"Queer Representation in Modern Horror" Transcript

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Rуаո‚ G․ (2021, Dес 9). “Kіll tһe tѡink!”: hοw ‘Chυcky’ ceⅿentѕ the murԁerous doll’s leɡacy as a ԛueer ally [Article]. https://www.nme.com/features/opinion/chucky-tv-series-queer-ally-3111995
Gеꬵfeո‚ S. (2018, Aυɡ 21). Trаnѕ Hοrror Storіes anԁ Soсietу's Fear of tһe Transⅿasculine Body [Article]. https://www.them.us/story/transmasculine-horror-stories
Wаlԁrοո, A. (2022, Aυɡ 17). Quеer Sсreaⅿѕ: A Hіstorу oꬵ LGBTQ+ Surνival Tһrough the Lens of American Horror Cinema [Book].

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Oct 09, 2022 First published.

Dec 05, 2023 Deleted post-callout.

May 8, 2024Channel deleted

Oct 09, 2022

2023-00-00

Dec 03, 2023

Horror movies have been getting queerer in the new millennium.
[patreon link]

#horrorstories #movies #gay

00:00 Introduction
03:56 Part One - The Monsters Are Real
11:23 Part Two - The Evolution of Tolerance
19:06 Chapter Three - Laugh Yourself To Death
24:32 Chapter Four - Horror Becomes Real
29:32 Chapter Five - All About The Dolls
37:02 Chapter Six - We’re All The Final Girl
45:24 Chapter Seven - Horrific Transitions
52:04 Chapter Eight - They Always Get Up

at the 1984 Democratic National Convention Bobby Campbell a prominent AIDS activist argued for a presidential candidate who would actually address the AIDS crisis unlike the Reagan Administration whose mandate regarding the growing pandemic was to look pretty and do as little as possible in Campbell's speech he discussed the need for diverse representation of queer people in Media I have a message for the nation very often lesbians and gay men are portrayed as isolated alienated and alone or else in a pathetic search for desperate sexuality I don't think that that's true and I think that it's important for people to understand that lesbians and gay men do not exist outside of a context we exist in the context of the people we love and those that love us Campbell's demand for more stories that truly represent the queer experience as human experience has oddly taken hold most strongly within the horror genre in one way or another despite their focus on pain and suffering horror films explore a wide range of human fears often these fears are projections of mass societal anxieties that touch upon politics psychology sociology and relationships between vastly different life experiences the horror genre consistently mirrors the concerns and fears of society as a whole Invasion of the Body Snatchers depicts the apprehension of the 1950s regarding an alien or foreign Invasion the hunger and Fright Night portray the infectiousness of queer culture in the 1980s and the final moments of Night of the Living Dead shed light on the racism of the 1960s and Cloverfield depicted the apprehension of a societal Apocalypse in the wake of September the 11th horror utilizes the Fantastic to develop the internal fears of these and countless other periods thereby extrapolating their shared realities I've tried to look at how horror affects us over the last couple of years first with a look at the history of queer representation and Horror in my video monsters in the closet then as society's Fear of Everything queer and different in deep cuts and then last year I looked at how we queer people will let monsters into our lives because we think we deserve nothing better this has become a sort of tradition for me every October a tradition I have all too much fun digging my teeth into and this year is no different but instead of looking at how horror is queer-coded let's actually take a look at horror from a truly queer perspective queer creators queer characters queer monsters and something that Hollywood so very rarely deigns to give us queer Heroes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] I spoke about The Silence of the Lambs all the way back in monsters in the closet and touched again on it briefly and fear-coded so I feel it is best to start with something that happened right after the release of the film The revelation of a truly horrific queer monster that was all too real Jeffrey Dahmer Dahmer was a gay serial killer with a penchant for pedophilia he frequently abducted young men and boys from gay bars raped and murdered them and then used their bodies in gruesome medical experiments he'd admit that he was trying to make sex zombies out of the bodies he dismembered and experimented on so that they'd fulfill his sexual needs and never leave his side Dahmer said he drugged and raped the men then drilled holes into their brains and injected chemicals to turn them into mute zombie sex slaves after his victims passed on he would do anything from keeping their body parts as souvenirs to engaging in necrophilia to even eating them unfortunately the police largely rejected the evidence of gay survivors and their families after Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys most of whom were young men of color in May of 1991 police found one victim a 14 year old walking the streets naked and still confused from Dahmer's drugging he had fled from Dahmer's apartment Dahmer told the authorities that the young man was his boyfriend and asked that he'd be returned to his care the cops complied and Dahmer killed the boy shortly thereafter in 1991 when Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news and Buffalo Bill was in theaters the public received a barrage of messaging claiming that homosexual serial killers were widespread in the United States and often connected to pedophilia the notoriety of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy before him along with the media's unrelenting focus on them contributed to the stereotype that all gay men were perverts while heterosexual serial killers Like Richard Ramirez and Ted Bundy were rarely categorized as such and their sexual orientation was rarely the focus of public attention unless it was women throwing themselves at Ted Bundy one source of violence against LGBT individuals is The Stereotype that they're more likely to engage in violent Behavior due to their malicious sexuality in addition the Casual homophobia of 1980s films and toxic masculinity portrayed therein contributed to the violence against queer people in the 1990s and afterwards Nightbreed directed by Clive Barker explores the formation of a queer family as a means of safety from the violence of the outside world Clive Barker a pioneering