
In this article:
- The horror genre’s fringe status has long made it one of the few spaces in a heteronormative society where queer themes and stories could be shared and explored.
- That doesn’t mean it was always a safe or tolerant space, as early queer horror often had to hide queer themes in subtext or cast queerness as evil and monstrous.
- Gradually, queer filmmakers break those boundaries more often and use horror to tell stories with queer protagonists (not monsters).
- This queer horror marathon takes you on a cinematic journey through that history.
Halloween is that special time of year where defying social norms and openly embracing all that society deems taboo the rest of the year is not only accepted, it’s downright expected. Likewise, the horror genre has long functioned as a creative outlet for exploring those same issues that the mainstream deems too deviant for polite society.
With its explicit focus on all things that threaten life as we know it, horror was one of the few genres where a heteronormative society would tolerate queer themes and subtext. A rom-com starring a gay couple may have been off the table, but a pulpy horror flick with a gay monster? Have at it.
As a result, the genre has always attracted those parts of a society that are outcast or ostracized, as a way to express and explore that pent-up trauma and frustration; to maybe, somehow share your story with the world, albeit coded and dawning a cheap monster costume.
This Halloween, celebrate that important social function of the horror genre with this movie marathon that will take you on a cinematic journey through the history of queer horror.
The Evolution of Queer Horror
Defining queer horror isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to earlier examples from the days of the restrictive Hays Codes and a general intolerance of explicitly LGBT+ content. More often, it’s about looking for themes and allusions that could be read as queer or looking for LGBT+ filmmakers and actors and then parsing their movies for those allusions and coded references.
With LGBT+ folks throughout history so accustomed to being confined to the closet and learning to connect with each other through code and in secret, a strong, recognizable language for talking about queerness without talking about queerness emerged in film.
While a heteronormative moviegoer might think those two women in their underclothes, holding hands in bed were just really (really) good friends, the gay kids in the audience would have immediately recognized that they were watching a lesbian couple share an intimate moment. When the mad scientist unveils the muscular male living doll he made “for science,” gay audience goers knew what he really made him for.

Many movies also reflect the internalized shame and disgust LGBT+ folks suffer with when they live in a society that ostracizes them as deviants or criminals.
As a result, it’s not uncommon to see horror movies where the monster, rather than the protagonist, is queer-coded. In some particularly heartbreaking cases, the monster occupies a troubled grey area where they want to fit in, but they’re wrestling with an inner “evil” that they can’t get rid of because it’s an inborn part of who they are.

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It is only in the last couple of decades that we start to see openly gay characters, especially protagonists, and, more importantly, themes and storylines that don’t cast queerness itself as the horrific element.
Thanks to the hard and dangerous work of LGBT+ activists who fought for their humanity to be recognized and respected, social attitudes have gradually become more tolerant and the United States no longer classifies nonheteronormative genders and sexualities as mental illnesses or criminal acts.
You’ll see how that attitude shift is finally starting to affect queer horror films toward the end of this marathon.
Without further ado, here are the movies to watch this Halloween night:
The Old Dark House (1932)

An early example of the classic haunted house subgenre, The Old Dark House follows five travelers who are forced to seek shelter from a storm inside a decaying house in the remote countryside.
The house turns out to be occupied by the creepy and mysterious Femm family. Director James Whale, who was openly gay, layered this proto-haunted house narrative with queer themes that are about as overt as they could be for the 1930s.

The Femm name itself is likely a coded reference to trans or gay folks as the family’s patriarch is very obviously played by a woman dressed as an old man.
Many of the family members and their servants also express either repressed or open(ish) homosexual desire and love. An (admittedly kind of toxic) same-sex relationship is implied, for example, between the live-in male butler and the secret son that’s kept locked away upstairs.
The film served as the inspiration for the 1975 cult classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which the trans and homosexual themes are decidedly not left to subtext.
Watch it free on: Kanopy, Tubi
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

