (Vanessa Paradis) has a lot on her plate: she’s going through a tumultuous breakup with her editor ex, she feels the pressure to make a new and more inventive film, and her cast is being murdered off one by one by a masked killer. In bold reds and blues and neon soaked night scenes, Yann Gonzalez’s ode to Italian giallo is stained with references to Cruising and one of the ultimate testaments to how cinema makes bottoms of us all.
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Black Swan
- 2010 Movie
- 4.1/5
“I’m the Swan Queen!” bellows Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) in Darren Aronofsky’s delirious backstage fever-nightmare of ambition and mental unraveling. As the infantilized, virginal Nina prepares for her role in Swan Lake, she sees her competition and her double in Lily, her polar opposite: sexual, wild, cutthroat. Dark and hilarious, this remix of The Red Shoes sees Nina go mad as she chases after perfection and asks herself what makes a woman.8.7KBlack Swan 2010 Movie •4.1/5Psychological horror film directed by Darren Aronofsky.“I’m the Swan Queen!” bellows Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) in Darren Aronofsky’s delirious backstage fever-nightmare of ambition and mental unraveling. As the infantilized, virginal Nina prepares for her role in Swan Lake, she sees her competition and her double in Lily, her polar opposite: sexual, wild, cutthroat. Dark and hilarious, this remix of The Red Shoes sees Nina go mad as she chases after perfection and asks herself what makes a woman.
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Cruising
- 1980 Movie
- 3.6/5
Protested upon release by LGBTQ activists, William Friedkin’s film plunges Al Pacino has a cop undercover in New York’s leather scene investigating brutal murders. The deeper he finds himself in the sweat stained underworld, the more he’s asked to confront his own relationship to masculinity. Though the film has experienced somewhat of a recent critical revival, the still controversial slasher was butchered by the studio, leaving a 40 min sex party scene on the cutting room floor; even in its ambiguous and bizarre remaining form, it’s nonetheless a testament to masculine fears and a chilling spectre of the AIDS epidemic to come.
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