openly gay author and filmmaker encodes almost all of his works with queer themes after being duped by his psychiatrist into thinking that he's a serial killer our protagonist seeks Solace among the Nightbreed a group of outcast creatures who dwell in a deserted Cemetery for protection from the rest of society can anyone watch Nightbreed and not automatically associate the titular characters with queer people asks Trace Thurman co-host of the horror queers podcast they've been Outcast by society and are deemed as dangerous by the normal people the climax of the film culminates in an assault on the nightbreed's home base of Midian as the normies would rather kill all of them as opposed to understand them sound familiar queer undertones are a vital part of Nightbreed rather than risk the anger of respectable citizens the film's monsters retreated into their own Enclave the normies want to hurt and kill everyone who is different from them the monsters who were othered because of their looks came together to establish Midian and their own other queer family the creatures of night breeds Midian were very much present in the 1990s American reality we monsters knew we had to stick together to avoid being victims of regular people's aggression and to look out for each other in case one of them was attacked not surprisingly anti-queer and transphobic violence continued to be a problem throughout the 1990s with two of the most high profile killings of the time that of Brandon Tina in 1993 and that of Matthew Shepard in 1998 acting as sort of horrific bookends that saw the American government first Embrace queer people well at least gay people and then throw us under the bus for political expediency but in the fictions of the big screen queer writers and directors have had much more of a say in what happens than in real life since the 1930s such creators have been at the Forefront of the horror genre but that doesn't mean they always have the LGBT community's best interests at heart Kevin Williamson who penned the faculty and scream came out as gay to his family and friends in 1992. unfortunately the character of stokely's betrayal and the faculty perpetuates the Trope of the butch lesbian who after meeting the right boy suddenly becomes comfortable with her own femininity but is that Williamson's fault queer filmmakers especially queer screenwriters will have their work relentlessly scrutinized by Executives for markers of queer sexuality as queerness has been suppressed or portrayed as evil for decades a lot of pressure gets put on gay artists to fix the queer image when it really should be shared more evenly with their straight and cisgender contemporaries however queer authors and filmmakers of the genre have an opportunity to give audiences a peek into and through the queer lens and to create characters that are not Odes to the repeated stereotypes that have plagued gay characters for most of Cinema history but we queers had some reason to hope that perhaps we wouldn't be straight washed out of horror Cinema anymore with the character of David from the Bride of Chucky an out gay character who isn't tragic or the butt of a joke he's killed on screen of course but not by our Plucky team of Serial killing dolls Chucky and Tiffany instead he accidentally steps in front of a semi and gets liquefied on the highway he's not killed because he's gay but because he wasn't watching where he was going and so the 1990s ended on a hopeful note for queer visibility in the horror genre sadly the queer Persona is created for the horror spoofs that swamped the box office in the 2000s would derail this ambition due to the widespread coverage of falling and broken bodies from the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 as well as Internet footage depicting suspected terrorists being subjected to gruesome torture techniques like waterboarding and bodily stress positions by American CIA agents Americans had become desensitized to your typical slasher films and so a sub-genre focusing on body horror emerged alongside the rise of the horror comedy there would be just as much anger at the start of the new decade due to inaccurate portrayals of the queer Community as there had been at the end of the last one unfortunately outdated homophobic stereotypes jokes and slurs persisted in the media depictions of queer people especially in the horror genre Kelly Rowland a real-life member of Destiny's Child plays the character of Kia in the slasher Blockbuster Freddy vs Jason which had the guts to include a homophobic slur intended at horror Legend Freddy Krueger the question is posed what kind of runs around in a Christmas sweater I don't know what else could serve as a better time capsule for the early 2000s than this line Chris egerton editor of billboard magazine said Kia uses it as a term of denigration and emasculation it is lobbed in an effort to diminish his power just as it has been against LGBT individuals throughout history you're not even scary she follows up Freddy goes on to semi-refute this by having Jason brutally murder her if only he could have murdered that line too Freddy versus Jason wasn't the only example of casual homophobia finding its way into the horror genre though Millennium horror tends to Echo the Casual homophobia of the 1980s films like American Psycho which is set in the 1980s Wall Street World revealed the homophobia rooted in fear of the other that was at the root of the Decades usage of queer people as punch lines Patrick Bateman the film's antagonist is a wealthy murderer who takes great pride in the look of his business suits and the layout of his business card Peter Staley a closeted gay man in the 1980s who worked in a similar stocks and bonds environment as character Patrick Bateman and whose story is told in the documentary how to survive a plague often heard the locker room spill into the boardroom several times a week some hideous and costly outcome gave cause for a traitor to slam his telephone against his cubicle or a salesman's chair or one of the room's many pillars with such force that plastic shards shot across several tiers almost without variation the targets of Rage were eggs pansies sissies fairies and suckers Bateman uses homophobic slurs to blend in with his buddies and is repulsed when his co-worker Lewis tries to seduce him in the men's restroom prompting Bateman to vigorously wash his gloved hands this type of toxic masculinity was ingrained