In a precursor to the 1970’s obsession with lesbian vampire flicks — which were often depicted through a thick layer of male gaze eroticism that made them less about LGBT+ pride and more about straight male fantasies — this 1936 twist on Dracula presents an uncharacteristically nuanced villain.
In a time when good and evil were black and white, Dracula’s Daughter gave us a villain living in the gray area. The villain is the daughter of the famous Count Dracula, a vampire just like her father, except that she’s determined to rid herself of the curse by any means necessary.
One of those means: therapy.
At the time this film came out, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness and the prevailing wisdom of the day was that psychoanalysis and intensive therapy could “cure” a person of their “deviant” desires. Thus, a movie about a young girl seeking therapy to cure her vampirism was a pretty obvious allusion to lesbians.
Beyond that obvious reference, the intimate moments between Dracula’s daughter and the women she seduces and feeds on were so explicit for the time that even before the movie was shot, the Production Code Administration — the office that enforced Hay’s Code censorship laws — kept an eagle eye on the filming in order to ensure no “questionable” implications appeared.
Even under the close watch of the PCA, Director Lambert Hillyer skirted censorship laws by including plenty of scenes implying sexual desire between female characters, including this one where the sexual tension between a partially-nude Lili and the vampire gazing tenderly at her could be cut with a knife:
Watch it free on: Peacock
Cat People (1942)
In the same vein as Dracula’s Daughter, the 1942 Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, explores a similar theme of a villain torn between her desire to be “good” and an innate “evil” inside of herself.
Instead of using vampires as a loose stand-in for lesbians, this one goes for the even more on-the-nose metaphor of cats.

The protagonist, Irena Dubrovna, is convinced she descends from an ancient tribe of shapeshifters who turn into panthers when aroused — a secret identity she works hard to conceal from society.
After meeting and marrying Oliver, Irena is unable to consummate the marriage, ostensibly because she’s worried that the arousal would unleash her inner panther.
Although Oliver is patient with her at first (largely because he doesn’t take her confession that she might be a “cat person” seriously), he eventually starts confiding in Alice, his assistant who he eventually falls in love with.
The affair sparks Irena’s jealousy but, rather than try to either confront him or win him back, this jealousy takes the form of stalking Alice.
Curiously, she transforms into a panther whenever she sees Alice — while it could be argued that the “arousal” was one of anger, not sexual desire, let’s leave that interpretation to the folks at the PCA because it’s pretty obvious what Irena is really struggling with.

Not only does Oliver want Irena to cure herself of this “cat person” business by going to a psychiatrist (which we know was a widely accepted “treatment” for homosexuality at the time), but the inability to consummate her marriage, and the fixation on Alice — whom she stalks but doesn’t actually kill — all point to a subtext of a woman struggling with her repressed lesbian identity.
Watch it on: AMC+
The Haunting (1963)
Based on Shirley Jackson’s iconic novel, The Haunting of Hill House, this 1963 film adaptation became famous for portraying Theodora, the lesbian character from Jackson’s novel in more explicit terms than the book (which kept her sexuality a little more implicit).

While still in effect, the Hay’s Codes had loosened quite a bit by the 1960s so there was a little more wiggle room to depict queer stories.
In The Haunting, Theodora is all but openly lesbian. At one point, she describes a female “roommate” leaving in terms that clearly suggest it was a breakup. She is also obviously romantically interested in Eleanor.
It’s this unrequited romantic interest that sparks some of the film’s conflict when Eleanor begins to fall in love with Markway, the male paranormal investigator who’s also staying in the house with them.
What might be most impressive about the film, though, is that the lesbian character is not the villain.
She’s neither predatory nor threatening in the way she expresses her affection for Eleanor. Instead, Theo’s just a star-crossed psychic, recently out of a long-term lesbian relationship, watching her crush go slowly mad under the influence of an evil house.
Rent it on: Amazon, YouTube
Nightbreed (1990)
Although more well-known for Hellraiser — a movie that also has queer undertones — Director Clive Barker imbued queer themes into many of his films, including Nightbreed. In this one, Aaron Boone is a psychiatric patient whose doctor uses LSD and manipulation to convince Boone that he is responsible for a series of murders that were, in reality, committed by the doctor himself.
Before he can turn himself in for his supposed crimes, however, he’s hit by a truck and hospitalized. In the hospital, a neighboring patient tells him of a secret place called Midian before ripping off his own skin to show his “true” face to Boone.
Boone finds Midian and discovers a community of monsters living on the margins of society. The monsters don’t accept Boone at first because he won’t embrace his true monstrous self. Once he does, the community works together to take down the serial killer doctor.
Building on the legacy of The Haunting, where a character’s queerness finally wasn’t cast as evil, Nightbreed explicitly makes embracing one’s queerness the key to defeating evil.
By twisting the “monstrous queer” trope of earlier decades into one where monsters are the heroes and “normal” humans are the villains, the film becomes an allegory for coming out and for the way that LGBT+ folks often create their own communities outside of the mainstream society that rejected and demonized them.

