“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.”
The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.
Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.
Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.
About the author
Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and has work featured in Muzzle, PANK, Apogee, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She received her MFA in creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark and is currently a Ph D student in poetics at the University at Buffalo. Her film work has screened at Fotofocus Biennial and the Milwaukee LGBT Film Festival. She tweets @burritotheif.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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