Bookbuster Review: Leftfield Horror Film Fanzines
The Last Closet on The Left, vol 1
Published by the Nottingham Horror Collective, 2023 rrp £9.99
IT Came from The Closet Edited by Joe Vallese
Published by Saraband, 2023 rrp £14.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Both these great new books investigate queerness in horror films, and in the queer communities’ interpretations of horror tropes. ‘Queer’ in this context includes a panoply of affinity groups, sometimes overlapping, and usually defined by gender and sexuality. A fascination with such readings of horror tropes is not limited to these communities, but the ‘queerest’ interpretations are usually birthed amongst them.
The Last Closet on The Left is a new zine, coming from lesbian, gay, and trans perspectives, and exploring, in this first ‘Pride’ edition, film. Herein you will find vampires explored through several lenses, the homoerotic undercurrents in The Lighthouse, the liberation of the id amongst the women in Yellowjackets, and a multi-genre path through the movie Songs of the Standing Dead. The zine’s byline ‘presents horror through an LGBTQ+ lens’. The recommended films in this issue are Jennifer’s Body, Huesera: The Bone Woman, The Hunger, Fright Night, Sleepaway Camp, and Mulholland Drive, though several others are addressed. The several writers vary in style, but all take a ‘this is fun’ tone, rather than a dull overly-serious academic approach.
It Came from The Closet is subtitled ‘queer reflections on horror’, and has essays based around 26 different films. Only Jennifer’s Body and Sleepaway Camp overlap with TNHC’s zine, and anyway it takes a different approach to the material, so I enthusiastically recommend reading both these publications, and look forward to volume 2 of the zine! Unlike Last Closet, which comes from the British Midlands with its writers, so far as I can tell, all UK based, contributors to From the Closet are all based in North America. I’d like to see a follow-up with a broader, international, appeal, but the films covered transcend the US, as do the LGBTQ+ communities the writers represent.
MANY VAMPIRE STORIES ARE SEXUALISED AND VERY QUEER
Many will agree, on average and certainly historically, with Kirsty Logan (the sole non-American herein) when she says in her forward to Last Closet, ‘I’ve never felt that horror gives us LGBTQIA+ people accurate representation’. Frequently, a horror movie runs through a predictable sequence of deaths and disappearances. The caricatured version would for example be, first to die: black or bimbo; second preppy girl; third gay and/or lesbian couple. Or, a serial killer that only hunts transvestites. Or sometimes, the killer/monster is trans, or very camp, etc. These tropes are as often played for comedy as pathos, and they invariably are stereotypic. They are also all too often a reflection of a vicious and bullying strand of mainstream culture – as a character in Sleepaway Camp, quoted by Vallese in his introduction to From the Closet, has ‘spat at her’ by another girl “What are you, queer or something?” this is a film Vallese describes as both ‘deeply transphobic and effusively homoerotic’.
Such stereotypes are, eventually, a dead-end, so more recent cinema has more frequently turned some of these on their head, or satirised them in extremis. The Scream movies are a mainstream source for this approach, as perhaps Evil Dead 2 is. However, much older examples in the genre have encoded queer tropes. Many vampire stories are sexualised and, in a broad sense, very queer, even if the latter aspect went uncelebrated. More recent cinema has engaged much more consciously with queerness, in the victims, the monsters, or both.
PEEK BEHIND THE MONSTER MASKS AND SEE THE CODED MESSAGES
One of the beauties of interpretation, though, is its tendency to co-opt and redefine, regardless of an author’s presumed intent. Some queer writers, seeing themselves represented as perpetual victims and all too often experiencing prejudice on a daily basis, can free themselves, psychologically, from this movie-stereotype trap, not just by writing new scripts that allow a little pay-back and fresher representation in new movies, but also by taking a hoary old chestnut, such as Dracula, and queering its interpretation, often embracing the ‘monster’ as a liberation and perhaps act vengeance on the ‘straight’ community. In these publications, the most enjoyment is to be found in these moments, reading encoded, subliminal, or even actually missing messages into these movies. Last Closet argues that ‘the horror genre […] has been […] inviting us to read between the lines, to peek behind the monster masks and see the coded messages, the transgressive identities, the struggles of acceptance and the beauty of being unique in a world that is relentlessly monochrome’.
Although from a different genre, an exchange between the android, Roy Batty, a different kind of ‘monster’, and the head of the Tyrell Corporation, came to mind: Batty: “I’ve done… questionable things”; Tyrell: “Also extraordinary things! Revel in your time!’’
Both of these books are available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply