In horror movies, to be queer is to be different, “which cinema has continually rewritten as a form of danger,” Peter Marra writes in his new book, “Queer Slashers.”
Dangerous, queer, different: Sounds like my kind of horror movie. Here are some of my favorites.
‘Dracula’s Daughter’ (1936)
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
“She Gives You That WEIRD FEELING!”: That’s how one poster advertised Lambert Hillyer’s lesbian-coded vampire thriller, a follow-up to “Dracula,” a hit for Universal Pictures in 1931. Hillyer’s movie centers on Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), a Dracula progeny who kidnaps a young woman in Transylvania. Holden’s performance is predatory but feminine, menacing but soft-eyed — a powerful example of how lesbian subtext in early Hollywood paved the way for future Sapphic vampires.
‘The Seventh Victim’ (1943)
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
The actress Kim Hunter made her film debut as an innocent boarding school student who looks for her missing sister in a Greenwich Village underworld teeming with queerness and Satanists. As directed by Mark Robson, the film is relentlessly tense and macabre, and shot through with lesbian desire; the characters of a headmistress and her assistant “exude Lesbos,” as the critic Lucy Sante has written. Try not to get spooked by the shot of a room that’s empty save for a chair and a noose.
‘Compulsion’ (1959)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
There are two terrific and audaciously homoerotic options when it comes to movies about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the Chicago students who kidnapped and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924. Hitchcock tackled the case in “Rope” (1943), and Tom Kalin put a New Queer Cinema spin on it in “Swoon” (1992).
But queerness hits differently in Richard Fleischer’s pulsing thriller, starring Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as the monstrous leading couple and Orson Welles as their lawyer. It starts early when Artie (Dillman) says to Judd (Stockwell): “You told me that you wanted me to command you to do things.” Tenderly, Judd replies: “I do.” That sexual power play brazenly sets up the rest of this subversively queer knockout.
‘A Taste of Flesh’ (1967)
The director Doris Wishman was a renegade: a woman who made lurid exploitation films at a time when American underground cinema was a man’s playground. One of Wishman’s most Sapphic films is this gritty black-and-white sexploitation shocker about assassins who weasel their way into an apartment shared by two lesbians in order to kill a foreign dignitary.
Little of the film makes sense, but who needs that when it oozes the kind of sleaze that would seal your boots to the grindhouse floor. Wishman shot her punk film without live sound and synced it afterward, further disorienting its maverick horrors. A sexy butch-femme dream sequence adds a jolt of playfulness.
‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971)
The director Jesús Franco mixes soft-core salaciousness with art house eleganza in his psychosexual exploitation film about an American woman (Ewa Stromberg) who gets seduced by the vampiric Countess Nadine (Soledad Miranda), a seductive nightclub owner whom Ewa thinks she recognizes. The film is a fever dream of blood and lust that is, let’s face it, lesbian horror for the straight gaze. But in 1971, just two years after the Stonewall Inn uprising, for representation-starved lesbians it wasn’t the worst thing to see a film depicting their desires and sexual tastes as real.
‘Fear No Evil’ (1981)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
What queer person hasn’t dreamed of having supernatural powers to exact revenge on their tormentors? That’s the reason to watch Frank LaLoggia’s scrappy and darkly camp film about Andrew (Stefan Arngrim), an effeminate high school senior who discovers that actually being the Antichrist has its perks, and its emotional costs. The film is notable for a dodge ball scene that goes disgustingly awry, a long gay kiss — an unheard-of smooch in 1981 — between Andrew and a bully, and for Arngrim’s goth-twink fabulous costumes, including the silkiest cape.
‘Sleepaway Camp’ (1983)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
Robert Hiltzik’s slasher is about a psychopath who murders their way across a summer camp for teens — standard “Friday the 13th” stuff. What’s unusual is that two of the kids were raised by a gay couple who are shown together in bed, in a rare display of gay intimacy during the golden age of the slasher film. (And all those men in midriffs? Gay, gay, gay.) The film is controversial for how the killer is revealed during a moment of transgender panic that’s still jarring to watch.
‘Nightbreed’ (1990)
Clive Barker’s ode-to-oddballs follow-up to “Hellraiser” is about Aaron (Craig Sheffer), a young man whose therapist (the David Cronenberg) gaslights him into thinking he is a serial killer. Aaron is eventually drawn to a cemetery where he discovers the tribe of monstrous but misunderstood outcasts who have haunted his dreams. In adapting his novel “Cabal,” Barker underlines queerness in ghoulish but affirming ways — it’s essentially a coming-out story — that will resonate with any young person who had the courage to escape their unaccepting hometown for a big queer Somewhere Better.
‘High Tension’ (2005)
Alexandre Aja’s blood-soaked drama is one of the most unsettling queer films of the New French Extremity, a movement that grossed out horror fans around the turn of the 21st century. It follows two friends, Marie (Cécile de France) and Alex (Maïwenn), as they travel to the French countryside for a getaway, only to have Alex’s family brutally murdered in a home invasion. It’s no spoiler to say that some perfectly timed and demented twists about repressed desire drive home the point that unrequited queerness is a monster not to be messed with.
‘Huesera: The Bone Woman’ (2023)
This recent folk horror drama from the queer Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera is a deeply creepy queer meditation on motherhood as affliction. Natalia Solián stars as Valeria, a woman who starts seeing a spectral demon haunting the house where she and her husband are preparing for the arrival of their newborn. Not even solace from a former girlfriend can soothe Valeria’s fears. This is the most queer-affirming film on this list, with a message about family and motherhood that offers hope amid the horror.
The post For Pride, Stream These Queer Horror Movies appeared first on New York Times.