in the wealth culture of the 1980s and dominated boys locker room language well into the New Millennium it would even be the excuse for Eli Roth's homophobic dialogue in his breakout 2006 film hostile written and directed by Roth hostile follows Josh Paxton and Ollie three male friends who travel through Europe in search of girls drugs and good times would find themselves at the hands of psychotic Killers who pay an expert hunting team to torture victims the movie is full of violence profanity and bro talk with several of the characters using gay slurs as forms of insult and comedy in addition while riding the train Josh gets touched on the leg by a stranger who then says what is your nature after Josh has yelled at the man the latter is ejected from their train car when Josh runs into this same man again this time behind a bar he tries to make amends his Pals tease him by calling him because of course they do this individual who tells Josh he is gay eventually turns out to be the one responsible for Josh's murder poetry in motion eniochialo wrote about the homophobia of hostile in fengoria magazine in 2006 the lesson learned no matter how nice they seem never be nice to a homosexual because in the end they'll get you the characters continuously refer to each other as Edgar you're gay and everyone laughs and everything is Jolly but not for a lot of queer rights supporters I understand that this is just a horror film and that it probably won't impact much of society but as long as a movie like this continues to Target an audience of teens to late 20s heterosexual males issues of anti-gay Prejudice will never be satisfied Roth initially met this criticism with a reaction akin to boys will be boys the following year a musician turned director Rob Zombie and noted Ally released his remake of John Carpenter's Halloween as with Roth's hostile homophobia rears its ugly head with slurs littered throughout the film however while Roth's use of homophobia is more gratuitous chalked up to Young people's vernacular zombies frequent uses of homophobic slurs particularly the epsler are said by characters the audience is not supposed to empathize with but rather revile unlike Roth's protagonists hostile part 2 is an example of how a filmmaker can actually take criticism and grow this film is still Tethered to the torture porn trend of post-9 11 horror so no character is safe from mutilation but the film does feature a queer lead character who is level-headed and not fetishized she dies of course because well hostile but you know baby steps and those baby steps were needed film historian Vito Russo said gave his ability has never really been an issue in the movies it's how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century so no more films about homosexuality instead more films that explore people who happen to be gay in America and how their lives intersect with the dominant culture he said this in the 80s as the New Millennium lumbered on fresh gay narratives were much appreciated if rare it was time for a new narrative one that didn't dwell on the difficulties of being queer in America but instead focused on everyday Americans who just happened to be queer in 2002's May a young woman is bullied as a child due to her lazy eye May is strange and withdrawn and has difficulty connecting with others she develops feelings for Adam a local mechanic and is also fascinated by Paulie an outgoing co-worker at the animal hospital where she works Polly is hopelessly in love with May and makes repeated attempts to seduce her she encourages me to come out of her comfort zone but she doesn't know about May's unorthodox friend a doll May speaks with when nobody's around the audience sympathizes with this odd girl who just wants some attention despite the fact that she turns into a horrible killer later in the film spurred on by Adam dumping her and calling her strange May runs away from Adam's attempts to avoid her and into the arms of Paulie who says to kiss you since I first saw you May is skeptical at first but she soon discovers that she actually likes Polly Polly noticing May's reticence says do you feel weird diamonds I am weird despite the fact that Paulie and her other lover Ambrosia are eventually killed by May in her quest to construct a doll out of human parts in the style of a modern-day Frankenstein's monster neither paulies nor May's sexualities are to blame simply put their lesbians in a horror film doomed to the same fate as countless other female protagonists in the genre nothing special about being queer in a horror movie early 2000s gave birth to the Blockbuster horror parody via the Wayans brothers scary movie franchise many problematic and highly stereotypical gay male personas were invented by the comedy duo before the scary movie films Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier played campy flamboyant gay Cinema critics Blaine Edwards and Antoine Meriweather on the enormously successful TV show In Living Color conceived and produced by Keenan Ivory Wayans critics and fans of the show have argued about whether or not the presence of Edwards and Meriwether is objectionable and whether or not it's a rare opportunity for mainstream audiences to experience gay black male sexuality on film in 1990 okay black filmmaker Marlon Riggs said I feel very ambivalent it plays into the stereotypes the dominant culture has of us but that's not my concern not that they're Queens they're Camp Queens but rather it's an image of Queens who function in a way that justifies all the very traditional beliefs about black gay sexuality it plays into an ocean of black asexuality held by the black gay community a notion that black gay men are sissies ineffectual ineffective woman-ish in a way that signifies inferiority rather than empowerment Luann's Brother's first film scary movie perhaps learned from the past mistakes while sadly still retaining key personality features when creating the character of Rey a masculine football player with a girlfriend who is not so secretly gay his homosexual Antics in both the first and second film of the series recall both Hollywood's perpetuation of homophobic stereotypes and the gay antics of the characters of In Living Color Rey's homosexuality is strongly implied by the fact that he is constantly making lewd advances toward his male peers listening to its reigning Men by The Pointer Sisters in the car and eagerly sprinting to the locker room