It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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Other standouts included: Carmen Maria Machado’s convincing reclamation of Jennifer’s Body for queer audiences; an essay on The Blob that morphed into a striking meditation on gendered bodies; an exploration of the remake of Candyman that probed connections between being gay, Blackness and San Francisco’s racist housing policies; a look at the unexpectedly queer erotics underpinning Spielberg’s Jaws; a lovingly nostalgic examination of the lesbian subtext of Hitchcock’s The Birds; slasher movies, the Aids crisis and the demonization of gay men; and an unusual take on Eyes without a Face and being trans. It Came from the Closet collects twenty-five takes on twenty-five horror films that make us cringe, crack up, turn away and turn back again—each piece lavishly queer in its intelligence, vulnerability, and wit.

some essays were more to my taste than others, but all of them were so well-written and well-organized that i can’t help but be overall impressed. Jones also praised the essays for not being overly analytical, saying "[t]hese are personal essays, not queer theory papers.

Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.

Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

Weaving elegantly between passages on theory to first sexual encounters and wrenching experiences with a surrogate, the essays take surprising turns and don't look for easy answers. There are a couple essays in it that push past the line of pretentious academia enough to be mildly annoying. But, most of these stories couch their analysis in fantastic storytelling of personal experiences of the authors. A fascinating, often compulsively readable anthology centring on the interconnections between horror films – from vintage monster movies to Get Out - and queer existence, that brings in aspects of memoir, academic theory and literary frameworks from Barbara Creed to Julia Kristeva to Anne Carson but remains accessible throughout. I was exposed to queerness from birth as my mom got with her then-girlfriend the April after I was born.

When Army of Darkness came out, having seen the first two Evil Dead movies, we went in ready to laugh and had the whole theater chuckling with us by the end.

Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.