"Deep Cuts: Society and Queer Horror" Transcript

[...] After asking around I found out that The Craft has a bizarrely large, and largely self-conscious, gay male following in my age bracket.

The movie is about four teenage girls who each grow up feeling different -- simultaneously special and rejected -- as so many LGBT teens have experienced. The girls end up at the same school and find each other essentially by cruising the hallways. Sideways looks and quiet nods to each other lead to hooking-up, which for them is going shopping for candles after school.

The best character is Nancy (Fairuza Balk), who is already fully out as a witch. She wears goth lipstick and black, lace-up Stevie Nicks boots. She has a sexual history and a noose hanging in her locker. She practices the craft. If this were about being gay, she would have been the kid with a rainbow button on her backpack.

Bonnie (Nev Campbell) has self-image issues because of scars that cover her back and arms. Like so many gay kids, she wants to be left alone, yet at the same time she fears that she will grow up lonely. Rochelle (Rachel True) the only African-American character, faces racist comments by the other kids. This angers her, but only in a pouty, look-at-what-she-did-to-my-cashmere-sweater, kind of way. Nothing in this movie's script can get in the way of the real social justice issue, which is witch-phobia.

Sarah (Robin Tunney), the main character, isn't sure about her identity in the beginning. She starts out craft-curious. This movie is about her journey. She is confronted with peer pressure and her own internalized witch-phobia. On their first night together, Sarah asks the others "do you guys really believe in this?" Back at school the next day she doesn't want to get rejected by the popular kids so she downplays her relationship with Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle. Chris, the football jock, persists in making bullying comments about the three spiritual deviants, whom he calls "the Bitches of Eastwick." He explains, "when you're a guy, and I am, people expect things." Very similar to often heard statements, 'Boys will be boys' or 'Don't be such a fggt.'

After the four witches have confirmed each other's witchy tendencies, the four take a bus to the witchy part of town where a young person can go and be herself. A safe space with no anti-witch judgement. In the movie that neighborhood seems to be an empty grassy field with butterflies. For me, it was the the gay bar district in southeast Washington, DC. But in either case, the bus driver in the film knew exactly what kind of neighborhood it was. As the four step off the bus the driver says "Don't let the freaks get you." Nancy stops, turns back to look at the driver, lowers her Rick Springfield sunglasses, and says with a smile, "Mister, we are the freaks." Yes, Nancy, own it.

Suffice it to say that there several scenes resembling Radical Faery gatherings where they call the corners and chant "Hail to the Guardians" etc. They also perform a ceremony that might someday constitute polyamorous marriage in some states, and they hold a Body Electric workshop in Rochelle's room where the four play "light as a feather, stiff as a board." The girls whisper and touch each other only with their index finger. Rochelle's mom walks in and interrupts the magic. "Whats going on in here?" "Nothing Mom." Tell me that didn't happen to you.

Empowered by their chosen family, the girl's inadvertently start causing their revenge fantasies to come true. These revenge scenarios are framed in classic locations of gay teen trauma. The white racist begins losing her blond hair while showering in the gym locker room. The football jock falls in love with one of the witches, and is then driven crazy when the love is unrequited. He finally meets his fate at a party at one of the rich kid's houses -- the party that the gay boys weren't invited to.

Sadly, the film's narrative wraps up as witchcraft backfires for the girls, thereby illustrating the dangers of nonconformity. The girls survive only by vowing to never practice the craft again. They all end up back in the closet, except one, who ends up in a straightjacket. This movie came out before E did. It would be several years before a young Bella could respectably choose the dark side. So big deal. Ignore the ending. Click rewind.

LGBT-inclusive paths and traditions

Wicca

Newer Wiccan traditions often avoid or disregard the historical aversion to LGBT individuals.^{[9][10][11][39]} Oboler notes the change in neopagan culture thus, "Although the symbolic bedrock of Wicca and modern Paganism is strongly gender-essentialist, the Pagan community, like the culture as a whole, has been moving away from that position."^[11] These traditions sometimes cite the Wiccan Charge of the Goddess which says "All acts of Love and Pleasure are My rituals".^[21][40] Professor Melissa Harrington wrote that despite traditional Wicca showing heterosexism "as Wicca has grown and attracted gay practitioners they have begun to work out ways in which Wiccan rites can become more meaningful to them".^[23]

Witchcraft, on the other hand, offered a spiritual space where queer folks like Bobbi, Mat, and Krysta could step into their personal power and explore otherness without shame, guilt, or fear. Though all of the witches I spoke to investigated magic (or magick) in their childhood, their crafts began to really come to fruition in their young adulthood, as they were granted more exposure to the variety of rituals and practices. Bobbi notes that discovering moon rituals was a major turning point in her witchcraft journey.

Furthermore, the idea of a coven — a group or gathering of witches — created space for community, another appealing aspect of mainstream religion. In addition to providing solace and support, Bobbi finds that her coven encourages her to be a better person.

Peirce also sees the story as a superhero origin story, which she also relates to a gay sensibility.

“I think another queer part of the narrative is that Carrie gets super powers, and those super powers are like a queer person understanding they have a talent, or a queer person finally coming to terms with their gender identity or sexual preference and saying even if this is not the mainstream, it’s okay. Because that’s literally what Carrie says. She says to her mom, ‘There are other people out there like me. I am normal, I am okay, even if you don’t think so.’ I’ve talked to lots of [gay] people about this movie and they loved the revenge tale, loved that Carrie gets even. They loved that she goes after the people that did this to her. It’s an echo of what a queer person could write as a kind of corrective narrative.”

The cult of Carrie (1976) from its origins in Stephen King's novel through to De Palma's initial cinematic interpretation, has accumulated a wealth of queer appropriations in both cinema and the theatre. Given Carrie's status as cultural icon, her simultaneous status as horror film victim and monster, alongside the narrative concerning her burgeoning sexuality and attraction to boys she may well be situated as a powerful figure of identification for gay male spectators. The very act of appropriating imagery and the iconography [...]

Carrie's narrative is 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) and the guilt or shame involved in doing so. The film also has both cult and camp allure for the gay male spectator deriving mainly from its use of excess, in the excessive style and form of De Palma's direction in terms of lighting, colour-coding, melodramatic use of music and score and in its exaggerated melodramatic acting (specifically from Piper Laurie and Nancy Allen). Like many horro^{[sic: horror]} films, [...]

The film opens by introducing us to Frank Cotton who obtains a puzzle cube that, upon being solved, summons supernatural beings clad in leather and chains. We later learn that these are the Cenobites, who dwell in a realm of extreme carnal indulgence, subjecting people to severe forms of sadomasochism that include but are by no means limited to limbs being torn apart by hooks and chains. Clearly, this amalgamation of pleasure and pain is extremely hyperbolized for the sake of horror. But it doesn’t feel too far off from the way queer people in the BDSM community are often perceived by those who don’t understand the subculture.

To me, that’s the key variable that makes Hellraiser so special. Barker is entirely aware of heteronormative insecurities, such as versions of polyamory involving Frank and his mistress, Julia. Barker took these insecurities and combined them with imagery derived from the underground leather scene of the time in order to establish a film about the broad spectrum of sensuality and sexuality. He shocked audiences with its subversive, but wildly inclusive, material.

Even more important is the fact that Clive Barker created this film as a gay man, which allows queer representation to transcend the screen into the real world, and almost makes Hellraiser resonate with me even more profoundly. Having always been interested in monsters, it could be safe to assume that Barker was fascinated by outsiders and outcasts like his creations because he could relate to them.

And that’s the thing—I could relate to them, too.

Clive Barker is an openly gay author, painter and film director, but while elements of his novels are celebrated for their queerness, it often seems that his films are regarded not as queer; they are simply films that happen to be made by a gay man. Even in Harry M. Benshoff’s somewhat exhaustive study Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film Barker remains a somewhat marginal figure. Benshoff recognizes Hellraiser for some of its visual characteristics, but comes to the conclusion that “too often the representation of Barker’s monster queers seems similar to those produced by right-wing ideologues.” ³

Benshoff’s book bases itself on the theories put forward by Robin Wood in the late 1970s. In a series of essays, Wood examined the ways in which horror films reflect the surplus repression in contemporary society. This serious study of a genre, one which has generally been regarded as something almost anti-intellectual, attempts to shine a light on the shapes that lurk in the darkness , and the way that the introduction of the Monster disrupts society. According to Wood, the basic formula of the horror film is that “normality is threatened by the Monster.” ⁴ This equation simplifies the engine that propels the horror film into the parts of the collective psyche that we’d seldom willingly explore, and allows for a discussion on how the genre may be used as a podium to express political ideas that fall far outside the mainstream.

