Abigail Waldron - Queer Screams: A History of LGBTQ+ Survival Through the Lens of American Horror Cinema

Cult filmmaker John Waters once expressed that without obsession, life is nothing. I began the writing of this book back in graduate school in 2019 as I was planning the topic of my American Studies masters thesis. Through reflection, I found that who I am is a combination of obsessions, two of the most passionate being American history and horror films. Since I was a child, I have been instinctively drawn to horror films. Combing through the horror selection at Blockbuster Video was both terrifying and thrilling, with images of Chucky from Childs Play and Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street imprinting themselves on my subconscious. I started realizing I was queer as a young teen. That too was terrifying and thrilling. Back then, I was unaware that who I was and the horror genre itself would become intertwined, as I found in my research that queerness is rooted in horror, and vice versa. My obsessions and my queerness are at the center of this book; I would not be able to write this had I not been queer and a horror lover.

Queer Screams is about queer representation in American horror films, and how queer folks can and should reclaim the horror genre as their own. Through the reclamation process, queer folks will find catharsis. The main objective of Queer Screams is to show how queer people find catharsis in the horror genre, mainly by using gay sensibility, as coined by queer film historian and activist Vito Russo, to identify queer characters and storylines in horror cinema. Based on a history of marginalization and trauma due to homophobia and transphobia, the fantasy of the horror genre, along with it being deeply rooted in queer sensibility, allows queer folks to see themselves within the frame of the bloody silver screen. Although not all representations are obvious or positive, the genre is rich in queer history as it reflects societal fears. For decades, the fear of the queer has permeated the horror genre, and many queer folks are now taking claim of horroran act of reclamation, just as the term queer and the pink triangle designated to gay men during the Holocaust has been reclaimed.

I follow the queer experience chronologically through history. Based on the specific decade, horror films reflect the fears of that decade. This includes the fear of the Lavender Menace of the Cold War 1950s, the fear of HIV/AIDS as depicted in homoerotic vampire films of the 1980s, and the revenge through representation of the anti-queer Trump era. I examine films through their historical lens and correlate them to the American queer experience. This book begins by outlining the various ways in which I analyzed horror films for queer representation. As film is used by scholars to study history, horror films are a key component in this research. Horror films are created to scare, haunt, shock, and horrify. As such, turbulent times in American history are often subjects of horror films or at least inspirations. Throughout the twentieth century, America has used social Others such as queer folks to instill fear in the majority, particularly straight white Americans. Queers have been demonized, pitied, ridiculed, and studied for mental illness for decades, resulting in real life and on-screen violence. This violence was perpetuated through film, specifically horror films, to cause fear and panic in the minds of heterosexual Americans, and often leaving the queer for dead. As I will explain in the subsequent chapters, queers took the form of monsters, aliens, deviants, and pervertsthey were villains. However, due to film censorship and the Hays Code (a set of regulations that will be discussed in Chapter 1), often these monsters were not outright queer but rather subtextual queers. The subtextual queer would be used for decades to villainize Otherness, i.e., queerness.

Despite this history of on-screen horror violence and its effects on the minds of Americans both queer and straight, there is a silver lining that has grown in the past few decades: catharsis through reclamation. Horror figures like Frankensteins monster (his queerness will be elaborated in Chapter 1) and the ever-frequent horror clich of the Final Girl (the often-lone survivor and killer of a horror films antagonist) have been reclaimed by queer horror fans as queer characters. They have become positive symbols of determination, survival, outsiderness, and destroyers of oppressive forces.

Of the books I have studied in preparation for writing Queer Screams , I have not discovered a book devoted to queer representation in horror from the past two decades. The books I have found do not mention current LGBTQ+ issues, such as transgender rights, marriage equality, or non-binary representation. My book bridges the gap between the ground-breaking works on queer film that have come before, such as Harry M. Benshoffs invaluable Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997) and Vito Russos pivotal The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1982), and offers a unique focus on queer film, theory, horror, and the American queer experience.

As a queer horror film fan, I have always been fascinated by the draw to horror, especially for queer folks. While an avid fan of the genre, I found countless other queer folks who themselves are drawn to the fantastical and the macabre. I began to research to pinpoint why there is such a pull to the genre for us queer folks and began finding specific films of queer focus. Throughout my research, I found that homophobic slurs in horror films were frequent, leading me to believe that the majority of horror film history was one of transphobia and homophobia. However, I began to turn my focus toward subtextual elements of queerness and found amazingly diverse representations of queer folks throughout the horror canon. I scoured hundreds of films from the 1930s to 2021, keeping note of seen and unseen queerness on the silver screen. Through my personal Instagram account, where I connect and interact with fellow horror-obsessed queers, I reached out to the horror community for input on why they, as queer folks, love horror. As I am a bisexual cisgender white woman, my insight is only one view in the diverse spectrum of queerness. With my questionnaire, I have included the responses from non-binary, gay, queer, and lesbian folks who adore horror for all sorts of reasons, some differing from my own, in the concluding chapter of this book. Ultimately, their input supports my argument for the invaluable cathartic nature of horror.