What's So Gay About Horror Movies?

Gay filmmakers are working in the genre today more than ever. Tim Sullivan brought us 2001 Maniacs and Driftwood, both of which are mainstream horror films that feature gay characters and themes. This year’s big-budget horror film The Ruins was helmed by out gay director Carter Smith (Bugcrush) and out director Andrew Fleming (Dick, Threesome, Hamlet 2) has written and directed several horror movies, including the enormously successful teen witch flick The Craft. 

Carter Smith (left) & Andrew Fleming

And in recent years some gay directors have even brought us straight-up “gay horror movies”. Paul Etheredge brought us the full-on gay slasher Hellbent in 2004, and gay schlockmeister Dave DeCoteau has been delivering his singular brand of boys-in-undies homoerotic horror (Voodoo Academy, The Brotherhood, Leeches) for more than a decade. 

A scene from Dave DeCoteau's Leeches

But it’s not just out men behind the camera who are shaping the genre. The foundational imagery of horror movies has been closely intertwined with the “queer” (for better or for worse) since the beginning. And though these days the idea of a “killer queen” is a bit passé, it’s been a long road to get to the point where gay characters are just a part of the horror landscape. 

We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Going To Eat You. 

From the moment that James Whale cast noted camp figure Ernest Thesiger as the evil Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein, horror films and queer iconography began a curious courtship. Which is entirely appropriate, given that Bride itself was Whale’s clever attempt at subverting the hetero-norm through horror film (Bride is really more of a satire or a dark comedy about gender roles than a horror film).  

Ernest Thesiger as "Dr. Pretorius"

Social commentary aside, one of the most lasting images of Whale’s experiment was that of the insidious “killer queen”, a single and presumably gay man whose apparent sexual frustration and loathing for the hetero-dominated world has driven him to acts of madness and destruction. Granted, at this point the only other gay images making their way into films were those of dandies and prancing queens … wouldn’t a prancing queen hell-bent on world domination at least be a step up in terms of ambition? 

For decades the killer queen character (and killer lesbian counterpart, thank you very much Dracula’s Daughter) would hover at the fringes, giving the cinema’s masterminds a hint of a lisp or an extra arch to the eyebrow. (In Ed Wood’s classic disaster Plan 9 from Outer Space, the evil Ruler of Mars is played by John “Bunny” Breckinridge, a man whose sex change attempt was cut short by an auto accident.)  

John “Bunny” Breckinridge in Plan 9