Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror

- It's a perfect night for mystery and horror.

The air itself is filled with monsters.

I'm all ears.

Open up your pits of hell.

- As queer people, we are considered outside of society

and I think horror is outside of society.

- Horror stories upset all the right people.

People who can't handle ambiguity,

people who can't handle violence or eroticism,

people who think of the world in these very clear-cut terms.

Most Americans are repelled

by the mere notion of homosexuality.

The CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans

look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear.

What was that?

- The main thing about horror was

that it was exciting to get scared

and that there was an honesty to it,

because I was responding to how my body felt.

So, kind of like porn.

Your blood starts pumping.

There is something very, very primal about being afraid.

- Horror designed to make you incredibly uncomfortable.

And I think that queer people

are just generally better at being uncomfortable.

Now kindly undo these straps.

- Because queer has been seen as bad,

has been seen as the other,

of course we're gonna put anything bad

and anything the other as the monster.

I know who I am now, Sam.

- You wait till mom finds out, buddy.

- I always thought of myself as a monster

or a freak or a weirdo.

- My, I'll bet you monsters lead interesting lives.

- I'm Frankenstein, I'm Dracula, I'm Mrs. Danvers.

So many of us can relate

to being the the monster in the room.

- I want to walk amongst the commoners unnoticed.

A prince amongst paupers.

- The reason queer people have latched onto these monsters

is because we see in them that society

is always trying to eradicate us.

And we're always waiting to fight back.

- That's how we're represented in film.

We're the bogeyman.

We're the ones who are out to get you.

- A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country

and is threatening to pervert

an entire generation of our American children.

You sit the fuck down!

- They constantly portray abnormal sexual behavior.

They glorify unnatural sex acts.

Show me.

With so many queer creators,

we see this affinity with the shadowy margins

of what's considered respectable society.

Are you a member?

I'm looking for somebody.

Aren't we all?

- The moment there's some kind of queer lens

being used to create,

it immediately reflects and reverberates

throughout the piece.

The evolution of queer horror

really parallels the evolution of queer liberation.

They're waiting for you.

You begin with queer artists

taking the spaces we're allowed to have

and slipping what we can say into those spaces.

- There's something affirming about that vision in horror,

because at least we know we exist,

at least we know we are out there,

even if we're only there

to put the fear of God into straight people.

- Through this material, today's youth can be enticed

to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians,

and other sex deviants.

We know that once a person is perverted,

it is practically impossible for that person

to adjust to normal attitudes in regard to sex.

- We queers have been a part of the genre of horror

since the beginning, right?

Since the beginning.

The horror genre as we know it

really dates back to folkloric traditions

and then the gothic tradition in literature

in the 17th and 18th century.

When you wanted to write about queers,

you had to find a sort of coded way to do it.

- We queers have always had our own language.

If you know, you know,

but otherwise it just kind of goes over your head.

And if somebody sees it, it's on them.

It's not quite on you.

- The gothic is literally about sublimated,

hidden things coming to light.

The dead, or the past, or desires,

or things that have been pushed down.

The whole point is you can't suppress the dead,

you can't suppress the past.

It's always gonna come up and erupt

in some really interesting and terrifying way.

- One of the defining characteristics of those gothic novels

is that they are all about transgression.

Resurrecting the dead, drinking blood,

making Faustian deals with the devil.

And tied to that is, of course, sexual transgression.

- We've now reached a sort of stage

with a very, very long history of the gothic

in literature and in film,

where we can actually start to look back at things and say,

"You know, that's not quite

what it appeared to be at the time."

- The general names from the 19th century

that we associate with horror

are really Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson,

but before that is Mary Shelley.

She is an angel.

You think so?

- It is no surprise that a woman created the horror genre.

We're suppressed in more ways than one,

especially a queer woman.

She had all the ammunition in the world

to create monsters, and she did.

Mary, what an icon.

I'm just gonna invent science fiction in an afternoon.

Do you guys want anything?

Like, "Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Mary."

- Mary Shelly is not only the mother of the horror genre

and the science fiction genre.

She is a leading feminist idealist

and also the goth-est of the goth girls.

Mary Shelley is so goth.

She lost her virginity on her mother's gravestone.

Here I come!

- We all know this image of Mary Shelley,

hanging out in the graveyards,

and there's a much more romantic

and heartfelt way to look at it.

Her mother, Mary Goodwin, was a prolific writer

before feminism was even a word,

was very much so of the feminist spirit.

She died within weeks of Mary being born.

The only way for Mary Shelly

to have a connection with her mother

was to be in the space that her mother left her

and to read her literature

and sort of piece together a relationship

with this woman she never got to meet.

- Mary Shelly was pretty radical.

She was very sexually liberal,

experimenting, very open-minded.

And what was also great

was just her equality with the men

that she was spending time with.

- Mary Shelley was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

They were also part of a who knows exactly

relationship with Lord Byron.

The trio was allegedly booted out of England

because of their notorious behavior.

- She was one of the original hags, right?

I mean, she could hang out, you know?

She was there for her gays, and they were there for her.

Hanging out with these sexually fluid men

and also having her own secrets

really speaks to her being a pioneer

in the art of monsters and of horror and storytelling

at that time when those stories were so new.

She's so goth.

- They ended up in Europe at Villa Diodati

where they all decided to write ghost stories

fueled by drugs and sex and alcohol.

- She's really turning it for the goths, honey.

- She's 18, she's hanging out with her husband and his bros.

I shouldn't call them bros.

They were all having sex.

- It is an age of dreams and nightmares.

- Yes, and we are merely the children of the age.

- And she has a nightmare about this shambling behemoth.

She writes it down, and she kind of invents science fiction

and horror in the same moment.

As the story goes,

Mary Shelley came up with the concept of Frankenstein

when she was debating,

what's the scariest story you can think of?

Kind of fitting that a female author

would think the scariest thing I can think of

is a man trying to create life.

- It's such a commentary on a man's world,

and it's such a commentary on the audacity of men

to think that they could even create

a functioning creature without a woman.

Like, the balls it must have took for her

to put those words on that page.

- She's writing in an era where there aren't a lot

of female authors to begin with.

It's certainly not a respectable thing

for her to be doing.

Just by virtue of her writing this book,