showers to smack his male teammates on the behind with a wet towel Rey even makes the culturally significant gesture of tucking his penis between his legs in front of his companions a move made famous by Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs scary movie also has the pretty damn transphobic character of Ms man a girl's gym coach played by female bodybuilder Jane tricka man makes a number of lewd comments to the girls and even seen sniffing their underwear in the office at one point scary movie Man reveals to Cindy that the only reason she underwent gender confirmation surgery from male to female was so that she might have an advantage over her competitors in athletics and we wonder why the more ignorant Among Us are so worried about trans people playing sports any attempt at humor in man's predatory behavior is rendered even more toxic by the presence of an SS uniform hanging behind her desk the idea of the predatory queer Nazi persists as evidenced by Ms man's SS costume even Buffalo Bill displays Nazi memorabilia in his home in the last 15 minutes of the film there is a brief shot of a bed spread with a swastika design Ms man was made for comedy despite the gravity associated with her casual Nazi SS costume in this horror comedy parody the queerness is both meant to be funny yet predatory with the killers of the first film both being gay Camp satire slasher psycho beach party adapted from the 1987 play by drag Superstar Charles bush is on the Other Extreme of the horror parody Spectrum as an Ode to and critique of the camp of the 1960s Bush's psycho beach party 30 mocks can't be B movies while also highlighting the queerness of the genre and confounding queer preconceptions Florence Chiclet Forest our protagonist is a girl who aspires to be normal just like the boys so she can surf with them within the first 10 minutes of the film The unassuming bully Rhonda makes comments on Chiclets gender identity because she is not as hyper feminine as the other girls of the 1960s Rhonda says she heard Chiclet went off to Denmark for the summer I heard you going there to have some sort of an operation Operation yeah I heard you're having your dick cut off and turning into a girl a clear reference to Christine Jorgensen who underwent gender confirmation surgery in Denmark in 1952 becoming world famous in the process psycho beach party also makes an obvious reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho through Chiclets ominous split personality that alludes to her being the murderer plaguing the teens on the beach as for the men most of the beach sequences have them flaunting their chiseled physiques and strutting around like confident Surfers but when yo-yo and provlone to Surf buddies engage in a half-naked wrestling match on the sand twice it becomes evident that they aren't being entirely honest Bush makes sure their unrequited love is pointed out all throughout the movie culminating in a big kiss even Chiclets nerdy independent best friend berdine who would rather analyze the subtext of horror films than date boys tries to make a pass on her best friend and soul mate but like so many queer couplings in film they don't quite make it to the finish line the United States of America in the 2010s was teeming with newly discovered representation in both pop culture and mainstream life homophobic and transphobic Americans often respond negatively to this newfound visibility and celebration of queer history and culture although marriage equality passed through the Supreme Court in 2013 the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended difficult days ahead for the queer community in the U.S for queer Americans Trump's selection of openly anti-gay Mike Pence as vice president was a clear signal that his government would be far less welcoming than the previous one despite Trump's own half-hearted attempts to appeal to queer voters all of this led to a terrorist attack on the queer community which would become the bloodiest mass shooting in U.S history up to that time a shooter opened fire at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando Florida on June 12 2016. there were 50 fatalities the vast majority of them LGBT Latino men after the events of September 11 2001 this was the worst terrorist assault in the United States and the deadliest mass shooting in American history since the Pulse Nightclub was so well known for its queer clientele it was immediately recognized as the target of a homophobic attack when news of the shooting spread another blow was dealt to the queer community on July 26 2017 when President Trump declared his intention to Bar transgender people from serving in the U.S military in a series of tweets and yet despite the devastating and frustrating defeats queer Americans endured throughout the Trump Administration film would prove more accessible than ever to the experiences of queer people even more so than in other genres horror films regularly feature dozens of queer characters often depicted with Grace and respect for the queer experience horror at its best has always been political from Invasion of the Body Snatchers extrapolating the fear of the Cold War into stories of violent alien encounters tonight of the Living Dead having the black hero of a zombie apocalypse slain by white police officers this sub-genre of fiction takes a fantastic and horrific look at the state of American politics it's possible that the generally positive gay portrayals and horror films of the 2010s could help to counter The increased hostility and backlash that had been directed at members of the community after the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of white supremacist Neo-Nazi movements all across the country sometimes horror movies even act as a Force for good as part of their marketing campaigns for new films one of the bloodiest film franchises in history saw had organized wildly successful blood donation campaigns since the franchise's Inception in 2004 the blood drive has been an integral part of the saw franchise serving both to promote the famed torture porn blood Fest that are the saw films and to thank donors with complementary seats to the premiere in 2017 the campaign took a more political turn drawing attention to the discriminatory of blood donation policies that Target gay men the FDA instituted a lifetime prohibition on any potential male donor who had had sex with a man at the outset of the AIDS crisis