What's So Gay About Horror Movies?

Following a mostly dark period for horror in which cheap B-movies were churned out like so many processed cold cuts throughout the 50s and 60s, a little movie called Psycho reinvigorated the genre by popularizing the concept of the Freudian psycho killer … and messing with gender roles in the process. 

Now, Norman Bates was not gay (far from it), and Alfred Hitchcock went to great lengths to make this clear to audiences. But whether the gay-seeming image of a man in a dress (holding a knife) was too powerful for straight audiences to ignore or actor Anthony Perkins’s real-life struggles coming to terms with his own sexuality seeped into his character, many people still view Bates as a repressed homosexual.

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates

It’s categorically false, but the image of a bona fide “killer queen” (i.e., “man in a dress”, which was what gays were to most people at the time) stuck, and a new kind of monster was born. Knockoffs like William Castle’s hilarious Homicidal followed (with a woman in drag as a man), and the trickle-down gave us such classics as Dressed to Kill and Sleepaway Camp (which also features a shocking gay dad subplot, quite something for the time) and lesser efforts like Switch Killer, Fatal Games and Cherry Falls. 

Surprisingly, horror films – particularly the formulaic slashers of the 70’s and 80’s – have a long history of gay inclusion, and were in fact in some cases leagues ahead of mainstream film in terms of presenting gay characters that were reasonably well-rounded and well-realized.  

The only problem is, hardly anyone actually saw any of these movies. And of course, we did have to suffer through a heaping helping of easily-dispatched sissies along the way… 

Theatre of Blood, (1973) probably one of Vincent Price’s most entertaining B movies, featured both a queeny theater critic names Meredith Merridew who dotes on his pink poodles … until they are baked into a pie and he’s force-fed to death with them. (Price also goes incognito as a gay hairdresser named “Butch” in order to murder Coral Browne who would later marry Price in real life). And of course Price became a horror legend for his effete brand of horror villainy, which he contributed to dozens of films. 

Vincent Price (left) in Theater of Blood

Greek import Island of Death (1975) actually features a gay wedding … although the wedded couple is then brutally murdered with a sword by the main couple, who are in fact a homicidal, incestuous brother and sister duo. 

A scene from Island of Death

By about this time gays were becoming a bit more trendy, and gay characters started popping up in horror films as a “sign of the times” … for better or for worse. Thanks in part to the whopping success of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1984), which mined post-Vietnam alienation and distrust with our own country as inspiration for its horror, films about progressive views and morals often used gays as a stand-in for “liberal” or “new” … which of course generally put them in harm’s way. 

The 1978 classic Eyes of Laura Mars is a tribute to the excesses of modern culture, and the bankrupting of violent imagery. And what better way to cast controversial photographer Laura Mars (played beyond the hilt by Faye Dunaway) as “modern” than to give her a gay agent? Donald (Rene Auberjonois) is a tough son-of-a-gun and one of the stronger and more accessible gay characters to hit big screens in this kind of film at the time … although of course when he dresses up in Laura’s clothes to help her evade the cops, he’s in deep trouble. 

Rene Auberjonois in The Eyes of Laura Mars