It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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But, when I finally did get into horror in high school, I never realized I was so attracted to it because horror itself explores Otherness. Jones also praised the essays for not being overly analytical, saying "[t]hese are personal essays, not queer theory papers. I decided to watch all of the movies that I hadn’t already seen before reading the essays they were based around. Because of these gaps, in terms of iconic queerness horror has to offer, this does feel a little incomplete to me. There is a wide diversity of contributors to this book from varying gender and sexuality labels and upbringings.

I couldn’t relate to the abuse story she was telling, but it was something deeper than that, I felt anxious, and so agitated that I had to stop reading it a few times. Other standouts included: Carmen Maria Machado’s convincing reclamation of Jennifer’s Body for queer audiences; an essay on The Blob that morphed into a striking meditation on gendered bodies; an exploration of the remake of Candyman that probed connections between being gay, Blackness and San Francisco’s racist housing policies; a look at the unexpectedly queer erotics underpinning Spielberg’s Jaws; a lovingly nostalgic examination of the lesbian subtext of Hitchcock’s The Birds; slasher movies, the Aids crisis and the demonization of gay men; and an unusual take on Eyes without a Face and being trans.Her fiction and cinema writing have appeared in Bosie , Evergreen Review , Leste Magazine , the Los Angeles Review of Books , Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot , and others.

I've spent years dissecting horror films on my own and finding the queer-coding; however, it's only been recently that I've seen that reflected back to me. This is a must-read for horror fans wanting to find connection and community in challenging the heteronormative and patriarchal narratives that can still dominate the genre.

Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine. I will say, I skipped the essays for the movies I hadn't seen yet, but I really loved many of the essays I did read (around half). Kirsty Logan ’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. oftentimes when i review anthologies, i say there were ups and downs, but this book ranges from B++ to A+ all the way through. It felt extremely intrusive to be given details about an adoptive child that apparently the child himself hasn't been made privy to and therefore cannot possibly have given consent for it to be shared with the world at large.

Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. What an intelligent, articulate, and culturally relevant anthology of essays by queer people reflecting on queerness in/and horror films. If you have a hard time understanding what people mean when they say, "horror is queer," then read this book, and you'll have your answer. Killers, monsters, and demons are frequently metaphors for what we don’t understand about our own humanity; they’re an attempt to externalize the “monstrousness” so many of us suppress within ourselves — or that others project onto unchangeable aspects of who we are… I finished [the anthology] with a new appreciation for the horror genre. Both Ways (Jennifer's Body)" by Carmen Maria Machado, "My Hand on the Glass (Hereditary)" by Bruce Owens Grimm, "The Wolf Man's Daughter (The Wolf Man)" by Tosha R.

Horror is INNATELY queer, and the discussion within this text highlight that perfectly AND beautifully (like there were some sections that had me tearing up.

His work has appeared in the anthologies "Instant Classic (That No One Will Read)" (Night Beats / tRaum, 2023) and "It Came From the Closet" (Feminist Press, 2022), as well as in anthologies recognized by Lambda Literary: the 2021 finalist "Trans-Galactic Bike Ride," the 2012 finalist "Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect," and the 2011 winner "Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community.Even in my nightmares, the ones that involve things like zombies and vampires are not nearly as scary as the ones involving social ostracism and abuse. Weaving elegantly between passages on theory to first sexual encounters and wrenching experiences with a surrogate, the essays take surprising turns and don't look for easy answers. I just made it a point to watch ALL of the films shared in this collection BEFORE reading the essays based on them.