We queer folks have had a strange relationship with the way the media presents us. For quite a long time or existence at all was used as a punchline, and it seems like only in the last decade or so we have started to get a lot more nuanced in how we show queer people. Unfortunately, the years of abuse and hiding have created quite a few queer tragedies being made as our main source of representation. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, Boy Erased, when I first started watching queer content it seemed all I could find was filled with a base level of suffering.
it's easy to get the impression that we queer people are few and far between, and it's the straight folks that end up in the history books. It doesn't help must public education (mine at least) never mentioned queer people at all, as if we were some glitches in the matrix that should be mostly ignored. After high school, I started doing more research on queer history and started to feel a lot better about the way queer people have silently helped shaped the modern world since the very beginning. But the horror genre? surely the whole of horror doesn't have some fundamentally queer roots that have been swept under the rug, right?
Wrong
Conceived as a follow-up to Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror features interviews with actors, writers, directors, producers, and creators who are icons of horror and suspense, including Boys Don’t Cry and Carrie (2013) director Kimberly Peirce; Scream writer Kevin Williamson; Dear White People and Bad Hair writer Justin Simien; In the Dream House writer Carmen Maria Machado; and Yellowjackets director Karyn Kusama and cast members Jasmin Savoy Brown, Tawny Cypress, and Liv Hewson.
Long story short, this series is awesome. it's not always easy to balance the academic and the entertaining, and this show perfectly walks the line between being a damn good time and a wonderful history lesson all in one fell swoop. The queer folks they interview are all incredibly talented in their own right, and I have had blast hanging out with them over the course of this series. In the past, I have somewhat struggled with the idea I have seen damn near all of the classic horror movies already, and I love the way this series turns over old stones and show you the amazing ecosystem underneath.
Shudder has a handful of similar series at this point, 101 SCARIEST HORROR MOMENTS, History Of Horror, Behind The Monsters, and quite a few more. Some of those series seem a little unnecessary other than to call attention to some old forgotten classics, but both HORROR NOIRE and QUEER FOR FEAR feel like they are doing a public service. chatting about good jump scares is far from necessary on the grand scale of things, but introducing a younger (and gayer) generation to the massive queer impact on all of cinema is damn near noble.
turns out that letting queer people talk openly about their own experiences is a great form of representation.
who knew
10/10
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