Gay Monster Mega Bundle: Strange Science

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Eventually, he was down to a medicine ball-sized gut, but where this would normally be several eggs, it felt different. Tina gently pulled his legs wide apart and massaged his remaining belly. Dean, though on the edge of exhaustion, pulled together his remaining strength to help. He grunted and strained as an egg far larger than any before slowly squeezed its way out of him, stretching him in ways that would have been lethal without Tina’s slime. The concept of invisible queers went from figurative to literal in this haunted-house film, where the coded lesbian character is actually a full-on ghost! A brother and sister move into a seaside mansion haunted by a woman scornfully tethered to this mortal coil by a desire for vengeance and a connection to her implied lesbian lover. The relationship of the protagonist, Stella, with the mysterious ghost she thinks is her mother, begins as an infatuation that’s been interpreted as subtextually queer. “The heroine’s fascination is directly identified as love,” writes Patricia White in Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, “But the condition of this unveiling is that the object of her attraction becomes literally her mother. The film thus dramatizes how the female oedipal narrative functions as a support for another story, a lesbian desire that is both evoked and covered over.” A classic tale of haunting. A classic tale of gay erasure! Congratulations, babe!” Dean grinned, but it was a bittersweet moment for him. “Guess you won’t be needing me anymore?”

Somehow, though, he contains the psychopathy and performs the kind of stoic macho man the horny, philandering Miriam would like to get it on with: He doesn’t speak, and he adopts a more butch posture, even showing off his strength by hitting the bell with a mallet at the carnival’s strongman game. Miriam is hooked. But it’s not a tryst Bruno has in mind when he finally completes the seduction and gets her alone. It’s a moment that shows, no matter what, you’ll be hot to someone — and how easily performed crude gender roles can be. —CB Another movie so often called queer that it’s surprising to learn it was never explicitly stated. Neil Jordan’s gothic romantic horror pairs young Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as two vampires in an intense lifelong relationship. “Lestat and Louis are in a relationship. They fight over another man. And they co-parent a child together,” said horror screenwriter Michael Varrati. “In many ways, ‘Interview’ is the most commercially successful gay film of all time, and most audiences didn’t even realize they were seeing a gay film.” —JD A pioneer of the queercore cinema movement born in the 1980s, Bruce LaBruce is a prolific writer and director whose many titles include No Skin Off My Ass — about a hairdresser fantasizing about a skinhead — and L.A. Zombie, a hard-core adult horror film about a shape-shifting alien zombie who finds his way to Los Angeles and awakens the dead with regenerative sexual powers. Otto, Or Up With Dead People is another deeply queer underground effort from LaBruce, and another zombie movie, this time following Otto, an undead man who ends up in Berlin as the subject of a lesbian documentarian’s film — which she is making in conjunction with another project, a politically charged zombie porn film. The cheap titillations of the ’70s lesbian vampire craze are adorable by comparison.At the studio level, there still aren’t enough gays or lesbians or bisexuals, and there certainly aren’t enough positive trans and genderqueer characters to make up for the years of gross stigmatization, but queer horror is incrementally getting more nuanced, more polished, more empathetic. And with a renewed rise in social conservatism, the blunt force of horror cinema will be an essential art form in reframing and critiquing who the real monsters in society are.

The film is widely considered one of the most controversial of all time. When “The Devils” was released in 1971, it faced harsh criticism and censorship due to its Holy Trinity of intense violence, sexuality, and religious themes. While it isn’t explicitly queer, it certainly is explicit. Film critic Judith Crist called it a “grand fiesta for sadists and perverts.” What could be more queer than that? —JD This was Paul Verhoeven’s last film in the Netherlands before he shipped out to Hollywood and started making sci-fi classics. The plot concerns a bisexual novelist named Gerard (Jeroen Krabbé), who starts sleeping with a woman named Christine (Renée Soutendijk), which leads to a love triangle with Gerard, Christine, and her other lover, Herman (Thom Hoffman). Also, the Virgin Mary appears to Gerard in a dream and warns him away from Christine, since she might be a murderer.In Robert Wise’s critically acclaimed 1963 version, the romance between Theo and Eleanor could merely be hinted at, though it has long puzzled and fascinated fans of the film. Played by Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, one of the film’s most famous scenes features the women clutching each other’s hands in fear before realizing it was actually a spirit. —JD This Nicolas Winding Refn movie is light on plot and heavy on aesthetics. An aspiring underage model (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles to make a living out of the one thing she’s good at: being pretty. Before too long, she’s either beguiling every jaded fashion-industry type she meets, or whipping them into a jealous rage. Demon takes Bergman’s Persona concept of women blurring into one another and makes it a deliberate, insidious act. There’s sex, cannibalism, and the near-orgasmic experience of encountering transcendent beauty.