even though blood donation programs are mandated to check all participants blood this implies that gay blood is inherently unhealthy and undesirable social media personalities with huge queer fan bases were featured in the blood drives campaign in 2017. as of now the saw blood drives have collected over 250 000 pints of blood despite the fact that few are safe from the clutches of evil and horror movies the genre has in recent years provided a welcoming environment in which gay characters can be explored and regarded seriously like in happy death day and happy death day to you where a recurring queer character named Tim is given multiple opportunities to come out at first glance he comes across as a typical sexist dude bro but is revealed by the protagonist to be in fact gay Tim's screen time is relatively short in both movies but the director's decision to incorporate and emphasize what may seem like a side narrative to the main plot will always stick with gay viewers the film's director the openly gay Christopher Landon was bullied as a child for being gay and an outcast as a child Landon sought comfort in horrific stories which sparked his interests and Ambitions in the horror genre by including Tim's narrative in his films the director sends a message of acceptance to the many other queer Youth and adults all across the world Don Mancini via his iconic Child's Play franchise is well known for queering horror a bit more with each installment especially with 2004's Seed of Chucky Glenn slash Glenda they them pronouns child of Chucky and his doll bride Tiffany was separated at Birth from their parents in the final scene of Bride of Chucky Mancini's use of the names Glenn and Glenda for the character calling back to the Edward classic Glenn or Glenda six years after being born in a New Jersey cemetery and being taken to the UK by a cruel Puppet Master the child now known as [ __ ] decides to go in search of their parents in Hollywood after seeing commercials for a film featuring two dolls with the same made in Japan markings on their wrists Glenn slash Glenda is mistaken for a boy at first because of their haircut and the way their Puppeteer refers to them but when Chucky and Tiffany finally get to meet their offspring they get into an argument over whether or not they should be called Glenn or Glenda she just had an accident you mean he had an accident even though Chucky has chosen the name Glenn for his future child Tiffany insists that they be called Glenda and I'm gonna call you Glenn the name is that for a girl your name is Glenda they pull down Glenn slash blender's pants to show that they like all other dolls have nothing going on down there this genitalia scene points out the absurdity of choosing a child's gender and how parents expectations and desires get in the way of what a child actually wants in a rather Progressive scene Tiffany and Chucky have a dialogue with Glenn slash Glenda about who they want to be I want a girl I want a boy what about what I want well which is it sometimes I feel like a boy sometimes I feel like a girl no matter what happens we'll deal with it together as a family as a result of their conversation Tiffany now supports her child's non-binary gender expression Noreen giffney and Myra J heard in queering the non-human discuss just how imperative this scene is in This brilliant intersexual thematic gender legibility is shown to be important for the parents not the child and the film foregrounds the ways in which normative identity requires stable gender in refusing to be either Glenn or Glenda and insisting on being both Chucky and Tiffany's kid focuses our attention on the horrific effects of heteronormativity and turns attention away from the monstrosity of The Ambiguously gendered body the queer future of horror depicted in Glenn Glenda is one that places a greater emphasis on the problematic social constructions of gender and the fact that queer people and Dolls exist not to be a spectacle but to have truthful narratives told about them the monstrosity is in the way their parents quarrel about their gender not in the way Glenn slash Glenda looks or acts Mancini utilizes Glenn slash Glenda to show that a non-binary person is valid and should be able to study their gender identity and sexuality without the influence of others rather than showing the character as a horrific device bodies belong to those who habit them transgender and non-binary people exist across the queer sexuality and gender spectrum and as such they should not be forced into tiny acceptable boxes under Mancini's Authority Seed of Chucky is gloriously queer and refuses to paint trans and non-binary bodies as violent and grotesque despite their physical scary doll appearance Mancini continued his queer inclusion with the following Chucky films The Curse of Chucky in 2013 and Cult of Chucky in 2017 but most of all in the new TV series simply titled Chucky in which we find ourselves watching the development of a sweet gay teen romance in the middle of a horror show when 14 year old Jake wheeler gets his hands on the titular possessed doll things get interesting for the budding artist who has a crush on classmate Devin Chucky played once again by Brad Dourif and not the knockoff Mark Hamill version I love Mark Hamill but no Chucky may still enjoy ingeniously killing off his victims by means of electrocution or throwing them out of Windows or stabbing them but he also has a lot of heart and it's not just a heart that he stole from somebody else's body the show is fundamentally a coming-of-age story despite being marketed as a coming-of-rage story and Jake's developing queerness is presented as both instrumental and incidental to the plot his first love just happens to be a boy while Chucky arguably represents his inner turmoil when Jake's drunken and violent father teases him about his interests in dolls and his tendency to spend time alone Jake or tortz hi you don't care that they think I'm weird you just care that they know my and then Chucky kills him a lovely little inversion of the kill your gaze Trope kill your homophobes Chucky might say in episode 2 Chucky points out that he has a queer kid a call back to Glenn slash Glenda you know I have a queer kid you have a kid gender fluid you're you're cool with it I'm not a monster Jake and as we've come to expect from the child's play franchise since 1998's Bride of Chucky introduced Jennifer Tilly to the series the show