It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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It Came From the Closet is at times beautiful, at times funny, at times gorgeously weird and baroque, and always as off-kilter brilliant as the genre, and queerness, itself. I was exposed to queerness from birth as my mom got with her then-girlfriend the April after I was born. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. I hadn't really thought much about how my queer and transness related to these sorts of media until reading this text.

When Army of Darkness came out, having seen the first two Evil Dead movies, we went in ready to laugh and had the whole theater chuckling with us by the end. Horror is INNATELY queer, and the discussion within this text highlight that perfectly AND beautifully (like there were some sections that had me tearing up.Richard Scott Larson earned his MFA from New York University, and he is the recent recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts. As Legacy Russell discusses in Glitch Feminism, what cannot be defined can contain power, and horror movies have allowed queer people to see themselves in blobs, the unseen Blair Witch, and mysterious monsters.

It’s a book that doesn’t ask many questions and allows readers to sit with each author’s interests in their own intersections of identity and love for a medium that a lot of queer people find drawn to in deeply personal ways. Doyle on In My Skin , Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers , and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror. There’s a moment in this book that’ll resonate with every single reader: undead, queer, or otherwise.

The movie inclusion was more like a gimmick so this wouldn't be 'just another nonfiction queer memoir essay collection' rather than an an actual component when it came to writing the essays, at least the ones I read.

There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Of course, this will appeal to people who love and/or are interested in horror movies, but if you're worried you're not well versed enough in the genre to appreciate this book, fear not (or embrace your fear, it's what the book is all about). His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, and North American Review, among other publications.