What's So Gay About Horror Movies?

Cut from the same cloth but certainly more progressive in his finished products was gay filmmaker Curt McDowell, a San Francisco-based artist who made a series of short (some pornographic) films (Weiners and Buns Musical, Stinkybutt) before producing what is probably the most ambitious and outright bizarre film that will be mentioned in this article: 1975’s horror porn comedy opus, Thundercrack! 

A scene from Thundercrack!

In Thundercrack! McDowell takes the classic “old dark house” setup (thank you, Mr. Whale) and throws it into a blender with hardcore sex (of gay, straight, interspecies, and vegetable varieties), comedy, and brilliantly inventive no-budget filmmaking tricks. The result is a very entertaining parody of horror movies and sexual relationships that truly has to be seen to be believed. (It’s also worth noting that two of the male characters who end up sleeping together are named Chandler and Bing … coincidence?) 

And of course there’s trash god John Waters. Granted, Waters’ movies have always fallen more on the side of comedy than horror, but the transgressive filmmaker has been employing horror elements since Divine was raped by a giant lobster in 1970’s Multiple Maniacs. Waters’ love of horror movies would inform all of his films (especially the brilliant Serial Mom), and in 2004 he would even appear as a gossip columnist in the horror film Seed of Chucky. 

John Waters in Seed of Chucky

But it would take a man with a mask and a taste for pointy objects to really kick the American horror genre back into gear, and lucky for us, he was just around the corner. 

The men behind the masks. 

It wouldn’t be until the real golden age of American cinema – the slasher boom of the 1980s – that gay horror filmmakers really shook their skeletons out of the closet. 

Take Tom DeSimone (aka gay porn director Lancer Brooks), director of the classic Halloween slasher Hell Night, starring Linda Blair. Or Child’s Play’s killer doll Chuckiy the evil plastic brainchild of gay writer Don Mancini (who would pen all of the Child’s Play films and go on to direct the final installment, Seed of Chucky).   

Tom DeSimone

Or horror heavyweight Clive Barker, who has not only written some of the most memorable horror novels and stories to date but who as the director of Hellraiser unleashed one of the genre’s most startling mythologies (and made an entire generation afraid of Rubik’s Cubes). 

And let’s give credit where credit is due: The American horror movie was given new life – Dr. Frankenstein-style – when gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson wrote Scream, one of the most successful horror franchises of all time (not to mention I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty and Cursed … actually, let’s not mention Cursed). The slasher movie was reborn (albeit with a rather annoying self-awareness that tired quickly) and the teens started lining up for horror films once again. 

Clive Barker (left) & Kevin Williamson

Even gay Hollywood A-listers like Bryan Singer and Gus Van Sant have dabbled in the genre, Singer tackling Stephen King’s Apt Pupil as a follow-up to his smash hit The Usual Suspects and Van Sant doing a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s gender-bending horror classic Psycho. Out filmmaker Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex) wrote a heroic gay character into his 1992 screenplay for Single White Female.

And before Oscar nominee Bill Condon directed Gods and Monsters and Dreamgirls, he wrote horror movies like Strange Behavior and cut his teeth by directing Candyman 2.