It Came from the Closet –
Queer Reflections on Horror
Edited by Joe Vallese
The Feminist Press, 2022
Time to squeeze in one more book review for October!
It Came from the Closet is a collection of essays by LGBTQ writers about their favorite horror movie and why they like it. That it scares them isn’t always the reason. In most of these essays it’s because they find some sympathy with the monster, or see in them some relation to their sexuality. In others, the movie’s protagonists are cited, the lens through which the movie may be given a queer interpretation.
As such I’m not really the intended audience, but I enjoyed reading most of these anyway for the writers’ particular take.
For example, S. Trimble’s essay on The Exorcist focuses not on the esoteric rituals of Catholicism but on Regan, the 12-year-old girl who becomes possessed. She goes from being an innocent pre-teen to a powerful (albeit demon-possessed) adult who can do exactly what she wants – cussing, masturbating, and pissing off (literally) the adults in her life, yet she’s being continuously quashed by the authoritative adult males of the movie. The doctor, the therapists, and the priests all want her to act more infantile and ladylike; the movie becomes a feminist parable. It’s a plausible reading.
More than one writer was enamored by the slasher genre — there were pieces on Friday the 13th (Jason) Sleepaway Camp (Angela) and Nightmare on Elm Street (Freddy Krueger). I never liked that kind of horror, yet the essays were enlightening for me. What I got out of all this in the end was how horror, more than any other kind of genre, acts as a way for these folks to process their feelings of being different and feeling alone in that difference. (A fair amount came from rural and ultra-religious backgrounds.)
The book was published in 2022 when wokeness was near its height. If you’ve got no time for that, be aware there’s matter-of-fact references to various sexual kinks, fetishes, labels, and communities that can be annoying. I’d rather not have heard about one writer’s confession he likes to have sex with overweight gay men he has belly-pushing contests with. I mean, that’s his kink to proclaim, but also one for readers — all readers — to judge.
And I also feel I must comment on a gay male trope I see a lot of in coming-of-age essays. That is, the encounter of the writer, as a gay male child, with an adult male who tries to molest them, as if “seeing” the gayness in them and (the writer thinks) wanting to initiate them into that world. This is a conceit I’ve got a serious problem with. Frankly, no, the molester is not to rescue you; they’re merely looking for a convenient victim and know diddly-squat about your inner secrets. That the writer has regrets about turning them down is more horrible to me than any amount of monsters from this book. It’s child abuse and predation.
