It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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All of these essays are so articulate and intelligent and offer some beautiful and heartbreaking perspectives on queerness in horror films. That being said, there's one essay in particular I was more than just a little uncomfortable with and its presence in the collection makes it hard for me to recommend it. His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb , VICE, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review , North American Review , Narrative Northeast , VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana , among others. I had previously watched Sleepaway Camp, Jennifer's Body, Hereditary, The Ring, The Birds, Candyman, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Us, The Blair Witch Project, Halloween, and Get Out; therefore, those have been long-time favorites of mine already.

But I would say that if you are planning on watching any of the movies that it’s a good idea to do it beforehand since they discuss a lot of spoilers.

I decided to watch all of the movies that I hadn’t already seen before reading the essays they were based around.

Doyle on In My Skin , Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers , and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror. A really terrific collection of essays by a great selection and variety of different authors — both fiction authors, poets, and essayists — about the intersection between queer studies and queer identity and horror movies. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. There are spoilers for the movies but you don’t need to have seen all of them to gain something from the essays. All in all — nie odradzam; wręcz przeciwnie, jeśli ktoś, tak jak ja, kocha horrory, to na pewno znajdzie tu sporo dla siebie.Jones also praised the essays for not being overly analytical, saying "[t]hese are personal essays, not queer theory papers. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The insight from these memoirs is wide; in addition to tackling on queer subjects as: being gay or lesbian in a religious household, growing up trans and dealing with gender issues, how bisexual visibility and queerbaiting seem to go hand in hand; there is also discussions about class, race, disability, abuse, fertility treatments, proving once more that we can’t analyze these matters in an isolated environment, everything is connected, and the only way to deal with it is voicing our experiences. The second reason: Some of the most interesting details were left as B-plots or insufficiently explored--teases that were frustratingly far more fascinating than what the author had to say about this or that film. An impressively diverse array of queer voices contributes their opinions on how and why particular horror movies made a personal and indelible impression on them.

Obviously, with such a diversity of approaches (and author experiences of queerness), certain essays moved or resonated with me more than others did. 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.

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. A critical text on the intersections of film, queer studies, and pop culture that will appeal to both academic and public-library audiences. 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.

Because of these gaps, in terms of iconic queerness horror has to offer, this does feel a little incomplete to me. 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. if you’re looking for a diverse theorization about queer appreciation for the horror (film) genre, look no further! no essay was particularly horribly written or totally uninteresting and i would recommend it to any queer horror newbie! Joe Vallese is Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I can see some readers being disappointed if they went into this just wanting straight up film criticism and weren’t expecting personal essays.