I have always been morbidly obsessed with the horror film genre. As a small child, I’d gaze up at the posters of Freddy Krueger or Pinhead in our local video rental shop with a curious mix of fear and desire. I wanted to be scared, and I also did not. I was 11 when Channel 4 screened A Nightmare on Elm Street. My poor mum, assuming it couldn’t be that bad if it was on TV, let me record it. I watched through my fingers, drunk on anxiety, the anticipation of the kills almost unbearable. There is, I would argue, something quite queer about this complicated urge. Horror is titillating.
The golden age of the slasher movie was the 1970s and 80s. I’m sure film-makers were inspired by the cultural austerity of the Reagan era, the Moral Majority and the unfolding Aids crisis. But, as a child, I was blissfully unaware of those things or my burgeoning queerness. I just knew I wanted to watch these films.
Some horror films are explicitly queer in tone. Hellraiser is quite clearly about anal sex (“The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits; pain and pleasure, indivisible”). Sleepaway Camp, from 1983, features a controversial reveal: the killer, “Angela”, turns out to be actually her brother, Peter – forced to live as a girl by her insane mother. FYI that’s not usually how being transgender works.