One of the controversial aspects of Wood’s article is the distinction that he makes between what he perceives to be progressive and reactionary movements within the genre. In the third section of the article he unleashes a vicious attack on the early films of David Cronenberg, and states of the deviously subversive Shivers (1975) that “with its unremitting ugliness and crudity, it is very rare in its achievement of total negation.” ⁵ This notion of reactionary horror continues to be a presence in Monsters in the Closet, and it would appear that this attitude contributes greatly to Benshoff’s general disdain for Barker’s work. While there does seem to be some merit to the criticism that there is a lack of positive queer representations in Barker’s cinematic oeuvre, the logic applied by both Wood and Benshoff remains deeply problematic for a number of reasons. Their argument revolves around the notion that films like Shivers and Hellraiser want us to reject the sights we see as being repugnant or negative, when the reality is that these directors find these images to be compelling and horror film audiences are more likely to be fascinated than disgusted. As Henry Jenkins observes, “The best artists working in the genre don’t just want to provoke horror or revulsion, they want to slowly reshape our sensibilities so that we come to look at some of the most outré images as aesthetically pleasing and erotically desirable.” ⁶

Even if one accepts that the queer images in Hellraiser film are not positive ones, how does that make these representations reprehensibly reactionary? To a large extent, the queers in Hellraiser belong to a pantheon of hyperbolically monstrous gay characters that appeared long before the outrageous stereotypes seen in John Waters, and extends well beyond the subculture sociopaths that populate the films of Gregg Araki. In his analysis of character construction in gay narrative film, Tom Waugh points out “the irresistible attraction by gay authors to images that seem harmful in the viewfinders of movement ideologues,” and asks the reader to ponder the following question: “Is the attraction to the ‘negative image’ by the gay author simply a question of self-oppression” ⁷ or is it something else entirely? He goes on to provide a laundry list of possible explanations before concluding that these questions have been side-stepped for too long, and that people have relied “instead on reductive moralism instead of criticism.” ⁸

When the cenobites move and speak there is a certain degree of attractive nobility in their appearance. These modern primitives may commit visceral acts of savagery, but they also posses a surprising grace and an erudite eloquence. While Benshoff may view these creatures as monster queers that are not at all a positive representation, Jenkins’ position that our sensibilities are being reshaped receives considerable support when one takes into account the way that the cenobites in Hellraiser fit more comfortably into the role of the anti-hero, than that of the monster. When Kirsty is confronted by the cenobites after solving the puzzle box and demands to know who they are, she is met with the reply,

“We are explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.” [...]

[...] This introduction implies that their prey chooses them, and that the violence they unleash is not directionless. If one assumes that their typical victim is someone like Frank, who summons them at the beginning of the film, then it becomes apparent that their talents are actively sought out by hedonists who are looking for new experiences. When they encounter an innocent the cenobites, unlike the psychopaths found in many of the slasher films of the same period, reveal that they are rational beings that can be reasoned with. Their appearance may mark them as outsiders, but they pose no serious threat to normal people who wish to remain normal.

If the cenobites are not truly the monster, then what is? It would appear that the film’s real monster queer is Frank: the undead beast the cenobites unwittingly leave behind. He is the one that truly threatens normality, and this begins long before his resurrection. In a flashback scene Frank returns home for his brother’s wedding and savagely seduces the bride-to-be. He is painted as a pure hedonist who has little regard for others, but it is not until his transformation that he becomes physically dangerous to those close to him.

Plot

Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, once an insecure and studious teenager living near Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, is now a violent mental inmate who narrates the story as a flashback while in solitary confinement. Since childhood, she had been friends with Jennifer Check, a popular cheerleader, despite having little in common. One night, Jennifer takes Needy to a local dive bar to attend a concert by indie rock band Low Shoulder. A suspicious fire engulfs the bar, killing several people. In shock, Jennifer agrees to leave with the band, despite Needy's protests. Later that evening, Jennifer, covered in blood, appears in Needy's kitchen and attempts to eat food from the refrigerator. She immediately vomits a trail of black, spiny fluid and leaves in a hurry.

The next morning at school, Jennifer appears fine and dismisses Needy's concerns. While the town is devastated by the deaths caused by the fire, Jennifer seduces the school's football captain in the woods and disembowels him. Meanwhile, the members of Low Shoulder gain popularity due to their falsely-rumored heroism (confirmed by "the Wikipedia") during the fire and offer to make a charity appearance at the school's spring formal.

A month later, Jennifer has become pale. She accepts a date with school goth/emo Colin, whom she brutally kills. While Needy and her boyfriend Chip have sex, Needy senses something dreadful has happened. She leaves in a panic and almost runs over Jennifer, who is drenched in blood. At home, she again encounters Jennifer, who explains that Low Shoulder had taken her into the woods after the bar fire and offered her as a virgin sacrifice to Satan in exchange for fame and fortune. Although the sacrifice and demonic exchange were a success, Jennifer was not actually a virgin, so she became permanently possessed. Leaving the woods, Jennifer had encountered an exchange student leaving the scene of the fire and made him her first victim. Jennifer states that when she has eaten, she can withstand virtually any injury without pain, healing instantly.

The following day, Needy goes to the school library's occult section and determines that Jennifer is a succubus who must feed on flesh and can only be killed while she is hungry and weak. Needy tells Chip about her discoveries about Jennifer and warns him not to attend the school dance. He does not believe her, so she breaks up with him in order to protect him. Chip decides to attend the dance anyway but is intercepted by Jennifer, who takes him to an abandoned pool house and begins feeding on him. Needy arrives there and fights Jennifer. Chip impales Jennifer through the stomach with a pool skimmer, but Jennifer removes it and escapes, while Chip dies.

Needy goes to Jennifer's home and breaks into her bedroom. She fights Jennifer and stabs her in the heart with a utility knife, killing her and destroying the demon. Jennifer's mother enters and finds Needy on top of her daughter's body. Soon after, Needy is brought to an asylum. In her asylum room, she manifests some of Jennifer's supernatural powers, such as super strength and the ability to levitate, due to a non-fatal bite from Jennifer during the fight between them. She escapes the mental facility, hitchhikes a ride to the hotel where Low Shoulder are staying, and murders them.

In 2020, the film was categorized as a horror classic.^[53]

This movie is fun. It’s messy, mean, sad, campy, and self-aware. Diablo Cody already blew me away with Juno, and the number of my interests that aligned in a smart, mouthy horror-comedy piece hinging on two queer girls being mean, miserable and tender while trying to consume each other? Really, it’s not fair. With all that in mind, it seemed like an obvious place to start this series off.

It bears mentioning that the marketing for Jennifer’s Body was deeply — and, I would say, dangerously — misleading, targeted toward someone who was not the intended audience. Diablo Cody has said in no uncertain terms that that’s not how she would have put together a trailer or promotional material for the movie if it had been up to her. Clearly, something got (perhaps deliberately) misplaced in translation between the screenwriting, direction, and promotional efforts.

Jennifer’s Body is not about Megan Fox being hot. This movie is not intended for straight teenage boys, trailer be damned. This movie is for women, queer folk, and perhaps most importantly queer women — and no, it’s not just because of “That Kiss,” though I definitely have some pretty major thoughts on that one.

Jennifer’s Body undoubtedly borrows a premise from rape-revenge movies, and can absolutely be read that way at first glance. What’s compelling about this movie, though, is that you soon realize that it is not what the film is actually about. What happens to the abusers in this movie is nearly an afterthought, laid over the closing credits. The emotional center or the beating heart if you will, of Jennifer’s Body is a messy, intense, codependent, twists-and-turns romance: between Needy and Jennifer.

The initial scene that seems to be played for laughs of Needy heart-eye-ing Jennifer as she cheerleads, first of all, can and should be read straight. Anita “Needy” Lesnicki is deeply, messily, and totally gay for Jennifer Check. Sandbox love, indeed, never dies. It’s not an accident that that scene is paired with the Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You.”

Much of the rest of Jennifer’s Body is spent escalating the warped, hungry tension between the two girls. Meanwhile, Chip (Needy’s boyfriend) nearly exclusively falls into the role that is usually held by the girlfriend in a horror movie. Essentially, he’s either there to pose a problem for the tumultuous relationship between Needy and Jennifer. Alternately, he’s there to be rescued.