is deliciously camp with Tilly returning to chew the scenery and Fiona Dora vying for her MVP Crown as a young version of her father Brad's character Charles Lee Ray the serial killer who's transferred via blood magic into Chucky Mancini has stated that he's infused his work with a queer sensibility whether through the use of black humor the inclusion of queer supporting characters or the portrayal of Glenn slash glinda's struggle to determine their gender identity in Seed of Chucky Tilly recalled how producers deemed Seed of Chucky which features John Waters a Britney Spears look-alike and Hannah from S Club 7 getting killed off by the doll to be too gay though they maybe should have realized that when they had a movie about a non-binary doll starring Jennifer Tilly but in a genre with queera tours such as screams Kevin Williamson who says the Scream movies are coded gay survival Hellraisers Clive Barker and final destinations Jeffrey Reddick queer references traditionally had to be subtext that's one of the joys of Chucky that it gives outright representation to slasher film fans who previously had to find it piecemeal where they could usually in villains who could not identify with Jason a kid bullied for being different and then gets to come back and have his revenge on the preppy jocks who made his childhood a living hell but now Chucky's Jake gets to do what very very few have done before not only be a rare final boy but one who makes it to the end and gets the guy even though horror has become much more diverse in recent years there's still something queerly revelatory about anchoring a 33 year old stab-happy franchise a better killer doll to an adolescent gay love story further cementing Chucky's Legacy as a queer icon who quite literally slays queer people have developed an unusual system of identification you see we queers have always been reduced to villains or worthless Side characters with little to no backbone because of this terrible dearth of positive representation gay people have had to make a choice identify with the side character or the main villain and so we connect with these perceived evil characters because of their overt or covert queerness such as Dr pretorius from the Bride of Frankenstein or Countess Maria's Alaska from Dracula's daughter we have become accustomed to identifying with the villain due to the fact that film has historically repressed us and designated us as scapegoats for villainy as a result marginalized people desperate for representation continue to adopt these horror monsters as their own to celebrate as anti-heroes final girls are also being embraced by queer people who want to be symbolized by powerful empathetic androgynous Victors of Oppression traits that are undoubtedly familiar to many throughout the queer Spectrum in horror the final girl is typically portrayed as a heterosexual cisgender white woman because straight white faces have dominated horror films from the earliest days of the silent horror era the final girl's look has been cliched and expected fans of horror who are black Asian gay trans Hispanic non-binary or any other race gender or sexual orientation other than the stock model for the sole survivor and horror films must find themselves within the characterizations of the final girl in films with little to no minority representation despite her outward appearance looking for representation beyond the physical may be satisfying for individuals particularly gay people when one looks beyond the white female face of the final girl one might find amazing personality qualities and attributes that mirror the gay experience the final girl may appear to be a gorgeous face on the surface but on the inside she is brimming with the fortitude strength and persistence required to fight monstrous slashers and high school bullies qualities that many queer people have gained in order to thrive in a queerphobic world Carol J Clover a cinema and gender historian and Final girl specialist deconstructs what a final girl means in the horror Canon her Book Men Women in chainsaws provides a hypothesis for what the Final Girl implies in a horror film as well as the characteristics that make her a feminist hero the final girl is usually the only character who is mentally developed with wits and Brawn in times of peril and finally beats the villain towards the conclusion of the film audiences relate with her since she is usually the lone rational character even if she makes mistakes along the way such as going up the stairs instead of sprinting out the front door the final girl's humanity is acknowledged she is the one who brings down the oppressor and the crowd cheers her on Clover explains that she is by any measure the slasher film's hero the final girl has not just manned herself she specifically unmans the oppressor the Final Girl holds the traits required not just to preserve herself for No One generally comes to her Aid but also to avenge all those slaughtered and tormented by the oppressor her bravery though is not gendered despite the name given to the horror film survivors the final girl is neither conventionally or stereotypically feminine she is a hybrid of masculine and female characteristics as Clover states she alternates between registers of masculine and feminine from the outset before her final struggle she endures the deepest throws of femininity and even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong now flee's the Killer and now charges him now stabs and is stabbed now Cries Out In Fear And now shouts in anger she is a physical female and character illogical Androgen the concept of the final girl actually being non-binaries kind of groundbreaking in terms of gender queer identity films like Brian De Palma's carry allow for identification by mistreated Outsiders who desire just to fit in but reach a Breaking Point from which there's no return Clover's theoretical final girl perspective allows us to see clear-cut final girls like Nancy Thompson in a Nightmare on Elm Street in a new light Nancy Thompson is a young high school student struggling with the strange death of her closest friend and persistent dreams of a burnt man in a red and green sweater Freddy Krueger the infamous child killer although she looks to be the adorable girl next door Nancy's Talent stem from her bravery and confronting Krueger in her nightmares and her ability to bring him into the real world when no one else would or could she