If you’re gay, and love horror movies, there are many times when you find yourself exploring some of the gay subtext in certain fright films. Some are more obvious than others. Some are a bit of a stretch. Some are accidents of casting and direction. But it makes re-watching certain movies so much more entertaining just for the queer coding.
There have been books like Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff that have clinically examined this. But it’s so thesis-like and academic that it sucks the subversive fun out of the subject.
So, I thought it fitting for this Gay Pride Month to list a few of my queer favorites. I get so weary of gay films that I’m supposed to like and support because of their positivity. At least horror films are a way to exorcise fears in a cathartic manner. And if you pop a boner while watching them, all the better.
Dracula’s Daughter. Gloria Holden plays the butch, vampire offspring of Dracula- Countess Marya Zaleska. Preying on pretty, down-on-their-luck, women on the streets at night offering to pay them as models. Yeah, it’s just for art, right? These one-night stands tend to be a bit deadly as she leaves their bloodless husks behind her. I love her fey manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel) with his slicked-down jet-black hair, silky attire and blackened lips. He’s only hanging around because his master promises to make him immortal. And when the Countess double-crosses him she learns the hard way not to fuck with a queen proficient with a bow and arrow.
How to Make a Monster. There seems to be an abundance of queer subtext in movies produced by Herman Cohen. But this one takes the cake. Pete Dumond (Robert H. Harris) is the great monster make-up artist. He lives with his long-time partner Rivero (Paul Brinegar). But when the studio decides to discontinue the horror cycle, Pete uses a weird formula in his makeup to hypnotize the hunky actors under the greasepaint in order to murder the studio heads. At the end, Pete and Rivero invite the two musclebound stars (Gary Conway and Gary Clarke) to their home and offer them some drugged Cokes. The boys immediately sense the threat of these predatory older gays. Not surprising, it all ends in flaming color.
The Haunting. A great, spooky Robert Wise film, based on a Shirley Jackson novel, about a group gathered by a leading scientist (Richard Johnson) at a very haunted mansion to test theories about whether this kind of ghostly activity is real. Julie Harris plays the frustrated spinster Eleanor who rooms with the more-worldly Theodora (Claire Bloom), who is clearly implied to be a lesbian. But the tender relationship between the two women has always fascinated me. You just want to smack the Julie Harris character and scream, “oh, fuck the ghosts- just get it on with Theodora and you’ll be fine!”
The Old Dark House. “Have a potato,” asks the effete Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) to the wary stranger who, during a wild storm, end up stranded at the desolate stone house of a family of lunatics. James Whale’s darkly comic masterpiece is dripping with queer subtext. Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart (Titanic), Charles Laughton and Raymond Massey are the unfortunate “guests,” and a scarred-face Boris Karloff is the unstable butler in this brilliant, hilariously subversive film. (Don’t forget to check out Ernest Thesiger’s campy turn in Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein).
Homicidal. Gimmick-master director William Castle’s homage to Psycho opens with a weird young boy stealing a doll from a little girl. Leave it to William Castle to be ahead of the curve with gender identity horror. Then we are introduced to a cool blonde woman who checks into a seedy hotel and approaches the sexy male bellhop (Richard Rust) and offers him two thousand dollars to marry her. But when they complete the ceremony she stabs the justice-of-the peace to death and flees. The rest of this wildly enjoyable thriller is rife with whacked-out chills and even a “fear break” at the end to weed out the cowards in the audience. I won’t ruin the finale but it’s truly “trans” terror for sure.
Haute Tension. A genuinely scary French film that is bristling with gay panic and repression. Director Alexandre Aja tells the nightmarish suspenseful story about two college girls out in a deserted French countryside house for the weekend and a rusty old truck that drives up in the middle of the night with a creepy stranger inside (Philippe Nahon, the butcher from I Stand Alone) armed with a straight razor. What happens next is so relentless and unbearably frightening you can’t even begin to imagine. The brilliant sound design and visuals and the overall effect is just harrowing and original. Horror fans have been grumbling about certain twists during the latter part of the film but I thought it gave the movie a perverse kick.