Early on in the movie, for instance, Chip stands a little helplessly by while the girls, giggling amongst themselves, enter into a play-pushing fight until Jennifer pushes Needy a little too hard. Everyone in the scene freezes for a moment as Needy collides with the door, and then moves on.

Instantly, at least for me, this was reminiscent of every stray remark about boys on the playground being mean and playing rough because they like you. Turning that on its head and applying it to a pair of girls already brings forth something messy and interesting about the nature and shape of desire between women, especially if one or both are repressing it.

This undercurrent of tension (or even hostility) soon is mirrored by Needy herself, when she accompanies Jennifer to the Low Shoulder concert at Melody’s Gate, Devil’s Kettle’s only (and very grimy) bar. She looks on uncomfortably as Jennifer plays up the role of the sweet, awkward, doe-eyed girl in the hopes of getting the lead singer’s romantic attention, and retreats until she overhears the band talking about Jennifer being a virgin.

Needy takes this as her cue to storm up to the band, taking on what looks to be a protector role, insisting that Jennifer is a virgin, which is something she knows to be untrue. She also insists that Jennifer is not going to sleep with a band of slimy scumbags. Amanda Seyfried’s delivery in this scene evokes more than a protective drive, though; there’s a current of jealous defensiveness lying underneath it.

She genuinely believes that Jennifer is “too good” to sleep with the members of Low Shoulder. She also resents, though, that Jennifer has clearly been considering it. She wants Jennifer to be considering sleeping with her, instead, though she may not know it consciously.

Later, when Jennifer grabs and squeezes Needy’s hand during the concert proper, Needy is appeased and even relieved. She smiles warmly, adoringly, over at Jennifer, much the same way as she had during the early cheerleading scene. Her smile only fades when she realizes Jennifer isn’t looking back at her, and only has eyes for the band. She releases Jennifer’s hand abruptly, and we see the fading white patches where Jennifer had gripped her hand too hard.

course, as horror movies often do, things rapidly go downhill from here. A bloodied, maimed, nonverbal and snarling Jennifer staggers over to Needy’s house in the middle of the night, desperate and hungry. Though Jennifer is unable or unwilling to communicate in words what’s happened to her, her physicality is speaking volumes. This is clearly a nod to both physical manifestations of trauma and a reference to women in horror movies (and in real life) who can’t talk about what’s happening to them for fear they won’t be believed or understood.

This scene doesn’t just ratchet the scare needle up, though; the sexuality meter comes with it, as Jennifer narrowly resists the urge to bite Needy on the neck as they’re hugging. Unavoidably, the camera angles and the way it’s acted makes the near-miss look more like kissing. Then, Jennifer pushes Needy away at the last second and leaves. Jennifer is unable to express or act on whatever degree of desire she feels for Needy, whether to seduce her or to kill her, and storms out in silent frustration.

Jennifer and Needy’s desire for each other is messy, ugly, dangerous, hungry, and complicated. It’s undoubtedly stretched thin over a tumultuous friendship between teenage girls, but more than that, it speaks to the fraught, at times consumptive nature of attraction between young women. Our sexuality is weird and intimate and incidentally kind of terrifying in ways that sleeping with straight men often isn’t — and, at least in this context, it has nothing to do with futurity or procreation in the “conventional,” hetero-normative sense.

Though Jennifer uses sex as a lure through which to eat her male victims, there are repeated hints throughout the film that tell us what she really wants to be doing is consuming Needy. She doesn’t though. Instead, though Jennifer begins the transformation into a demon as an opportunistic creature, simply eating the most conveniently available boys, her pursuits quickly become more targeted.

The clever, and decidedly uncomfortable, intercutting of scenes between Jennifer seducing Colin and Needy’s sweetly, clumsily earnest sex scene with her boyfriend, not only further entrenches the queer back-and-forth between the girls. It also confirms a bordering-psychic connection between them, as Needy flees — in the middle of having sex with Chip, no less — to try and track Jennifer down, realizing that something is deeply wrong. This frantic search only results in a series of scares, after which a frightened, tearful Needy returns home to find herself alone… or so she thinks.

By the time she finally crawls into bed, she finds Jennifer already there in the bed with her — a Jennifer who, I’ll add, is wearing one of Needy’s shirts. Understandably startled, Needy leaps out of bed and immediately demands that Jennifer leave. Jennifer, unfazed, responds, “But we always share your bed when we have slumber parties.”

The fraught, confusing tension of the scene leaves Needy still more vulnerable, and responsive when Jennifer kisses her. In a 2018 article for Vox by Constance Grady, [...]

Of course, since both girls are approaching this moment from such diametrically opposed positions, it can’t last. Needy pulls herself away, remembering suddenly all that happened before she found Jennifer in her bed, and demands an explanation.

Megan Fox imbues Jennifer with an unexpected, exhausted vulnerability held under a thin veneer of brittle indifference as she explains the trip in the van out to the woods, and the sacrifice. She rounds off her story with a fragile display of intimacy and affection: “I don’t really remember what happened after that. I just know that I woke up and I found my way back to you.”

After all that, though, Needy begins to doubt Jennifer’s story and pokes holes in it anyway. Feeling her control — and her closeness to Needy — slipping, Jennifer reaches for the nearest easy target. She nearly immediately responds by trying to make Needy insecure about her relationship with Chip, suggesting that Chip is “having second thoughts about [her].”

This is the first, but not the last, effort of Jennifer’s to drive a wedge between the couple, and doing so right on the heels of an attempted romantic overture is hard to read any other way than wanting Needy for herself. Indeed, she extends another — admittedly less tender — approach, quipping, “Come on, Needy, let me stay the night. We can play boyfriend-girlfriend like we used to.”

At the climax of the film, Needy confronts Jennifer armed with a box cutter — leading to an acerbic little double-entendre on the slang meaning of box, and Jennifer quipping that Needy buying her murder weapons at Home Depot is “so butch.” This is also the scene in which Jennifer finally bites Needy at the join of the neck and shoulder, while they’re fighting in Jennifer’s bed. The bite isn’t lethal, though, and it clearly wasn’t intended to be.

Ridley Scott’s Alien is often renowned as one of the first feminist sci-fi films. With its powerful central female character and motifs around reproduction and sexual violence, the film is lauded as being a cornerstone of feminist film theory.

The film is also super gay. Not only is Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) the strong, androgynous femme fatale we can all swoon over, it is also a film that - according to David McIntee, author of the Alien study ‘Beautiful Monsters’ - “plays very deliberately with male fears of female reproduction”. The male characters are emasculated in various ways, suffering blows to their male ego or experiencing things women are expected to. Through a queer film theorist lens, this film explores gender, sexuality and bodies in a way revolutionary even for today.

When writing these characters, Dan O’Bannon wanted to focus more on developing the Alien as a character and so when writing the crew, he left them more generic which included not specifying gender. A note on the script read: “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.” From the conception of this story, there is a rejection of performative gender. From initial perceptions, all our characters are similarly gender neutral in that they all wear the same loose jumpsuits and are addressed by their surnames, removing the usual basis for gender. The gendered choice of actor [...]

The crew are constructed as gender neutral through the use of identical genderless uniforms and the use of only their second names - stripping the femininity or masculinity given through first names. The ship’s mechanics complain about being paid less than everyone, including the ship’s two female crew. This was in a time where women were earning just 60 percent of the wages of their male counterparts. Ripley’s personality is constructed as quite neutral, and she doesn’t lean into docile femininity or ego-driven masculinity. She’s strong but empathetic; courageous but sensitive. She’s stripped of sexuality and gender, making her a queer protagonist who deconstructs the gender norms of the time.

[...] removing the usual basis for gender. The gendered choice of actor for the roles were up for interpretation by the casting director, Mary Selway, and director, Ridley Scott. Once casted, actors had the freedom to play into whatever gender performance they desired but Weaver and Scott kept Ripley neutral.

In most media of the time, a character played by a woman may slip into certain categories. In horror, a popular one is the damsel in distress. Ripley in particular is a big standout in horror as they refused to slip into gender-coded typical behaviours such as this. A female character acting like Ripley is obviously not monumental in today’s standards, but in the 70’s, where extreme performance of gender was the norm in media, this dismissal of gender binary stereotypes for Ripley was notable. Other categories for characters played by women were the mother or the seductress. Of course, these are not representative of what defines womanhood in real life, but in media predominantly created by men, these were the usual binaries on show. Interestingly, the main conflicts driving Ripley’s story revolves around their refusal to fit neatly into the boxes of motherhood and seductress.

