[Book Review] It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (2022)

Queer horror is rapidly growing genre. The essay collection It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, which will be published by The Feminist Press on October 1, is bursting with stories of LGBTQ+ writers sharing their personal connections with horror films, and describing how these movies intersect with their queer identities. 

There are several standouts in the collection, including editor Joe Vallese's moving essay Imprint, in which he describes the heartbreaking (but ultimately beautiful) journey of having a close friend carry his and his partner's child as a surrogate. He shares this deeply personal tale as he discusses the 2009 horror film Grace, in which a woman has multiple miscarriages before giving birth to the titular Grace, her "rainbow baby." Vallese's surrogate had also experienced devastating miscarriages before giving birth to his child Elio. 

Of course, the stories aren't totally parallel – Grace was stillborn, but perked up once she started drinking her mother's blood, and Grace's mom and her midwife-turned-lover must keep their child happy by supplying her with lots of blood. Both Vallese's story and the story told in Grace show that queer people will go to incredible lengths to have and take care of their families. Vallese describes the blinding pain he feels after his friend's miscarriage:

It was as if something had entered my body and was throttling me from within. A pained barking sound I never knew myself capable of making shot up out of my throat, matching the frightening rhythm of my body…. "My baby, my baby, my baby," I sputtered, my eyes glued to the monitor, wondering if maybe just this once, life could be like the movies, wondering if she'd stir.

Vallese's thoughts go to Grace coming back to life, and in this case, a horror film has a happier reality than what he's experiencing in real life.

Parallels like this also come into play in Addie Tsai's eerie and beautiful essay Twin/Skin. They write about being a twin and the 1988 psychological thriller Dead Ringers, which Tsai calls "uniquely and specifically horrifying." (The film itself was based on the true story of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, twin gynecologists who died together under unusual circumstances in 1975.) In the film, the two men share everything, including a horrifying relationship with the same woman, who at first does not know she's been intimate with two different men.

Tsai sheds a light on the complex relationship twins have with one another and how it can affect their sexual identities:

I didn't come out until my late twenties because, for many years, I found it especially hard, as a twin, to make sense of same-sex attraction. Were these primal feelings I had for my "friends" evidence of queer desire, or simply residual complications from the relationship I already had with my twin, this other same-sex body I could never create distance from since she was always with me?

Just as the twin doctors of Dead Ringers began to invade one another's lives in an unhealthy way, Tsai's twin tried to  blur the boundary between what was Tsai's experience and what was her experience, leading to a fracture in a relationship that will never cease to exist. 

Carmen Maria Machado does what someone should have done a long time ago in her essay Both Ways: She writes about the wildly overlooked and often misinterpreted horror film Jennifer’s Body and its portrayal of bisexuality. Machado observes, "[The movie's] energy is exceptionally specific: what it means to experience parallel sexualities with your best friend as you punch through the last vestiges of childhood; and, significantly, the central body of water that is bisexuality." 

Jennifer's Body focuses on two teenage girls: the absurdly sexy Jennifer and her nerdier (or at least, Hollywood's version of nerdy) best friend Needy. The two girls both sleep with boys during the course of the movie, but they are ultimately dedicated to each other and share many, many moments of flirtation and passion that's more interesting than most of their interactions with young men. Early in the film, a demon takes up residence in Jennifer's body after a poorly thought-out "virgin" sacrifice (Jennifer was not a virgin), and she quickly begins killing boys, while becoming even more seductive toward Needy.

In Machado's own youth, she also had a relationship with a close female friend that crossed the line from friendship to physical intimacy. She's left heartbroken when the friend ultimately decides she's straight. Machado reflects on her initial hurt and anger, which eventually turned into a kind of understanding as she acknowledged, "How little we know of ourselves at any moment; how distinctly human that is." 

In Three Men on a Boat, Jen Corrigan provides a queer interpretation of the classic horror movie Jaws. While the film may not read as queer to an audience who isn't anticipating it, as Corrigan points out, "The thing about Jaws is that it's only queer if you're looking for it." Corrigan, who identifies as pansexual, is looking for it – and she finds it with Police Chief Brody, biologist Hooper and Captain Quint. 

The three men team up to wage battle against a murderous shark, sharing several intimate moments along the way. As Corrigan reminds readers, "Touching with hands has a significance in queer intimacy." Quint and Hooper meet and immediately touch hands and even compare their hands; it's a moment of bonding. The trio goes even further when they're aboard the Orca: They compare their bodies, peeling back various items of clothing to reveal more flesh. Quint later opens up about his horrific wartime experiences, and as Corrigan writes, "This moment of vulnerability is the climax to the explorations of their bodies, because even homoerotic touch is less intimate than the baring of Quint's trauma." 

Corrigan shares, "Many days I feel like I am not queer enough, and there is a self-shame in that… But I feel comforted while watching Jaws and seeing characters that defy those labels, as much as I find myself wanting to use those labels that I know are false or incomplete." While Brody, Hooper and Quint never explicitly identify their sexualities, the likelihood that they would describe themselves as straight while also sharing such homoerotic connections proves that labels can be meaningless or misleading, even when they provide occasional safe havens. 

Vallese has put together a diverse collection of thoughtful and incisive essays that show just how meaningful horror films can be to queer people, no matter how they identify. It Came from the Closet is a big and beautiful book that shows that queerness and horror are natural (or occasionally, supernatural) bedfellows. 

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