It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

Product Information

Readers that do not know any or very few of the movies being discussed will likely struggle, because this is an unabashed passion project that never feels the need to explain itself. 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. Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. The navigations and dissections of some of my favorite slashers through various queer lenses are akin to any great horror film: mind-blowing, eye-popping, and heart-ripping. There’s a moment in this book that’ll resonate with every single reader: undead, queer, or otherwise.

It Came from the Closet is a fantastic collection of diverse queer perspectives—an accessible, provocative, and much-welcomed addition to the growing body of queer horror analysis of our favorite films, new and old.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. 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. Manages to strike the balance between in-depth, heartfelt discussions of queer identity and the coming-of-age stories of people across the spectrum with a sense of humour and lightness of touch. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. some essays were more to my taste than others, but all of them were so well-written and well-organized that i can’t help but be overall impressed. But, most of these stories couch their analysis in fantastic storytelling of personal experiences of the authors. 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. A must-read for horror fans who may gain a whole new outlook on some of the all-time classics and cult favorites covered in its pages.

Some essays tend more towards personal reflection and memoir, others more towards analysis of various films through a queer lens; some move into lyrical "creative nonfiction" territory and others take their tone from the humanities graduate student essay or the chatty, freewheeling blog post. 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. 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. She is also the author of two novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a short memoir, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists.

They are well written and the storytelling aspect of it makes this sort of analysis so much more accessible and entertaining to read. 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. It’s a book that doesn’t ask many questions and allows readers to sit with each author’s interests in their own intersections of identity and love for a medium that a lot of queer people find drawn to in deeply personal ways. 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).

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 particularly enjoyed Trimble’s piece on The Exorcist, and growing up as a lesbian in 90s America surrounded by representatives of the Christian right. I was exposed to queerness from birth as my mom got with her then-girlfriend the April after I was born. As Legacy Russell discusses in Glitch Feminism, what cannot be defined can contain power, and horror movies have allowed queer people to see themselves in blobs, the unseen Blair Witch, and mysterious monsters.

His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, and North American Review, among other publications. There are spoilers for the movies but you don’t need to have seen all of them to gain something from the essays. A phenomenal collection of essays from various queer lovers of horror and their connections, interpretations, and understandings of their favorite horror films.Whip-smart, honest, and hilarious… gore aficionados and reads-the-Wiki-plot-summary scaredy-cats alike will find something haunting to love within its pages. THE RING really traumatized me as a kid and unlike many (if not most) queer people, I had a ~decent~ childhood.