Carmen Maria Machado

Bruce Owens Grimm

Zefyr Lisowski

Joe Vallese

Richard Scott Larson

Through the lens of horror—from "Halloween" to "Hereditary"—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.

"It Came from the Closet" features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on "Jennifer’s Body", Jude Ellison S. Doyle on "In My Skin", Addie Tsai on "Dead Ringers", and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

Queer Reflections on Horror

It Came from the Closet

Richard Scott Larson, “Long Nights In the Dark” (Halloween)

Vicky

I didn't yet have a name for what I was, but I knew that it was derogatory. Schoolyard jeers portrayed queerness as a weakness, an affliction, some kind of monstros-ity. I watched with a barely containable resentment as the girls flirted openly with the most alluring of the boys in the hallways of my large public middle school, all of their bodies having sprung suddenly from awkward childhood into something resembling beauty, and I didn't understand yet that I hated these gris because I wanted to be them, or at least to hold the power that they held over the boys chasing them, pawing at them, trying to claim them. I didn't understand yet that what I wanted was to be claimed by those boys in exactly that same way.

Sachiko Ragosta, “On Beauty and Necrosis” (Eyes Without a Face)

Transness is not a masking but rather an unmasking, a stripping of a performance expected of us by way of biological essentialism

“A Working Definition of the Monstrous”, Ryan Dzelzkalns

Clara Gauthier

What if love necessitates monstrosity, creates this terrible flesh by laying one’s wanting bare? Monstrosity both in the confession and the desire; in the vulnerability and the hunger. 

To live in the world as a twin-a doubled body, a mirrored self-is to also live with others’ misperception that you’re somehow interchangeable. 

Krys C

A point The Ring makes inadvertently is how interconnected all monstrosities are. The young dead girl who's the villain is different and sick, so she becomes a recipient of violence. She becomes a recipient of violence, so she becomes an enactor of violence. Then, only then, do the death start.

It Came from the Closet quotes

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