outwits the adversary while also fighting her oppressor physically Heather langenkamp who plays Nancy in the film spoke with gay times about the significance of her role among gay horror fans she was surprised to see that many young gay men relate with Nancy who they see as a crucial character in the film series as a whole more than langenkamp had anticipated further more lesbian women can recognize themselves in the All-American Girl Next Door in the framework of Nancy's story in the first Nightmare on Elm Street film Nancy although having a boyfriend rarely thinks of him romantically they're more than Pals pledging to protect each other from the evil Freddy Krueger but when Glenn tries to initiate sex with a preoccupied Nancy at her best friend Tina's Place early in the film Nancy's comforting Tina while she's home alone and plagued with fears of the man in her nightmares Nancy stops him saying not now ourselves Nancy is a character on a mission to defend her friends while also killing Freddy Krueger she has no time for adolescent activities which is a characteristic shared by practically all final girls that's why they make it out alive movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween which along with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of birthed the Final Girl archetype are not meant to be queer nevertheless the character of the final girl in each as well as across the spectrum of Horror can be used as a vessel for queer experience oppression and Hope the Final Girl depicts a monstrous gender a gender that splatters rips at the seams and then is stitched back together as something messier than male or female though Clover theorizes that the final girl's Essence is non-binary her body becomes a place where queer people of All Sorts can project their experience and find solace in seeing themselves Triumph on screen and their tormentors whatever or whomever the Tormentor represents to them perish by their own queer hand Joshua Anderson in his essay the Final Girl an lgbtq representation states that the journey through that confusion of coming to terms with your sexuality is in essence the journey that these final girls take when they are chased and battered almost to the brink of death for those of us who grew up in a world where what we were learning about ourselves was considered immorally or internally wrong queer people in their bodies have been utilized by and for horror for over a century the bodies of queer horror characters bruised and bleeding had largely witnessed abuse and Scorn their lives utilized for Wicked actions or malicious laughter the growing identification of queer people with the Final Girl represents a psychological need to repair the damage that horror has inflicted on queer bodies and Minds in the past as well as a need to reclaim a genre that has explicit queer Roots but lost sight of such roots somewhere in the 20th century this drive for reclamation is a reaction to the bullying of queer people in horror films and Society in general horrific fiction has traditionally found a fertile ground in the fear of femininity it's the driving force behind The Exorcist in which a male demon takes over a girl's body and transforms her into a muttering twisted and self-mutilating Monster Rosemary and Rosemary's Baby is pregnant but not with a human child she wants instead she is a host for the son of the devil when she realizes this she takes drastic action by changing her hairstyle from a demure Bob to a harsh boyish pixie which her complicit husband publicly condemns movies like this transform natural processes like puberty and pregnancy into Tales of demonic Invasion by imbuing them with satanic potency they use the same method that was used to make the monsters in Silence of the Lambs and psycho only backward the trans feminine is a common theme in many horror films with characters like Buffalo Bill preying on young girls for their skin and Norman Bates killing as his mother to prevent trans feminine persons from using women's restrooms and shelters turfs and far-right fear mongers invoke the image of the wild predatory transphalus fear of the transmasculine a group far more dismissed by Society has been rarely voiced in mainstream Publications before recently nevertheless transmasculinity is still a breach of gender norms and since it most frequently affects people who have uteruses and so have the capacity to produce children it elicits a special kind of fear that is cloaked in condescending compassion a particularly contentious report from Jessie's single attempts to argue that it has become too easy for young trans people to begin gender confirmation procedures that some young people may be misdiagnosing severe gender dysphoria as something less serious such as sadness anxiety or patriarchal oppression meanwhile I've spoken to trans people who took so long to start their transition because Society had convinced them that their dysphoria was all just internalized misogyny at the same side I have read testimonies from a number of trans people who figured out that they were trans because of gender Euphoria not dysphoria as though the subjective experience of gender were a nefarious opaque mystery he asks where is the line between not feeling like a girl because society makes it difficult to be a girl and needing hormones to alleviate dysphoria that otherwise won't go away in a particularly revealing thought single rights that kids who go on puberty blockers and then on cross-sex hormones may not be able to have biological children as though the life of a theoretical future child matters more than the life of a potentially trans but certainly already living child 2018's hereditary plays upon the fears single stirs up the film's villain Charlie loses their grandmother at the start of the film after the funeral their mother Annie checks in on them in a scene in which Charlie reveals that their grandmother wanted them to be a boy but their mother responds as though she's heard something else something like I want to be a boy declaring that they were a tomboy growing up but in the end they got over it we never see Charlie interact with their grandmother so we never find out exactly why she felt like they were supposed to be a boy but Charlie makes it quite apparent that they feel disconnected from their physical form they have an extreme allergy to nuts walk in a shuffle don't look at people directly create Effigies out of garbage