When Ripley asserts authority in the team after Dallas is caught by the alien, Ash, the ‘male’ robot, feels threatened and attempts to dominate over Ripley to regain his masculinity. He’s a genderless robot, however he exemplifies constructed toxic masculinity - aggression, a fragile ego and stubbornness. He attacks Ripley, who’s exemplifying gender neutrality and sexual equality, by beating her.

He shoves a porn magazine rolled up into a phallic shape down her throat - symbolically raping her. A queer reading could suggest this is ‘corrective’ assault to attempt to quash the queerness and sexuality of women. The pornographic nature of the magazine suggests he is trying to make her succumb to her ‘truth’ as a woman - a sexual object. The patriarchy is battling queerness here, before Ash is defeated.

Kane is attacked by the facehugger, and it orally rapes him and impregnates him through an act of sexual domination. Later, Kane is again penetrated when the alien bursts out through his chest in the infamously horrifying birth scene. Kane is the powerless male - destroyed and emasculated by giving birth or being ‘penetrated as opposed to penetrating’ - highlighting the panic society reacts to gender diversity and challenging stereotypes and norms with.

The alien is constructed as having both phallic and vaginal imagery - the gooey and soft mouth with erect tail, head and inner jaw, complete with oozing white liquid. The overt and grotesque sexual imagery in the alien is designed to evoke fear and anxiety, which is how society was already responding to sexual openness and breaking out of what it means to be typically ‘male’ and ‘female’. The alien’s phallic and vaginal components are used together in stark contrast from the traits and qualities usually assigned to them, thus deconstructing notions of gender. The alien’s body is overtly sexual and blurs our ideas of anatomy. The horror and sexual violence from the alien, including the penetration of Lambert and forcing Dallas into a womb-like egg as an allusion to motherhood, suggests that having one pair of genitals doesn’t make you inherently violent, but that society’s construction of gender is to blame.

But let’s rewind back to the beginning of the movie. A subtle Easter Egg sneaked into the movie by Cameron is in a bio of Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) on the screen behind Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) during the boardroom inquisition scene. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but the first few lines read: “Subject is Despin Convert at birth (male to female). So far no indication of suppressed trauma related to gender alteration.”

Aliens (1986) is curiously progressive in its sexual politics for a movie released at the height of the Reagan years. Take, for instance, the exchange between Hudson (Bill Paxton) and Frost (Ricco Ross) when they sit down in the mess hall. Hudson asks about the mission, to which their Sarge replies, “It’s a rescue mission. You’ll love it. There’s some juicy colonists’ daughters we have to rescue from their virginity.”

This seems like pretty standard machismo dialogue for a marine in a science fiction action film, but then Frost says something surprising: “I sure wouldn’t mind getting more of that Arcturian poontang. Remember that time?” To which Hudson responds, “But the one you had was male.” Frost responds, “Doesn’t matter when it’s Arcturian, baby!” and they both laugh together, slapping hands and pointing at one another.

Who knows what they’re really talking about here. Prostitutes? Did they have shore leave on the planet Arcturia? Are Arcturians a race of people? Whatever the answer, it’s clear that Frost slept with a man. The Aliens universe, after all, isn’t like Star Trek or Star Wars. Aside from the Xenomorphs and Space Jockeys (later dubbed the Engineers in Prometheus [2012]), human beings appear to be the only known sentient beings in the universe.

Not only did Frost have sex with a man, he’s vocal about it and wants to do it again. And his friend wholeheartedly supports him! This isn’t just queer behavior being portrayed in a positive manner, but one of the many ways that the movie obfuscates gender and supports a pansexual ethos.

Again, this would suggest that gender standards have evolved in the future, as Drake’s relationship with Vasquez is never questioned by anyone else as anything but normal. But assuming they are not lovers but just old friends, bonded by hard upbringings, is there a chance that Vasquez could be a lesbian? Goldstein herself answered this question in an interview with April Wolfe:

“She’s an outsider — she was just who she was,” Goldstein says. “With Vasquez, I never said she was straight or gay, because to her it was nobody’s business.” The ambiguity made it easy for fans from all outsider positions to identify with her.

“A lot of gay women come up and say, ‘Oh my god, when I saw you, and you had a masculine look to you, I saw myself,’” Goldstein says. “But I had straight women coming up to me with the same thing. Someone was going through breast cancer, and she told me that with each round of chemo she would think of Vasquez. A gay man from Guatemala came up to me, and he said, ‘I identify so much with her,’ but he was very feminine. Vasquez is universal.”

Finally, there’s Bishop, the “artificial person” who is gendered as male but has no real sex. The very fact that he requests to be called a more politically correct version of his kind codes him as being a minority. One might assume he’s a stand-in for African Americans during the Jim Crow years, as he’s treated as a servant in a lower tier of society. But considering his soft voice and gentle mannerisms, it’s more fitting that he’s an analog for a gay man.

As David Greven explains in “Demeter and Persephone in Space: Transformation, Femininity and Myth in the Alien Films“:

Bishop, the cyborg retooled as queer suffering body, is an example of a resistant masculinity devoid of any obvious sexual desire. Such figures suggest queer sexuality in films and television series in that their refusal of the normative codes of masculinity suggests an alternative to them. As with Ash, but much more pitiably, the white blood that drenches Bishop suggests both mother’s milk and semen. But in a radical decontextualization, semen here, as it almost never does in film (and the substance would go on to make quite a visible mark on subsequent films ranging from The Silence of the Lambs, 1991, to There’s Something About Mary, to the numerous American Pie films and beyond), suggests the vulnerability of male bodies, their susceptibility to violation, rather than unseemly urges (Silence and serial killer Multiple Miggs, who vilely flings his ejaculate at the heroine) or comic, embarrassing waste (gross-out comedies).

Greven further suggests that the aliens, and specifically the Alien Queen, represent a cis-gendered, heteronormative status quo that resents the changing times:

What gives this entire spectacle of shaming its radical charge is the queer typing of Ripley as mother. With her short hair and male garb, Ripley combines the masculine and the feminine. With her casual indifference to heterosexual sex, despite some no-sweat flirtation with Hicks, she suggests the possibility of different sexual needs. With her adoption of a child, she suggests the lesbian mother who thinks outside the normative procreational box. The Alien Queen’s vicious contempt conveys the charge of an old, customary inability to recognize the beauty and heroism in queer love of the kind Ripley and Newt embody. Read as a queer allegory, Ripley, Newt, the reintegrated android Bishop, and the wounded, vulnerable, and bed-ridden Hicks together constitute the new queer family; the Alien Queen, a repository of old modes of contempt and hate.

So while Greven suggests that the conservative Alien Queen has contempt for the queer family dynamic of Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop, I’d go even further. Cameron creates a future where gender norms have all but disappeared. Even subtle things like fashion, such as the corporate woman at Ripley’s hearing wearing a power suit and sporting an androgynous haircut, to the fact that the marines have a co-ed locker room, suggest the battle of the sexes ended with a draw.

It’s the Alien Queen who, although she “rules” over an army of male drones, is actually trapped within the biological determinism of her sex. Forever cranking out eggs, she ironically wants to destroy this new world and turn back the clock a few centuries.

Alien 3 is secretly about AIDS in the '80s and early '90s, and how badly we fucked up trying to deal with this epidemic.

The deaths of Newt and Hicks, as painful as they were, is actually central to this message. The scariest thing about AIDS (in Alien 3) is that it seems to kill almost randomly -- it doesn't matter if you are an innocent like Newt or a fit and healthy young man like Hicks; you might start showing symptoms and quickly die before anyone even knows what's going on.

Then, there's the population of "Fury" 161, an almost completely abandoned prison planet. One of the higher-ups realizes they can potentially wrangle this little alien-problem into a profit. So, they show up dressed in hazmat suits -- which is what some doctors chose to wear when they treated AIDS patients.

But, the most telling part is the speech given by the character Dillon, who explains his decision to try and kill the monster that's killing them:

"You're all gonna die. The only question is how you check out. Do you wanna go on your feet or on your fucking knees, begging? I ain't much for begging! Nobody ever gave me nothing. So, I say, fuck that thing. Let's fight it."

It's badass, and strikes the exact same tone as Larry Kramer's speech from when he launched ACT UP in New York in 1987, five years before Alien 3 was released: "If my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If what you're hearing doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on Earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?"