The Hitcher. Rutger Hauer is absolutely chilling as a psychopathic hitchhiker, who stalks a motorist (C. Thomas Howell) in this harrowing thriller directed by Robert Harmon with an excellent screenplay by Eric Red. When asked what the maniac wants, he fiendishly replies “I want you to stop me.” But the killer’s twisted obsession with the cute guy who picks him up feels really homoerotic in its intensity.
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Talk about being in touch with your feminine side. A wonderful transgender take on the oft-told Robert Louis Stevenson classic. Scientist Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates) is experimenting with an elixir of immortality only to be transformed into an evil woman (Martine Beswick) who murders prostitutes in Whitechapel for the female hormones needed to feed the serum. Martine Beswick is deliciously fiendish as she slowly attempts to take full control over her male alter-ego in this entertaining, perverse 1971 Hammer horror directed by Roy Ward Baker.
Fear No Evil. Andrew (Stefan Arngrim) may be a straight-A student but he’s also the Antichrist in this low budget 1980 oddity shot in Rochester, New York and directed by Frank LaLoggia (who was 23 at the time he made the film). Andrew ravishes a pretty classmate in her dreams, and his eyes glow yellow when he uses his evil powers to cause a coach to kill another student (and romantic rival) with a dodgeball. There’s a big showdown between two female archangels (in human form) in a crumbling castle in this weird little horror film. He also forces a school hood to kiss him on the lips while naked in the locker room shower. That scene alone is so unlike horror movies of the time it just fries your gay brain. It made the packed, homophobic audience I saw it with on Times Square so disturbed that they howled and threw their beer cans at the screen.
The Uninvited. A superior supernatural thriller starring Ray Milland as a composer who buys a gloomy seaside mansion with his sister (Ruth Hussey) only to find the joint is seriously haunted. His investigation into the former owners brings him into contact with a beautiful, fragile young woman Stella (Gail Patrick), who believes the place is haunted by her mother. This leads them to a sanatorium run by the sinister Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner) who had some deep, unnaturally emotional connection with Stella’s deceased mother. Even lasting after death. Skinner’s performance rivals Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca for obsessive, scary queer intensity.
Knife + Heart. Set in Paris, 1979, Anne (Vanessa Paradis) is a successful director of gay porn films. She has had a messy break-up with her girlfriend Lois (Kate Moran) who is also her editor on the films, and Anne still calls her in the middle of the night when she has nightmares. But then a creepy killer (with a leather mask covering his face) starts stabbing to death her porn actors. Enraged by the inactivity of the police, she gets her anger out by way of a porn film she directs titled: Homocidal. It all ends in a confrontation with the killer in a gay porn theater. This is more overtly gay than the others on my list but it seems dumb to omit it when you’re discussing gay horror. Directed by Yann Gonzalez, there are some really interesting moments, and Vanessa Paradis is always wonderful, but to be quite honest, I’m not at all sure this movie works. But at least it tries something daring and different. And I’ll take a movie like this over a “gay-coming-of-age” comedy any day of the week. (Other films along this line: The Final Scoop, Hellbent, Hard and, of course, Cruising).
The Mad Doctor. A rare 1940 Paramount thriller starring the always excellent Basil Rathbone as a suave Bluebeard-like wife killer. As a psychiatrist in Manhattan he romances a death-obsessed heiress (Ellen Drew) hoping to wed and murder her, but John Howard, as a wily newspaper man, is determined to unmask him as the malevolent fiend he really is. The fascinating thing in the film is the relationship between Rathbone and his assistant (Martin Kosleck), which clearly has homosexual overtones. Historian David Del Valle, during his informative audio commentary on the Blu-ray, relates how actor Martin Kosleck told him that he and Rathbone definitely played these characters as a couple. It’s a moody, weird, great film.
Daughters of Darkness. Now, there are tons of lesbian-themed vampire movies out there. From Vampyres, The Vampire Lovers, The Hunger, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride and so on. But I can’t say enough about this elegant, erotic 1971 horror movie starring the divine Delphine Seyrig as an ageless vampire countess traveling with her cool blonde lover (Danielle Ouimet) and stopping at a coastal off-season Grand Hotel in Ostend. There, she and her protégé seduce and quench their blood thirst from young virgins. Directed by Harry Kumel, there are visually sumptuous scenes of mayhem (one involving a broken glass bowl is particularly grisly and inspired).
