Gay Themes in Horror Films

I sat through an absolutely horrible movie the other day. Some gay guy fell in love with some guy who couldn't decide whether he was gay or straight. The romance was insipid at best and saccharine at the worst. To keep from falling asleep, I made up my own movie involving chain saws. At the end of the film, my date turned to me and said, "Wasn't that incredible?" He went on and on about different "gay films."

After his rant, I said that most of my favorite films were horror movies. He made a face and asked why I liked something so hetero. I tried explaining to him that horror movies are filled with homosexual images, themes, and characters. he told me that he didn't buy it, but then the only horror films that he ever saw were the teeny-bopper PG-13 slasher flicks. (He did admit to liking some of them, but only because he liked Dawson's Creek and it's stars.)

I spent a great deal of my life in the closet to myself, not sure what I was, but hoping that I wasn't really gay. I would watch horror films and I would pick up on either graphic depictions of homosexuality (normally lesbianism) or subtle images (normally in the forms of vampires, werewolves, and monsters.)

At age fifteen, I discovered a movie called HELLRAISER. I had been all but warned not to see it, told it was the most disgusting film I would ever see. I watched the movie in a state of awe. It was as graphic as it was artistic and intelligent. The image that stayed with me when I shut down the videotape was not the hammer killings or the skinned human beings. It was the cenobites, particularly Pinhead.

Pinhead was a very sexual image, sauntering slowly into a scene wearing black leather. He seemed very masculine, but his love of pain and flesh transcended gender. He enjoyed torturing men in his sadomasochistic Hell where the instruments of punishments looked like body piercing and fetishes taken to an insane extreme. He beckoned men and women to come closer and have them live out their darkest fantasies.

In HELLRAISER's sequel, HELLBOUND, Pinhead was shown to be a English soldier that tried opening the box. Becoming Pinhead was his fetish taken on insane limit. In the end, he returns to his humanity, slowly stripped to a man wearing the leather robes and looking very angelic and feminine. In the third movie, he is revived by tempting an oversexed young man (who was just wearing silk boxers at the time). Everything about Pinhead seemed sensual, and even though he tempted both men and women. . .men seemed to be his favorite targets.

The longest, overt homosexual image in horror films has been the lesbian vampire. It was even there before film, in the novel DRACULA with the brides. There was just something enticing about a female bloodsucker either sharing a relationship with another female bloodsucker or taking a female victim that the horror community could not get enough of. It has been glorified in the most grade-Z horror flicks to big budget Hollywood films. Meanwhile, with the exception of the film version of Interview with a Vampire, there has been little done on homosexual male vampires.

A lot of times the homosexual images were really subtle. Normally in a slasher film, there was normally at least one virginal guy or prankster that would be portrayed as very feminine. Their names would range from neuter to feminine. The most obvious example amongst the recent years was Randy from the SCREAM movies (and to a lesser extent Dewey, who is the beta in any relationship). They were normally played like little boys, and we notice how unmasculine they are by having them in scenes with far butcher characters (be they female or male.)

The werewolf has often been compared to a mirror of homosexual life. There are many takes on how one becomes a werewolf in the movies, but the two most prominent can both be compared to homosexuality. Around puberty, a young person (normally a boy) discovers that he's not like everyone else. He has inherited a legacy that makes normal love difficult, if not impossible. He has to hide his true nature and does his best to hide what he is. Gradually, he becomes unable to hide it and his illusion of a normal life is shattered.

The other common way that werewolves are made in movies is to have the lead (normally a man) be bitten by another werewolf (normally also male). The encounter with the other male is animalistic, ferocious, and leaves our hero changed forever. He doesn't want to admit the change, and once again tries in vain to lead a normal life. His new nature had made a normal life impossible, and he finds himself having to surrender to his more animalistic desires.

There are many more homosexual images to be found in horror movies, and it would take several books to detail them all. These were just the most prominent ones to affect my life. I'm sure that lots of other gay men and women have other favorites.