It Follows tells the story of Jay Height (Maika Monroe), a nineteen-year-old Detroit suburbanite who acquires a sexually transmitted curse from her boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary). After they first have sex, Hugh sedates her with chloroform and ties her up, forcing her to heed his bizarre instructions about the curse: she must “sleep with someone as soon as [she] can” in order to pass it along to another person (and on and on, like a chain letter), lest she be tracked down and killed by a ghostly entity—the titular “It”—that takes various human forms, slowly but perpetually walking toward her location. If It kills her, It will resume following Hugh or whoever else preceded each of them in the sexual chain. It follows only one person at a time, so maintaining a continual line of transmission is necessary for survival. Aided by her younger sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and [...]

The monster in It Follows may be a supernatural being, but the ilm’s true source of horror is living under a regime of sexual shame wherein our heteronormative culture compels sexual subjects toward monogamy—even at the risk of their overall well-being. Although nearly all critics observed that the film’s conceit was a clever reworking of the “have-sex-and-die” cliché commonly associated with the fate of disposable teenage characters in 1970s and 1980s horror films, few critics grasped the film’s most subversive implications: the curse would become moot in a society embracing the value of a multiplicity of sexual partners in conjunction with an ethos of open communication and mutual support. In other words, the characters’ failings illustrate how the film’s logic finds monogamy (serial or otherwise) as promising perpetual danger, whereas one’s survival would be far better ensured through what Michael Warner has called an “ethics of queer life.”²

Contagion, Queer Intimacies, and the Normative Couple. At first glance, It Follows would seem an unlikely candidate for a queer reading, since it features neither protagonists nor monsters that might be coded as “queer” in an identity-based sense. Following Harry Benshoff’s influential 1997 study Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, most academic discussions of queer horror cinema have tended to explore how the genre’s depictions of monstrosity can be read as symbolizing the supposed “threat” of homosexuality, offering both pleasures and misgivings among gay and lesbian viewers.³ Nor does It Follows register any of the overtly homoerotic appeal exhibited in, say, David DeCoteau’s^† beefcake horror films that represent “part of the ongoing hegemonic negotiation of exactly what the phrase ‘queer horror film’ might actually signify.”⁴ For understandable reasons of political reclamation,established minoritarian identities like “gay” and “lesbian” remain the dominant points of reference in much of this critical literature. Although the previously cited authors do highlight how queerness can operate in these films in multivalent ways for different audiences, “queer” ultimately tends to operate in these accounts as more of an umbrella term for a variety of same-sex-desiring identities rather than to suggest a fluidity of (nonnormative) desires that would evade or blur the very boundaries of minoritarian identities—or, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it in her famous definition:“[T]he open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”⁵

For some viewers, a horror film that depicts sexual partners callously spreading a deadly curse via intercourse might seem deeply sex-phobic—indeed, most of the film’s reviewers understood the film’s central conceit as tapping into “the fears of anyone who came of age during the AIDS plague years.”⁷ The threat of AIDS has, of course, long been allegorically linked to popular horror imagery, from crisis-era films like The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), and The Fly (David Cronenberg,1986) to perceptions of the AIDS-era gay man as gothic vampire.⁸ Allusions to that most infamously incurable and stigmatizing of sexually transmitted diseases abound in the critical reception of It Follows, but the film’s queer lesson is less about the avoidance of sex than the management of risk. After all, according to the film’s logic, those infected by the curse can survive only by successfully finding new sexual partners, versus remaining abstinent and living out the fatal consequences of their prior sexual history.⁹ The film scarcely acknowledges that Jay has any other option but to find new partners, but her hesitance to move beyond a series of monogamous bonds ultimately proves her downfall as well. It Follows thus implies that having a sexual life is inevitable and always involves a certain negotiation of risk (emotional or otherwise)—but the film also suggests that the danger truly lies in the social attitudes that make one increasingly objectified and stigmatized as a consequence of one’s sexual history.

We later learn that Jay was not a virgin when the film began—she says she already slept with Greg back in high school and it “wasn’t a big deal”—so acquisition of the curse should not be seen as her character’s “punishment” for premarital or non-procreative sex. Indeed, just before Jay arrives home with her newly acquired curse, we see Kelly, Yara, and Paul playing Old Maid on the front porch, the camera slowly zooming in on the Old Maid card; the game’s goal of avoiding the mismatched card (personified by a decrepit, asexual spinster) ironically foreshadows the “game” that Jay will soon be forced to play in finding new sexual “matches” to inherit the curse.

Importantly, however, neither Hugh nor the film in general ever specify which sexual acts will successfully pass along the curse—thus opening plenty of space for queer speculation. Is heterosexual intromission the only option? Will same-sex partners do the trick? Do oral or anal sex count?¹⁰ What about nongenital forms of sexuality? Just how conventional and vanilla are the expectations of this paranormal entity, anyway? Although these speculations might strike some readers as silly [...]

Here, especially, the film’s resonance with AIDS anxieties gains greater relevance. At the time It Follows appeared on screens, media attention began addressing the slow-growing popularity of preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drugs, such as Truvada, that prevent HIV viral transmission altogether, thus reopening possibilities for queer sexual life that once seemed foreclosed by the threat of AIDS and the push toward same-sex marriage.²⁸ In Tim Dean’s brilliantly provocative 2009 book Unlimited Intimacy, he argues that condomless “bareback” sex has [...]

Overall, then, It Follows appeared at a historical moment when a hetero-cum-homonormative model of monogamy was upheld as law of the land in its extension to gay and lesbian couples while a countervailing trend saw the (partial) overcoming of longtime anxieties about the most infamously fatal of sex-borne diseases, opening fresh possibilities for sexual autonomy through multiplicitous intimacies. The film may not have been deliberately intended as a sociopolitical commentary on such shifts—indeed, David Robert Mitchell left the monster’s motives and weaknesses nightmarishly unexplained and open to interpretation—but the place of queerness as a sort of structuring absence within the text, an unnamed but perpetually haunting presence, still speaks to the film’s centrality within an emergent “structure of feeling” informed by queerness’s lingering status as an indeterminate quality that, despite recent political shifts, cannot be fully incorporated into normative socialization.³³

[...] After eventually passing the curse to her unbelieving neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto) proves to be Greg’s undoing once It catches up with him, Paul then volunteers his own body to Jay, perhaps more eager to have sex with his unrequited crush than to help the childhood friend with whom he experienced his first kiss. After a climactic confrontation in which It takes the form of the sisters’ absent father, the film ends with Jay and Paul beginning a romantic relationship, unaware that It still follows them.

[...] a statement that links him to the killers and to their murder of the babysitter victim played by Drew Barrymore at the start of the film, a character who was similarly dispatched.

In terms as resonant as they were phobic, Scream was a cry of despair over an apparent amorality in millennial youth, especially its male population. The homoeroticism of the Billy-Stu relation-ship, which the film develops into an all-but-explicit queer love affair, evinces both the unpredictable, anarchic, bewildering behavior of this "entire generation" and the shifts in male gender roles synonymous with it. Scream was first released in December 1996; in a hideous fulfillment of the film's paranoid fantasies, the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999. In an eerie echo of Scream's two teen-male killers, the teenage Columbine killers were two high-school seniors, [...]

Lovers And Killers

Scream redeploys the long-standing American tradition of a homoerotic bond between a pair of young male killers. The foundation of the tradition is the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. These wealthy young men were University of Chicago students who murdered the fourteen-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 in an attempt to perpetrate the "perfect crime." (Both were sentenced to life imprisonment; one of the men was shortly thereafter murdered by another inmate.) This case has generated several fictional treatments, ranging from Hitchcock's significant 1948 film Rope, based on the 1929 British stage play by Patrick Hamilton (which was retitled Rope's End for its New York premiere) to the 1959 novel Compulsion, directed by Richard Fleischer (based on the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin), to the 1992 Swoon, an independent film written and directed by Tom Kalin that has come to represent the New Queer Cinema of the era. Adding to the mystique of this paradigm is the real-life case that was famously turned into the 1966 "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: the 1959 killing of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, by two young men. (Richard Brooks made a 1967 film of Capote's book.) Capote's tormented, erotically charged bond with one of the killers has been widely reported.