and constantly click their tongue their mother feels they need to be socialized so their older brother Peter reluctantly brings them to a party where they stand out like a sore thumb an awkward 13 year old in a knee-length orange sweatshirt clutching to their brother because they don't know what else to do Peter forces Charlie to eat chocolate cake so he and his Crush can get high but there's walnuts in that cake and Charlie's throat begins to constrict and they barge in and beg for help from their brother who's in the middle of a bong hit in his haste to get them to the hospital he swerves around a dead deer and decapitates Charlie on a telephone pole as they were leaning out the window for air in a horrified Haze Peter travels home goes to sleep and awakens to his mother's cries of anguish the camera cuts from Peter's anguished face to an indelible shot of Charlie's severed head swarming with ants but Charlie's beheading was no accident it was part of a ceremony to free them from their body and reveal their true identity as pymon the eighth king of hell they get occult's help to torment Peter into a possessed State at which point they take over his body as Peter Charlie clicks his tongue to show that he is now in control slowly he makes his way up to his tree house where his cult members are waiting to anoint him King one of the cult's leaders assures Charlie that he is okay now Charlie now in the body of Peter gazes just beyond the camera mouth slightly a gape he does not look afraid if anything he seems for the first time to be at home the fact that Charlie's transition calls for such Extreme Measures of physical violence reflects a residual fear among many CIS people the transition is a type of Mutilation and at worst a kind of death the sloughing off of one body in exchange for a new different one those who identify as trans masculine may have their desire to transition misunderstood as a magnetic draw away from the submissive gender and toward the dominant one a power play rather than an act to feel whole as a person if hereditary were a typical drama it would simply follow the family disillusion surrounding the transition of a child the over-dramatic concept of a person dying and a new one being born a fantastically fictitious morning process that so many CIS people say they have to go through when friends or family transition but because it's a horror movie we get actual death murder possession and a literal king of Hell a queer person is never given more power than within the scenes of a horror movie and if hereditary says anything about the trans experience it's that it's a hell of a lot easier to change your body than to change your soul in March of 2020 as the world failed to prepare for the coming covid-19 pandemic so did Hollywood the film industry's reaction was for the most part to Simply shut down for months movie theaters were deserted and many customers didn't return to theaters at all the following year since streaming services had taken over the void traditional Studios had left empty in response several companies shifted their focus to online streaming and video on demand Services among the earliest horror films to make the quick transition from theaters to streaming was freaky which originally opened in cinemas in October of 2020 and then became available on streaming services two months later slasher comedy freaky directed by Christopher Landon of happy death day includes Josh the protagonist's gay best friend in the history of horror having a gay best friend is Not Unusual the non-binary actor Misha oshirovich who played Josh said my character is a gay best friend but also a commentary on the gay best friend both they and Nyla an African-American character who befriends the protagonist are depicted as independent characters who highlight the genre's history of discrimination in one scene Josh says to Nyla as the slasher that once took the form of Vince Vaughn now inhabits the body of their best friend Millie and is on a murderous Rampage you're black I'm gay we are so dead filmmakers in the horror genre now have a Keener understanding of Their audience and make no deliberate effort to turn away from underrepresented groups the slasher movies Halloween kills and the new Candyman both feature gay male couples although in each film only one of them survives to the end horror fans know that Killers don't care who they kill but what makes these two films Stand Out is the attention paid to the relationships between these couples queer bodies are no longer a source of Terror queer bodies were exploited to shock terrify and make audiences laugh during the bulk of the 20th century there were punching bags sissies Phantoms and ghosts monsters beneath the bed and in the closet queer horror Figures were rarely much more than fodder for American gay Terror over the last two decades though a new queer era has emerged in which queer people in horror May gain empathy from viewers however in order to comprehend the decade's significance previous failures and accomplishments must be remembered horror films are historical time capsules whether it's aliens representing foreigners vampires representing sexually promiscuous disease carriers or vicious serial killers each picture represents the concerns of the day looking back at the history of horror queer people will undoubtedly see how we were utilized for violence humor sympathy and Dread however if a queer person looks deeper it will find themselves as they have in the pages of History as survivors final girls final boys and final people in which to place themselves more victoriously than in the monsters that American society has tried to turn them into and at the same time perhaps we can own the power of the cisgender straight majority accidentally gave to us via the movie Monster the slasher returning from the grave to take revenge on the heteronormative stand-in of the day the monster created by society and then disowned by it the Misunderstood Beast looking for its brood we are and always have been the heroes of our own stories even if we were the monsters and theirs and so we made the monsters the hero and now we've even taken ownership of the Gilded Heroes themselves we are the monsters we are the heroes and no matter how many times they think they've beaten us we always get up one more time [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music]

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