There is a cause the queer group loves horror. Positive, the spooks and campy thrills are enjoyable, however as a style, horror has lengthy been a ripe territory for metaphor, and for exploring the darkish and fantastical sides of otherness that is so inherent to many queer and trans experiences.
Queerness has been everywhere in the historical past of horror, even when it hasn’t all the time been loudly represented. From the queer coding of basic monster motion pictures to very clearly homosexual vampire flicks, from horror sci-fi explorations of gender identification to the brazenly LGBTQ+ characters of contemporary slashers, queer and trans audiences have lengthy discovered themselves mirrored — whether or not deliberately or not — within the horror style.
This spooky season, whether or not you are within the temper for a queer cannibal romance, a surreal lesbian vampire story, a homosexual cruising thriller, a haunted home comedy, or a trans horror twist on The Little Mermaid, there are many motion pictures to maintain you entertained and up at evening all through October.
Jennifer’s Physique
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“I am going each methods.” Title a greater, queerer, and funnier line of dialogue from a horror film monster. Megan Fox’s iconic “My tit!” response is a detailed second. Each of these strains from Jennifer’s Physique spotlight the brilliance of Diablo Cody’s script, and the proper steadiness of tone that director Karyn Kusama strikes all through the cult horror comedy, a movie unfairly lambasted upon launch that is discovered its long-deserved appreciation lately.
Again in 2009, Jennifer’s Physique was slammed by male critics and audiences with a 46 % Rotten Tomatoes rating and a C- Cinemascore. However regardless of a deceptive advertising and marketing marketing campaign, this was by no means a movie for males, and it particularly wasn’t the standard kind of horror movie cisgender heterosexual males males have been used to watching, the place feminine characters are victimized for his or her viewing pleasure. It is a movie in regards to the absolute hell that’s rising up as a teenage lady, about male violence in the direction of and the sexualization of femininity, about trauma, and in regards to the monstrous ache of queer repression. Jennifer’s Physique cleverly makes use of the instruments of its style — over-the-top gore, suspense, and camp — to subvert expectations and inform a narrative that, at its tit-covered coronary heart, is humorous as hell, and fairly rattling homosexual.
The way to watch: Jennifer’s Physique is streaming on Hulu and accessible for hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
Cat Folks (1942)
Lesbians, cats, and witchcraft collide oh-so-perfectly within the implausible B-horror film Cat Folks (to not be confused with Paul Schrader’s synth-heavy 1982 remake, which shifted its focus to much more risqué taboos, akin to, uh, incest). This eerie, atmospheric movie from Jacques Tourneur follows a Serbian lady named Irena (Simone Simon) who turns into fixated on the concept she could also be a descendant of an historical society of people that morphed into cats. “Loopy!” thinks her new husband, who’s additionally conscious of the truth that Irena has but to kiss him, and who’s additionally spending an increasing number of time together with his fairly feminine coworker. Irena grows jealous of this different lady and begins to stalk her. The remaining is finest left found on this deliciously sinister masterpiece that makes use of expressionistic noir images to construct suspense and hyperlink the ostracization of lesbian want with monstrosity.
The way to watch: Cat Folks is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
Stranger by the Lake
Credit score: Les Movie Du Worso / Arte France Cinema / Prods / Kobal / Shutterstock
Set at a homosexual cruising seaside within the glistening summertime of rural France, 2013’s Stranger by the Lake stays probably the most fascinating, haunting, and sexiest erotic thrillers of years. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) arrives on the in style cruising spot and shortly units his eye on a mysterious stud named Michel (Christophe Paou). The attraction is mutual, as some extremely sizzling beachside intercourse scenes present, however Stranger by the Lake makes a extreme pivot when one character witnesses a horrific act. In Alain Guiraudie’s movie, the horror comes much less from what’s seen on display screen and extra from the movie’s psychological examination of lust and voyeurism — significantly when intimacy and want grow to be tousled with acts of violence and aggression.
The way to watch: Stranger by the Lake is streaming without spending a dime on Kanopy and accessible for hire or buy on Prime Video and VUDU.