The killers in Hamilton's play and Hitchcock's film, as did the real-life Leopold and Loeb, consider themselves to be Nietzschean supermen, using their "superior" intellect as justification for their thrill-killing. The killers in Scream, in pointed contrast, have no lofty philosophical ambitions. Indeed, their motivations are family- and romance-driven and nebulously opaque. Billy claims to be avenging himself on Sidney for her mother's crimes her "whoring" ways that destroyed his family. His frequent denunciations of Sidney as "Bitch!" intensify the note of intense misogyny in his rage. Stu, it would appear, is simply aiding and abetting Billy. If Stu's motives are left a blank, they are decisively marked as a blank. Sidney explicitly calls him on [...]

[...] Normative and queer-pathological masculinities cannot be easily distinguished in Hitchcock's challenging, unquiet film.

Scream also offers contrasting portraits of masculinity but only in order to intensify its vision of a gathering cultural depravity. Perhaps the first touch that links the killers to homosexuality is Ghost-face's first appearance to Sidney. He tries to trick her into believing that he is on her front porch. "Well. I call your bluff," the intrepid, neo-Final Girl Sidney responds, walking out onto the porch. Ghost-face then jumps out of her closet instead. In a scene in which Sidney, Billy, Stu, Tatum, and Randy discuss the possible identity of the killer [...]

[...] Interestingly, the epithet that Billy uses against Stu is "fuckrag," which sounds like a phrase that has tumbled out of the arsenal of misogynistic insults.

Skeet Ulrich's performance as Billy and, especially, Matthew Lillard's as Stu deepen the queer resonances of the characters in this movie that poises forever on the knife edge of explication. Ulrich's teen anomie, brooding intensity, and perpetual white T-shirt clearly evoke James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (but without his trademark unzipped jacket). The intent look in his eyes, either sad or cunning, keeps the audience off-balance as to his identity, as it does Sidney. But when he does reveal his murderous identity, the winsomeness dissolves entirely, and he becomes truly frightening, barking "Bitch!" at Sidney. Overall, the performance as delivered and directed evokes Anthony Perkins's sensitive yet secretly sinister murderer in Psycho but with an effort made to show the dark side of his all-American geniality. Lillard's attention-getting performance is notable for its gender-bending potentialities. He uses his basket-ball-player height, rubbery face (sometimes it seems on the verge of melting), and excessive emotionalism to create a memorably frenetic character. Eschewing standard male stoicism, his ostensibly straight Stu would surprise no one by coming out in full drag regalia.

In one scene, set in the video store where Randy works, Randy theorizes about Billy's possible identity as the killer. (This happens after Randy has gone into hysterics about the ways in which victims in horror movies die because they remain stubbornly ignorant of genre conventions. Randy astutely presages the fanboys who were to emerge in the new millennium with their rigid attention to the rules, conventions, and logic, or lack thereof, behind genre productions.) In perhaps the most daringly homoerotic moment in the film, Billy suddenly swings upon Randy, challenging him. "Maybe you're the killer, Randy." Billy taunts him. "Maybe your movie-freak mind got the better of you." [...]

As Billy gets in Randy's face, Stu comes up from behind him, holding him almost against Billy's body as Stu even traces a line with his finger across Randy's ear. Homoeroticism, in typical fashion, can only be [...]

[...] confused understanding of their own masculinity. Indeed, their potential effeminacy may be more threatening to the general audience than their explicit hatred of women. What has been called "effeminophobia" intersects here with homophobia, as the killers' increasingly inept performance of gender mirrors their ultimately inept attempt to craft the perfect murder plot.

Craven makes the interesting choice to stage the big revelation scene at the climax in the kitchen -- a particularly large, gleaming kitchen. Parodistically, the mama's boy killers reveal their nefarious identities within the domestic space most closely associated with the mother and her private, familial, nurturing sphere. Clearly, Billy longs for return to the mother, just as Sidney does. Indeed, he explicitly [...]

[...] confusion over mother's roles and unresolved Oedipal conflict. Freud is not dead.

A Negative Oedipus Complex

Billy and Sidney have sex after she announces that, if life is one big movie, the genre she will pick is porn. Ghostface suddenly appears right after they have had sex and seemingly stabs Billy to death. As we learn, this is only a ruse to distract Sidney from Billy's real identity as one of the killers. Billy staggers, it appears, back to life in his seemingly blood-drenched T-shirt. Gaining possession of the gun Sidney now wields, Billy shoots Randy, cites Norman Bates's line about going mad from Psycho, dabs a finger in his "blood," and brings this sticky finger to his lips. "Corn syrup." he announces as he tastes his fake blood, "the same stuff they used for pig's blood in Carrie." Through his own gesture, the queer killer associates himself with a regressive orality as well as a metaphorical female world of suffering, blood, and victimization.

[...] desire for the mother into exogamous desire for a woman who resembles her but is outside of the family.

But what of the so-called negative Oedipus complex, in which things go awry? Homosexuality is the chief among these. In a footnote added in 1910 to his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud conjectures that homosexual identity emerges from an identification with the mother. After the phase in their childhood in which they intensely identify with the mother rather than the father, homosexuals "identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them."

For our purposes, what is especially interesting is the central ity of woman to Freud's theory of male homosexual narcissism. Her role and her love and, most importantly, her desire become the models for the homosexual male's own version of all of these, as we have noted.

While many have read Freud's theory as homophobic, in my view it is fairer to say that it has been put to homophobic uses in American psychiatry, which historically used it to pathologize homosexuality as arrested development rather than suggesting that homophobic in and of itself. Freud is describing the psychological experience of a male who identifies with mother rather than father, and while it would be naive to say such an identification is true for all homosexual men, it certainly is true for some.

What films like Scream make vividly clear is the cultural reception of narcissistic, mother-identified desire. The killers in Scream are monstrous not only because they kill but because their desire proceeds from identification with and, more urgently still, longing for the mother. What complicates, or is left quite deliberately unresolved by the filmmakers, is the specific nature of the boys' relationship to each other. Stu's desire is left especially unclear. But in some ways, it is his desire that more clearly has a basis in the homoerotic. Though he has a girlfriend (dispatched via garage door as the party. goers watch Halloween), Stu's chief affectional energies are directed toward Billy, to whom he is devoted. What is chiefly significant about Stu's relationship to Billy are the ways in which Billy's desire becomes Stu's desire.

Narcissism seems very much at work, and in homophobic terms, in the depiction of Billy as mother-identified. As are so many horror-movie monster-males [...]

In 2017, a perhaps unlikely queer icon emerged in the form of a black and white cartoon character from Australia with sharp teeth, theatrical makeup, and a top hat. This cultural phenomenon began with a 2016 Tumblr thread initiated by online user ianstagram who declared Mister Babadook, the eponymous monster from Jennifer Kent's 2014 horror film, to be “fearlessly and proudly” gay. In this initial post, ianstagram wonders, “Whenever someone says the Babadook isn't openly gay it's like?? Did you even watch the movie???” Sparking what participants called a “Babadiscourse,” scores of others weighed in on the Tumblr thread, with one user proclaiming, “The B in LGBT stands for Babadook” and another posting a fake screenshot claiming that Netflix had categorized The Babadook as an LGBT movie. The next several months saw the proliferation of queer Babadook memes and multiple representations of Babadook at 2017 Pride festivals across the United States.

Babadook has emerged as a queer icon because he can be read as having characteristics associated with cultural gayness. For example, he wears dramatic--even scene-stealing--costuming that recalls the theatricality of drag, and he struggles against a (rather literally) closeted existence in which many disavow or reject him. While references to these characteristics abound in the typically humorous and ironic figurations of the character's queerness, this essay takes Babadook's queer iconicity quite seriously, arguing that this character and the film from which he emerges call for critical attention to normative constructions of the family, the hegemony of reproductive heterosexuality, and the implications of both for the lives of women.¹ That is, Babadook invites queer appropriation because he voices and makes visible horrors perpetrated in the name of heteronormative family life and gender politics.

While socially conservative rhetoric, which has intensified coextensively with Donald Trump's rise to power, frequently casts the family as a site of innocence imperiled by outside forces, including members of LGBTQ communities, The Babadook constructs the family as a site that is too often constitutive of and constituted by myriad forms of structural, symbolic, and material violence. Likewise, the film considers how intersections among cultural constructions of sexuality, gender, dis/ability, and class place certain bodies and subjectivities in positions of precarity. Accordingly, this essay argues that The Babadook and its titular monster disrupt tropes associated with the family, and white motherhood in particular, to reveal their emplacement in discourses structured by heteronormative, sexist, ableist, and classist logics. At the same time, however, The Babadook's exclusive focus on the experiences of white characters without consideration of their racial privilege risks undermining its intersectionality. This analysis will proceed with a discussion of intersectional feminism and its relationship to theories of precarity, a contextualization of Kent's film within feminist analyses of the genre of horror and public discourse about the film's meaning, and a close reading of the film itself.

Intersecting Babadiscourses

Kent's The Babadook received limited release in Australia, the country in which it was produced, in 201. It fared well with reviewers but not audiences. Traveling through the international film festival circuit, including Sundance, the film received critical accolades, bringing it considerable attention in the U.S. and in Europe, and also leading to its revival in Australia. Narratively, The Babadook is the story of Amelia, a white single mother, and her only son Samuel, who has both emotional and behavioral struggles. On the day her son would be born, Amelia and her husband Oskar have a car accident on the way to the hospital, and Oskar dies. The film opens with Amelia literally dreaming about this nightmare scenario almost seven years later, just days before Samuel's birthday and the anniversary of Oskar's death. Having given up her career as a writer to earn wages as a nursing home attendant, Amelia has been Samuel's only caregiver--an isolating experience exacerbated by both other people's uneasiness with her grief and by their ableist discomfort with Samuel's differences.

Amelia's ability to care for her son becomes severely constrained when she decides she must remove him from his school, which seems unwilling or unable to accommodate Samuel's needs. At the same time, Samuel becomes fixated on an invisible monster that he warns lives in their house and aims to do harm to his mother. When a mysterious and violent children's book appears, Amelia begins to fear that the monster is not a figment of Samuel's imagination, and soon she and her home are tormented by a bogeyman known as Babadook, who lives under her child's bed and in his closet. As anxiety, sleeplessness, and trauma take a toll on Amelia, she first directs her anger at Samuel, toward whom she becomes violent, before eventually confronting Babadook. Realizing she can never fully rid their lives of the monster that now resides in their home, she determines to make relative peace with Babadook, locking him in their basement but keeping him well fed and alive. As illustrated by a line in Babadook's book--“The more you deny, the stronger I get”--the monster certainly operates as a signifier of Amelia's grief over Oskar's death; the more she represses this trauma, the more power it has to return and disrupt her life. This allegory is not, however, the only one at work within The Babadook.

[Previous paragraph was about Rosemary’s Baby.]

Amelia appears as a 21st century sister of Rosemary as The Babadook crosses the horror formula of Other-as-villain with the female gothic interest in gendered experience and victimage, transforming the beleaguered female protagonist herself into a monster. Like the protagonists of Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, Amelia struggles with ‘demons of femininity’ (Wexman 1987, p. 32). But hers are [...]

As confrontations with her sister's friends make clear, Amelia's widowhood is not just a matter of personal sorrow for the loss of a partner and lover but has altered her social status for the worse. Amelia is struggling financially and the depiction of the life she leads with her son registers the economic vulnerability of single parent families, especially with female heads of household. Different from the aspirational [...]

In The Babadook, the paranoia of horror, the sense of being watched, originates in the way Amelia’s public life is dominated by and private life intruded upon by institutional and bureaucratic forces that scrutinise her and especially her parenting: first the representatives of the school system that has failed Samuel once too often and the Community Service representatives that take over once Samuel is removed from school. Then there are the disturbing encounters with those she hopes will help her. The MD who looks askance at Amelia’s request for tranquilisers to make Samuel sleep so she can sleep and the desk sergeant in the police station who, when Amelia attempts to report a stalker, looks back at her with the strange pale eyes of the storybook monster. Both encounters registers historically strained relations between institutional authorities and women under threat, wherein women victims find themselves the focus of censure. Even the homely, familiar detail of the internal window that links Amelia and Samuel’s house to Mrs Roach’s—so typical of the Sydney terrace—works both as a link to a quasi-maternal support for the at-risk pair but also offers yet another potential site of observation. Mrs Roach (Barbara West) is both a lifeline and inspiration, but also, like her namesake, a source of irritation for Amelia once she begins her monstrous transformation.

In acknowledgement of these real, every day, social pressures on Amelia, the form taken by the babadook references the familiar sources of her madness and monstrosity. There are elements of Samuel, as the babadook’s costume recalls the little boy’s homemade magician’s guise, while the atavistic threat of its mouth in the pop-up book offers a horror movie version of Samuel’s screams for attention. There is also something insectile about the babadook when it manifests in the terrace, recalling [...]

“Let Me In!”

Central to The Babadook's consideration of the politics of class is the film's figuration of Amelia and Samuel's home--a Victorian-style house that Kent had constructed specifically for this film and that operates as a character in the film in its own right. Specifically of note are the ways that the home in the film diverges from both idealized constructions of the home and the role of the home within the horror genre. The signifier of the home often functions as a synecdoche for heteronormative, sexist, ableist, and classist figurations of the family. Consider, for instance, how often home-ownership functions as a milestone marker for success and stability along heteronormative timelines and within constructions of middle-classness, how often the home acts as a site for the production and regulation of bodies that are normatively gendered and sexed, and how consistently the “culture of suburban home life” and typical design practices presume that a house's inhabitants will be non-disabled, thereby rendering these spaces inaccessible to many (Hamraie). [...]

[...] Note also the extent to which figurations of the single family, private home often stand in contrast to other, less culturally idealized types of homes, such as public housing, group homes, nursing homes, or institutions, which are often imagined as sites of containment for bodies and subjects deemed to be disruptive or “misfitting” (Hamraie). The trope of the home also plays a significant role within the horror genre, which frequently inverts constructions of the home as a site of safety and security. As Carol Clover notes, horror films abound with images of homes as “Terrible Places,” whose dreadfulness owes less to the “Victorian decrepitude” of the houses themselves than the “terrible families” that occupy them (30).

“Someone was like, ‘How could “The Babadook” become a gay film,’ and the answer was readily available,” said Karen Tongson, an associate professor of gender studies and English at USC. “He lives in a basement, he’s weird and flamboyant, he’s living adjacently to a single mother in this kind of queer kinship structure.”

The Babadook is creative (remember the pop-up book) and a distinctive dresser. Instead of living in a proverbial closet, he lives in a literal basement. He exists in a half-acknowledged state by the other people in his house. The family is afraid of what he is, but finds a way to accept him over time.

“For many LGBT people, that’s what it feels like to be in your own families sometimes,” Tongson said.

Naturally, there are counter-arguments: The Babadook never says he’s gay. He never displays physical attraction to another person. But historically, fictional characters haven’t needed to say “I am gay” out loud to be read as gay or to become gay icons.

“So many LGBT people have been barred from seeing themselves represented in popular culture, so we’ve had to project ourselves into so many of these figures,” Tongson said. “There are ways to read into the character itself and the structure of how this ostensibly monstrous thing becomes incorporated ultimately into a family.”

“It” by Stephen King was published in 1986 and has made a lasting cultural impact ever since. The novel inspired a miniseries, two movies, and an entire generation of children to fear clowns. And adults, frankly. Pennywise transforms into things that will scare children and Stephen King used the 1950s setting to pay tribute to classic movie monsters.

Since It’s release, Stephen King’s cult classic has inspired fans to discuss it themes, allegories, and underlying subtext. A common discussion on the Internet is the interpretation that Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak had strong, repressed homosexual feelings for one another. The most recent adaptation, “It: Chapter 2,” directed by Andy Muschietti, dedicates an entire subplot to the romance between Richie and Eddie. There have been protests that the characters’ change in sexuality comes out of nowhere, but that’s not so–Richie and Eddie are in love in the book, but their romance exists primarily in subtext.

Eddie is so obviously gay coded that I’m a little surprised I have to write an essay to convince people Eddie’s first encounter with It happens at 29 Neibolt Street, a place known to attract hobos and drifters. It takes the form of one of those hobos that is stricken with disease. It uses a leper to frighten Eddie, which is different than the classic movie monster forms It takes for most children.

[Article includes image of novel's text]

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. Eddie had backed away, his skin like ice, his mouth as dry as lint balls. One of the hobo's nostrils had been eaten away. You could look right into the red, scabby channel.

"I-I don't have a quarter" Eddie said, backing toward his bike.

"I'll do it for a dime," the hobo croaked, coming toward him. He was wearing old green flannel pants. Yellow puke was stiffening across the lap. He unzipped his fly and reached inside. He was trying to grin. His nose was a red horror.

