Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror (2022)
Exec. Prod.: Bryan Fuller
Rated: N/A
image: ©2022 Shudder
In college, I took two courses that likely did more to change my perspective on the world and my philosophy of justice than any other event of my young life, although I had no way of grasping it at the time. Shocking exactly no one, both were film studies courses. But they were much more than only film studies. They used movies as a way to explore our societal fabric and certain biases woven into it. (If you’ve gleaned nothing from my near-decade of writing about movies on this website, you’ve likely picked up that I see movies, for all their faults and imperfections, as the best artistic means of understanding the world and how humans function within it.) Both classes were designed and taught by the same man.
The first was called Perspectives on Film. The core idea that informed every topic covered in the class was that of intersectionality. Coined in 1989 by scholar, UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School professor, and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality is the idea that it is impossible to separate a person’s overlapping social, physical, and political identities when considering how they might experience discrimination or a lack thereof. For instance, a gay Black woman is likely to experience more structural discrimination than a straight white woman does. A straight white woman might experience more structural discrimination than a straight white man.
Intersectionality – used primarily in legal and academic theory circles – gained mainstream cultural cachet in the early- to mid-2010s. I first wrote about it in my review for Moonlight, the 2017 Oscar Best Picture winner, no matter what Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway say. Intersectionality is related to and informs another recent point of cultural conflict, something you might have heard of called Critical Race Theory. Perspectives on Film used intersectionality to interrogate how historically oppressed minorities have been represented throughout film history.
The second course had a much sexier title. The instant I saw it in the catalog while planning my upcoming semester, I put a star by it: Gender and Sexuality in the Horror Film. I wasn’t excited because I thought it would be a survey course in soft-core porn. I was excited because the description promised fresh new ideas that I never could have imagined (or encountered) growing up in my small East Texas hometown. It was to be an exploration of the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities have been coded and depicted in the horror genre, with extensive background on how those depictions were informed by the literary horror genre that preceded the art of filmmaking.
The groundwork for Gender and Sexuality in the Horror Film came from the doctoral thesis of the professor teaching the class, Dr. Harry Benshoff, titled Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Dr. Benshoff is one of those life-changing college professors. At the risk of getting maudlin, he was my own personal John Keating. He never stood on a desk and shouted, "O Captain! my Captain!", but he provided me with a quintessential college experience: he challenged me to see the world in a wholly new way, to see life from perspectives completely different from my own. He was also jovial, welcoming, and funny as hell.
(I’ll never forget his lighthearted ribbing of young (almost entirely male, entirely white) film-school students who signed up for Perspectives on Film, having no idea what they were getting into. He said that while we might be discussing the Indiana Jones movies, there would be no rah-rah exhortations of “GO, INDY, GO! GO, INDY, GO!” Instead, a critical examination of the jingoism and racism at play in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would be more likely.)
Dr. Benshoff helped me see movies differently. He never entered my mind once when I decided to make film criticism my avocation, but the ideas he exposed me to almost two decades ago continue to shape and inform the ways in which I write about movies today.
Benshoff appears as an interview subject throughout Shudder streaming service’s new original limited-series documentary Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror. The four-part series aired its last episode on October 21, right in time for spooky movie season. Executive produced by Bryan Fuller, Queer for Fear looks at queer representation in horror movies from the beginnings of cinema through roughly the 1990s. It covers everything from gay director James Whale’s outsized influence on the horror genre, via his seminal work for Universal Studios in the 1930s, to the Wachowski sisters exploring queer desire in 1996’s Bound.
Another interviewee in the series is Mark Gatiss, who, in addition to co-creating the Benedict Cumberbatch iteration of Sherlock, co-created a 2020 BBC adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which he also played the role of Renfield. Stoker and his vampire subgenre-defining creation Dracula are covered in extensive detail in the first episode of Queer for Fear. It’s speculated that Stoker himself was gay, although he had to hide it due to the societal and political climate of the time. Queer for Fear offers a rich and nuanced reading of Dracula informed by this knowledge. The character of Renfield is given new context when read as a man obsessed with and consumed by another man. The Dracula vampire legend can be seen – and Queer for Fear makes a very convincing case for it – as a thinly veiled metaphor for the homosexuality that Stoker had to repress throughout his life.
A key theme running throughout the docuseries, and one I vividly remember from Dr. Benshoff’s lectures, is that when a class of people are denied representation in popular culture – or, when they are included, they are coded as monstrous – they will take inspiration and identification wherever they can find it. Hence the idea that many queer people reshaped the movie monster Frankenstein into a character they could identify with and extend compassion to. Frankenstein’s monster is treated as an aberration, a monstrous other to be contained or destroyed. That’s exactly how most cultures have reacted to queer folks throughout human history, so queer people found common cause with the outcast creation.
In an example of Benshoff’s offbeat delivery, he describes in one sequence that the very idea at the core of Frankenstein – created by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who was herself queer – i.e., a man with the desire to create another man outside of the “normal” way of procreating ordained by God, is inherently queer. Benshoff describes the queer undertones running beneath the plot of a man stitching together another man for his own purposes, ending with a droll little laugh. His little laugh says it all: “OH MY GOD, HOW CAN YOU STRAIGHT PEOPLE NOT SEE THIS!?!”
What’s so electrifying for me – I’m probably a 93.8% straight guy (sexuality is a spectrum, after all, not a binary) – about Queer for Fear, besides its social justice mission to create a space for LGBTQ+ folks despite straight society’s concerted effort to deny them that, is ideas. Ideas are at the heart of film and film criticism. What is the movie trying to say? Who is saying it? How does who’s saying it shape the ideas contained within it? How do those ideas conflict with or complement my values as a leftist and humanist?
Any person committed to understanding the world with as much complexity and nuance as possible craves ideas and perspectives other than their own. Queer for Fear gave this (mostly) straight guy a new perspective on dozens of cultural artifacts and made them richer and more interesting for it. It also validates and reclaims a vibrant history for people who have experienced intolerance, rejection, hostility, and violence from those in society – sad to say, probably still the majority – who can’t slap their hands over their ears fast enough when new ideas are presented to them. Queer for Fear is a wonderful achievement in queer cinema. Both LGBTQ+ and straight folks should relish the ideas it presents.
I’m not doing the regular thing in this space this week. Instead, I’d like to make an urgent plea. As is usual, right-wing demagogues have been going to a tried and true tactic to rally their bigoted base by demonizing the LGBTQ+ community. We have an election happening on Tuesday, Nov. 8. If you give a damn about people facing hatred and violence because of their sexual orientation, please, for the love of the god I don’t believe in, vote these fascists out, or keep them from obtaining elected office in the first place. I don’t believe in single-issue voting, but if a candidate says they are committed to inclusivity for the LGBTQ+ community, it’s a good bet that they also stand for most or all other progressive social issues. Please stand up to hate, and help protect our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.