It’s Coming From Inside the House: Queer Horror in 2023

April 4, 2024 4:39 AM

"What does a queer family look like? How do you define one without capitulating to heteronormative ideas of the 'nuclear family'? And how do those dynamics play out with families in the horror genre?" Laura Riordan on queer family in recent horror films.
posted by cupcakeninja (4 comments total)

Oh god I wasn't going to have an opinion on this, I really wasn't, but I kept thinking about it, and now I'll just blurt it out. I understand the author's point here, but I don't think she succeeds in the analysis, because she's limiting her scope to just a few movies hoping to find some kind of representation and meaning in them--and I think that's the wrong approach when you're talking about horror.

The social function of queerness is to destabilize existing 'proper' relations. There's a huge literature illustrating how, in earlier days, the only way to portray this destabilization was to have your gays be monsters. The idea of a gay horror protagonist would only become available later to culture, but I think, as this piece illustrates, we're still not sure what to do with that character.

Destabilization is about power--often a secret, subversive, erosive power that destroys from within. (Like, literally, that's what the title of the piece refers to!) But family is our basic unit of stability. Family is home, it's what you can always come back to (assuming you don't get kicked out for being queer). What we want--what horror wants--is a vision of the family and its stability as the locus of terror, and queerness as the tool, the weapon, of dismantling, escape, and rebuilding. To let oneself become a monster to oppose monstrosity.

I think that's very hard to do, and I don't think people try, and you're left with mere representation, which is very unsatisfying. (This was the problem I had with The Cabin at the End of the World, upon which Knock at the Cabin was based: Horrible things happening to nice gay guys who just want to be happy gay dads. But gay-as-passive-victim is not very satisfying! We've done that already! C'mon guys! Become a monster!!! It's the only way to fight back, to become weirder and more powerful than the hallucinating kidnapping murderers!)

Of these movies, I feel like only Skinamarink really counts, if you know what I mean, and even that felt very much like footage Todd Haynes had left on the floor?
posted by mittens at 5:42 AM on April 4 [10 favorites]

There was a recent interesting episode of Analee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders' Our Opinions Are Correct podcast with Dr. Chuck Tingle about Queer Horror.
posted by signal at 6:18 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]

The interpretation of Skinamarink as a kind of nightmare representation of what the world may be like for LGBTQA kids is an interesting one, and tracks with the otherwise kind of random fact that it takes place in 1995; one would hope that kids that age in the 2020s might feel less out of place, more welcome and understood. I would hope so. I didn't know the writer/director was gay when I saw it, and to be honest I wouldn't have thought that could be relevant to a film I saw as a metaphor for child abuse. This article made me consider the film from another angle, and I appreciate that.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:08 PM on April 4

This is also the first time I'd heard that Skinamarink was made by a gay man. I think the author's analysis of it from that angle is pretty spot on. It made the film click for me in a way it hadn't before
posted by treepour at 4:21 PM on April 4