"I . . . I don't have a dime, either," Eddie said, and suddenly thought: Oh my god he's got leprosy! If he touches me I'll catch it too! His control snapped and he ran. He heard the hobo break into a shuffling run behind him, his old string-tied shoes slapping and flapping across the riotous lawn of the empty saltbox house.

"Come back here, kid! I'll blow you for free! Come back here!"

Like Beverly, Eddie’s physical manifestation of fear has symbolic meaning that is linked to his abusive upbringing. Eddie sees It as a leper because his mother’s insistence that he is sickly and delicate has made him afraid of disease. Eddie is horrified of the leper’s appearance, but the real terror doesn’t set in until he realizes that he could catch its illness.

The leper continually offers to give Eddie a blowjob and uses this pressure of sexual favors to scare him. There are no other instances of It threatening children with sexual assault, so Its decision to do so here is an important distinction. This metaphor is significant because the leper is a sickly, diseased man offering oral sex to Eddie and Its combination of these things shows us a deep fear Eddie has, unknown even to himself.

Eddie is afraid of doing sexual things with men because he believes he will get a disease and die. Its use of the leper as a complex manifestation of Eddie’s fears is our first clue that Eddie is gay coded. Because he is groomed to fear disease and sickness, he fears his own homosexuality and views it as something that could kill him.

We get some interesting religious imagery as Eddie thinks back to the root of his religious fear. He is quick to dismiss religious rules as stupid but stops himself as he remembers he takes religion seriously enough to be afraid of it.

This flashback shows how Eddie’s mother has shaped his life. She constantly scared him about illnesses like cancer and polio, which instills in him a fear of any activity that could result in disease or injury. It’s interesting how a young Eddie worries about being sent to hell because it’s unlikely that he has done anything that would warrant this fear. He worries about going to hell a lot for a child who was never very religious.

Reading Eddie’s inner turmoil as the result of suppressed homosexual feelings, it makes sense for Eddie to wonder about going to hell because of who he is, rather than something he has done. The common belief about the gay and trans movement in the 1950s, gay men in particular, is that they are committing dirty, sinful acts that will give them diseases and damn them to hell. Eddie’s fearful feelings towards illness and religion have a more in-depth meaning if you consider that this narrative is popularized by society as Eddie grows up.

Another interesting aspect about Eddie’s hidden sexuality is how he interacts with the other Losers. I will analyze his scenes with Richie in part two, so for now let’s focus on Bill and Beverly.

In a later scene, Stephen King singles out Eddie as being “delighted” by Bill.

We get an explanation for Eddie’s unmatched joy when Eddie tries to imitate Bill to appear brave during a scene with Mr. Keene.

Eddie idolizes Bill and his love is rooted in that admiration. There are many references to Eddie having “hero worship” for Bill or seeming to love Bill more than the other Losers, perhaps even more than Beverly does. This is disguised as Eddie simply idolizing Bill, but it’s much more likely that he had an unrequited crush on Bill and didn’t know how to categorize it.

An era update makes sense, with ’80s nostalgia reaching an all-time high with shows like Stranger Things taking over the zeitgeist. But, given some of the trauma the children face, specifically Richie Tozier (played by Finn Wolfhard as a child and Bill Hader as an adult), the script demanded an update it never received. Childhood trauma looms under the skin of the Losers Club well into adulthood as It: Chapter Two explores the unholy reunion of the crew in their hometown. For most of the children, their traumas existed on the surface of the first It film. A hypochondriac, Eddie’s overbearing mother instilled in him a fear of anything that might be unclean. Beverly’s father verbally abuses her and sexually taunts her as she begins to grow into her adult body. Mikey saw his parents burned alive when he was a toddler.

Six out of the seven Losers left Derry as fast as their legs would carry them. Leaving allowed them to forget, but it didn’t remove the trauma they experienced. It seeped out of their pores and impacted their choice in a spouse. Both Beverly and Eddie married a version of their parents. Billy, now a writer, can’t think of a happy ending since his brother Georgie met his bloody end at Pennywise’s doorstep. Stanley is so terrorized by his childhood torment that he “takes himself off the board” permanently. Like every person on the planet, the Losers remain trapped in their trauma. They’ve just found new ways to cope. Richie ended up telling other people’s jokes. He amassed a lot of wealth, but he lives his life alone.

Throughout It: Chapter Two, it becomes clear that Richie is a closeted gay man in love with his childhood best friend, Eddie (James Ransone plays the adult version). Mostly this revelation becomes clear through two scenes. The first is a flashback of Richie hanging out at an arcade the same summer the Losers defeated Pennywise the first time. He plays Street Fighter with a kid we’ve never seen before. When the kid says he has to go, Richie offers to pay for the next round of games. Unfortunately, the new kid’s cousin, Henry Bowers, lives to torment Richie and his friends. Now face to face with a stab-happy bully, and surrounded by the judging eyes of his peers, Richie’s sexual orientation, and therefore masculinity, is challenged by his crush.

Richie runs out of the arcade and seeks refuge in a public park. Before him stands the symbol of masculinity; a giant, ax-swinging Paul Bunyan looms 20 feet over a young Richie. In his flannel and denim, he’s a stark contrast to Richie’s blue and pink swirled button-up shirt. The American folk hero instantly becomes a threat with shredded teeth like a whale, but sharp like a shark’s tooth. While the giant tries to stab Richie, a crowd stands by and watches it happen. The fear, bullying and ultimately the way in which adults ignore bullying are accurate to the 1989 time period.

The second scene that reveals Richie as queer happens when Eddie dies. Everyone is sad, but Richie is beside himself, so overcome with emotions he has to be hauled out of the sewer by his friends. Adult Richie doesn’t seem to fit into a 2019 narrative. Not everyone can come out in America. There are many different reasons for remaining in the proverbial closet. Some careers, like a being a professional athlete or conservative analyst, can be difficult for an openly gay man to maintain. But Richie works as a comedian in Los Angeles. Even if he chose to keep his sexual orientation close to the vest, the idea that the ’00s marriage legalization or the ’90s coming out celebration could miss a white man working in Hollywood doesn’t make sense. If it did, highlighting that fact is vital to understanding the character.

Screenwriter Gary Dauberman and Hader have both shared their thoughts about the depiction. But the murky nature of Richie’s queer identity feels like a letdown. The second chapter of It attempts to reveal the way dormant childhood trauma springs forth in adulthood. Anything buried will eventually rise to the surface. There has never been a more traumatic time for the queer community than the AIDs epidemic. Everything that came after cemented the LGBTQIA community as lawfully represented citizens of the United States. There’s so much more we’re fighting for, particularly our trans siblings. We’re still struggling to be seen in cinema as more than tragic tales. The balance of identity representation within the Losers offered an awesome opportunity to detail the effects of the past 30 years on the most privileged members of the community. Richie never even says he’s gay out loud.

An early section of the novel describes a gay bashing and the violent murder of Adrian Mellon, a gay man, with all the homophobic language my 13-year-old vocabulary contained. It even taught me a few brand new slurs against myself. Whether I feared being beaten and thrown over a bridge before reading the book or whether it birthed that specific fear in me, I can’t say, but I read that section breathless, because there it was, in black and white on the page of this 1200-page book: that the adults around me said and thought the things I feared they said and thought. I wasn’t crazy. My fears were valid, or else why would a horror writer write them? I felt seen. Scared, but seen.

Middle-schoolers aren’t taken very seriously by our culture. [...] King takes young people seriously.

There was more to the representation of hate crime in IT for me, though. The opening section is, undoubtedly, filled with problematic stereotypes and hateful language, but when the bullies and the cops toss their anti-gay slurs around, they are not celebrated for it. The author is very clearly judging them. The gay-bashing is the first evidence the reader gets that evil is returning to the town of Derry; that something terribly unnatural is afoot, and it’s not homosexuality. The hate is unnatural, the hate is evil. When we get into the head of Don Hagarty, Adrian’s boyfriend, and the author lets the reader know him in his own thoughts—the first time I’d ever known a gay person outside of the news—he’s sympathetic. He’s smart and loving. He also sees the town for what it is, sees its evil clearly and wants to leave it.

I couldn’t believe it. Stephen King thought gay people should be able to date and hold hands and live their lives. Stephen King did not think gay people should be tortured or killed. He thought that those who would torture or kill gay people were in the service of evil, as were those who would tolerate it or look away. The victims of homophobia did not deserve to be victims. Homophobia, Stephen King seemed to say, is not the natural way of the world. It is a monstrous thing and those who practice it are a part of the monster. He made that a literal fact with a literal monster.