Staying with horror, It Came From The Closet is an essay anthology that takes a look at cinematic horror history told from the perspective of LGBTQIA+ writers. Here, the anthology’s editor, Joe Vallese, writes of how looking at horror through this lens brings a new richness to the genre.

It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
Edited by Joe Vallese
Published by Saraband

It’s hard to deny that horror movies can be, well, pretty fucked up. And yet, I and so many other queer people somehow can’t help but find immense guiltless, unironic pleasure in them. We’re titillated by the genre, even when it actively excludes us from the narrative—or, worse, includes us only to marginalize, villainize, or altogether neglect us…

So then, how are we to think about the complicated relationship between the queer community and the horror genre? How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us? As a still-closeted, still-horror-obsessed teenager in the late ’90s and early ’00s who did not yet know anyone who was out, I worried over this incongruity, fearing that somehow my wires were even more crossed than I knew. Was my affection for horror just some residual self-loathing, a sorry attempt at maintaining that bit of machismo I credited to myself while in my brothers’ company? Did I need to shed my boyish bloodlust to make room in my brain and heart for more heady, urgent, queer pop culture? Worse still, did my chatty, encyclopedic, know-it-all-and-dying-to-share-it zeal for horror actually give my secret away? Thinking about this self-induced anxiety embarrasses me now, but when you’re always hiding in plain sight, you second-guess every move you make, every word you utter, every passion you claim.

It wasn’t until I stumbled upon AOL chat rooms and Internet forums solely dedicated to horror that I discovered just how deep queer affinity for the genre runs. I was astounded by how many regular posters proudly identified (from behind avatars and witty handles) as LGBTQIA+, and was floored by how masterfully they explicated what they saw as queer coding in many of their favorite movies…

I eventually came to understand that, while I was busy fretting over whether being gay would displace me from connecting with the films I loved most, queer affection for horror was actively being claimed, recontextualized, and integrated into the culture and community—and, like most things touched by queerness, horror becomes more textured, more nuanced, and far more exciting when viewed through a queer lens.

Though the current horror landscape is slowly (slooooowly) telling more queer-centered and -adjacent stories, we largely remain tasked with reading ourselves into these films we love, to seek out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways in which we encounter, navigate, and occupy the world. In this way, It Came from the Closet is very much the anthology of my cinephilic dreams: a collection of eclectic memoirs that use horror as the lens through which the writers consider and reflect upon queer identity, and vice versa. These essays don’t draw easy lines between horror and queerness but rather convey a rich reciprocity, complicating and questioning as much as they clarify. The powerful and diverse voices in this collection reckon with trauma, shame, grief, loss, abuse, race, discrimination, parenthood, familial structures, religion, disability, illness, art, love, and so much more. While these essays spotlight each writer’s singular queer perspective, their respective representations and analyses of ‘the Horror Film’ serve as a kind of universal connective tissue between them and their readers.

It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese is published by Saraband, priced £14.99.