It’s also a powerful rejection of the pathologization of homosexuality. The doctor treating Boone is clearly cast as the villain, relying on deception and manipulation to convince Boone that he’s deranged, when, in reality, he’s committed no crime.
Watch it free on: Tubi, Peacock
Hellbent (2004)

Like Nightbreed, this 2004 slasher flick does away with the tired trope of the evil queer. While Nightbreed still kept monstrous elements but recast them as heroic rather than threatening, Hellbent featured all its gay characters as completely human protagonists.
The film takes place on Halloween and follows a group of gay friends in West Hollywood as a homophobic serial killer lurks in the darkness, hellbent on exterminating the entire gay community.
There’s nothing implicit about this movie. The good guys are openly and obviously gay and the bad guy is a homophobic maniac wielding a sickle. It’s got all the hallmarks of a classic slasher flick paired with a clear message about the destructive consequences of homophobia.
Watch it on: HereTV, Spectrum On Demand
What Keeps You Alive (2018)

This Canadian psychological horror follows a young woman, Jules, as she begins to learn that her wife, Jackie, has a darker side than she knew.
Thanks to the progress made by the LGBT+ films that preceded it, What Keeps You Alive gets to tell a queer horror story without needing to make a case in defense of queerness. It’s not an identity that needs to justify itself or prove its humanity in this film.
Instead, What Keeps You Alive gives us a queered survival horror in which a couple on a romantic getaway to a remote cabin (of course) breaks down into a bloody rivalry as one of them turns out to be a tad murder-y.
The darkness in the villain is not her queerness. It’s her penchant for solving personal conflicts with “tragic accidental deaths.” It’s a masterpiece of tension building and a beautifully executed example of survival horror.
Watch it on: Netflix
Bit (2019)

Bit provides a much-needed update to the queer vampire genre. Laurel, a young trans woman, befriends a coven of queer feminist vampires who are on a mission to exterminate all predatory men.
After Duke, the head of the coven turns Laurel into a vampire without her consent, she tries to win the protagonist over to the coven’s side by explaining their mission.
The film relishes moral ambiguity. The vampire coven’s approach is heavy-handed and definitely ethically questionable but the predatory men they target are hardly innocent victims.
Laurel wrestles with this moral ambiguity as she gets wrapped up in her new vampire vigilante life but neglects the needs of her own friends and family in the process.
It’s another strong example of modern queer horror where queerness is neither subtext nor evil.
Watch it on: Tubi (free), Amazon Prime
Fear Street Trilogy (2021)

The classic R.L. Stine series of the same name gets a queer makeover in this 2021 adaptation. The Fear Street Trilogy follows a teen lesbian couple who are trying to save their hometown from evil while also navigating their own rocky relationship.
Part slasher flick, part supernatural mystery, the trilogy blends multiple horror genres with a generous dose of nostalgia for any kid who grew up obsessively reading R.L. Stine books.
The small town of Shadyside has been terrorized by an ancient curse for centuries. That curse takes the form of a periodic series of brutal murders (executed in true slasher flick fashion by a mysterious killer).
Most Shadysiders accept the rational explanation that’s it’s some crazed (but human) serial killer. But when other haunting events start to plague the town, the rational explanation becomes increasingly more difficult to believe and the teens are sent on an epic quest to chase down the killer and break the curse.
Following the trend of openness and acceptance in modern horror, queerness is not evil in Fear Street. However, like Nightbreed, the trilogy cleverly twists the antiquated tropes, making monsters into heroes and “heroes” into villains to tell a cautionary tale about the sinister ways homophobia infects communities.
Watch it on: Netflix