IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror, a genre the community embraces...hard

IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror
JOE VALLESE (Editor)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$25.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. 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.

It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on "Jennifer’s Body", Jude Ellison S. Doyle on "In My Skin", Addie Tsai on "Dead Ringers", and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWESS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll put it this way: It seemed to me, when I began reading, that queer people are really barkin' up the wrong tree to look to horror, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic medium it is, for representation. Anti-models, maybe...but representation carries (to me, anyone else?) positive or at the minimum neutral connotations for the represented.

I do not see this in horror stories, where the evil queer has survived long past its rejection in most mainstream media.

"All of us together are smarter than any one of us" has never been more amply and aptly demonstrated than in this collection of essays. It is true that some are hits and others misses; it's in the nature of collections for this to be the case. My miss could easily be your hit. It's the reason that essays are so very valuable collected together, to maximize the reader's exposure to new, different ideas that might resonate...or clang dissonantly. Both, and all the shades of experience between, are valuable for pointing out and pointing up one's blind spots.

I'd never once, when watching Jaws in 1975, considered the homoerotic subtext in the film. (I've never read the novel.) I only watched it the once because, fifty years later, I still won't go into the ocean above my ankles because I'm *still* scared by that buoy scene. (IYKYK) Jen Corrigan saw it. I didn't think she was right at first; then I kept thinking about the points being raised and came to think she was correct. Fifty years later, I'm thinking about a film I saw once, and can't forget for bad reasons, reassessing it in light of a stranger's thoughts and appreciating it more positively for doing that.

Recontextualizing an object of fear, fifty years later, actually reduces the terror I've always felt due to Spielberg's genius-level indirect threat building, not making it grimly obvious therefore dismissable, reducible to whether we think the effect was "good enough" or not. What strikes unseen is always more frightening, look at Alien, look at ICEstapo's masked raids, look at the fear of the unknown everywhere in our culture.

So essays by queer people about the films that scare all of use make the scares, even the ones at our expense like Tucker Lieberman's essay on childhood trauma and A Nightmare on Elm Street, are the best use of our mental energy around these cultural products designed to elicit fear in the viewer. When we, the queers of the world, are targets of evil everywhere in our quotidian lives it pays to forearm yourself with context to battle the inner demons "They" want to feed, to convince you are REAL and YOUR FAULT...which they aren't.

A book to be savored in sips, not down-in-one belted into your eyeholes. Well worth gifting to your horror-obsessed friend of any sexuality, or your queer media-studies nibling/grand, or just some guy who was traumatized by Jaws as a teen.

You never know where healing will come from.