Jeepers Creepers 2. From the first shot of all these shirtless male youths sunning themselves on the roof of their stranded school bus, all bets are on that this is filmed through a queer lens. And, with scandal-plagued director Victor Salva at the helm, that’s a given. But this creature that reappears every 23 years to snack on humans only seems to have his eye on the lads for some reason. There is one telling moment when his face scarily appears outside the window of the bus and lasciviously licks on the glass at his future, hunky, victim.
Sleepaway Camp. Angela (Felissa Rose) is a traumatized child sent to Camp Arawak for the summer by her oddball aunt along with her cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). Then campers start disappearing or dying mysteriously. By bees, arrows and even a curling iron. This feels for the most part like a generic 80s slasher film set at a summer camp. But then there’s the wild ending which unhinges your jaw. I refuse to divulge what it involves, but it’s definitely trans-formative.
The Brotherhood. Studly Sam Page is Chris, the new man on campus. When Devon, (Bradly Stryker) the spiky-blonde-haired leader of a feared fraternity, observes him jogging shirtless he says to his sunglass-wearing posse: “He’s the one. He’s beautiful. he’s perfect.” So, Devon gets Chris high on absinthe and using a pin in his Liberace-like heart-shaped pendant makes him a blood brother in the fraternity of undead. “You’re vampires?” Chis asks. “No.” says Devon: “Vampires wear capes and have fangs. I drive a Maserati and spend an hour a day in a tanning booth.” Before long they’re both stripped to their skivvies and sucking the blood from each arm of a very willing college slut. (The Covenant has plenty of queer-coded eye candy too). Director David DeCoteau has been interjecting horror films with all sorts of wonderfully perverse touches for years. He’s just the best.
Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Called the gayest horror movie ever, Mark Patton stars as Jesse, the new boy in town, whose parents bought “that” house on Elm Street. In no time, he has nightmares of Freddy Krueger, with the razor-fingered glove. This time Freddy is using Jesse as his killing machine. Jesse sleepwalks to a gay bar where he finds his gym coach, who brings him back to the school to run laps. The coach is attacked by all types of ghostly, flying balls in his office. Then he is stripped naked, tied to the shower with a jump rope, and slashed to death. What the hell is going on? Later Jesse is making out with his girlfriend and suddenly jumps away and runs over to a male friend’s bedroom begging him to watch over him while he sleeps. Unfortunately, Freddy emerges and kills his sexy classmate in his underwear. What is this really about? Gay panic? Poor actor Mark Patton was excited about getting the lead in this film until the movie became a camp hoot with audiences. He chronicles the hell this was for him, a closeted gay actor in the 80s, in a fascinating documentary- Scream Queen: My Nightmare on Elm Street.
Thelma. In Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s simmering supernatural psychological drama, Thelma (Eili Harboe) is a lonely student in college in Oslo, raised by devoutly Christian parents, who strikes up a friendship with a fellow student Anja (Kaya Wilkins) and slowly falls in love with her. These powerful, deeply conflicting, emotions cause her to have a series of epileptic like seizures, coinciding with spooky flocks of crows racing towards the windows of her school. As the movie progresses and more secrets from her childhood are revealed we discover Thelma has certain disturbing powers that have been dormant since she was little and are alarmingly returning with a vengeance. Beautifully lensed by Jakob Ihre with a terrific score by Ola Flotturn, the movie eerily evokes Thelma’s erotic awakening and the chilling repercussions that follow.
Nightbreed. Clive Barker’s wildly ambitious 1990 film stars handsome Craig Sheffer as Aaron Boone, a troubled young man set up as fall-guy for a series of murders. (David Cronenberg has a memorable part as a psychotic psychotherapist). Aaron flees into a subterranean, monster-filled world called Midian. The film was heavily edited by the studio and bombed on its release. Mercifully, a complete, uncut version was recut by Clive Barker and survives on Blu-ray. This epic supernatural saga is filled with a staggering array of creepy creatures (even more varied than in Hellraiser). Barker does slip gay subtext into his films- Hellraiser is chock-full of S & M imagery. In Nightbreed, Midian seems a secret realm filled with weirdos, outsiders and misfits. In other words, Provincetown in the 1970s.