Below the Pores and skin
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Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi masterpiece Below the Pores and skin is the kind of film that leaves you uncomfortable, transfixed, and presumably unable to maneuver out of your seat as soon as the credit roll. Scarlett Johansson, giving what is definitely her finest and most refined efficiency, performs a anonymous lady who drives round Scotland at evening trying to find random males to select up in her van. The remaining is finest left unspoiled, however what earns it a spot on this listing is how Below the Pores and skin serves as an interesting exploration of what it feels wish to be a trans particular person in a society dominated by, and oriented round, cisnormative concepts of gender and our bodies. It is a haunting story about otherness, in regards to the paralyzing loneliness and horror of realizing that you simply — and your physique — are usually not like these round you, that it is alien, even unnatural to some. Below the Pores and skin, virtually certainly unintentionally on Glazer’s half, faucets into a particular trans perspective of the inside longing to attach with, to grasp, and to really feel aligned with the outside. It is lovely and tragic and horrifying, and a few of the most imaginative sci-fi horror filmmaking the style’s ever seen.
The way to watch: Below the Pores and skin is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
Bones and All
Credit score: Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Photos
In director Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, cannibalism serves as a potent metaphor for an unquenchable want and eager for that which is taboo and even evil by some requirements. It is clear to see the queer symbolism throughout the horror romance starring Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet, who play a pair of outcast lovers on the run, à la Terrence Malick’s Badlands — and there are some express queer moments all through. The 2 wanderers each undergo from an inescapable starvation to feed on individuals, a brand new twist on the age-old horror trope of vampirism as a metaphor for queer want. Take away the grotesque component of consuming individuals, and also you get a narrative about two teenagers burdened with disgrace and alienation merely for the way in which they yearn for love and connection. However Bones and All additionally understands how that non-heteronormative longing is seen as grotesque and monstrous by a lot of society. Followers of Guadagnino’s different work, like Name Me by Your Title, Suspiria, and I Am Love, will discover loads of thematic parallels right here, solely as a substitute of Chalamet sensually devouring a peach, it is a bloody corpse.
The way to watch: Bones and All is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
How Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Bones and All’ is completely different from the novel
Daughters of Darkness
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Vampire movies have lengthy been fixtures of sapphic storytelling, from 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter to the explosion of lesbian vamp movies within the ’70s, however Daughters of Darkness is definitely the GOAT. This 1971 Belgian movie takes the folklore of Elizabeth Báthory — a Sixteenth-century Hungarian countess rumored to have drunk the blood of the ladies she lusted after — and turns it into an erotic psychological horror story.
French actress Delphine Seyrig performs the Countess, a platinum blonde, red-lipsticked menace who saunters round a vacant seaside lodge in glowing robes alongside her quiet secretary/girlfriend. However when a younger lady arrives on honeymoon along with her husband, the Countess’s unquenchable want units in, and she or he’ll do something to have her. Daughters of Darkness is a surreal journey of a film that is like the trendy and subversive art-house cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder cross-pollinated with ’70s lesbian erotica.
The way to watch: Daughters of Darkness is streaming on Shudder, AMC+ or Shudder through Prime Video, and with advertisements on VUDU, and is offered for hire or buy on Apple TV.
Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies
Credit score: Erik Chakeen
Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies is probably the most Gen Z slasher comedy you can think about — it is Clue with wealthy, coked-out twentysomethings caught in a mansion throughout a hurricane with nothing however TikTok, liquor, and drama to maintain them occupied. When Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her shy new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), to her finest pal David’s (Pete Davidson) lavish home to shelter in/get together at throughout a storm, the vibes are instantly bitter. Sophie’s pals bristle at her sudden arrival, her awkward girlfriend, and the way she ghosted them after she went to rehab. Nevertheless it’s nothing some photographs and tablets cannot repair. When the group sits right down to play the titular homicide thriller recreation, that is when every part goes haywire and an precise useless physique winds up in the home. Director Halina Reijn’s movie is a deliciously enjoyable and gory mixture of comedy, suspense, and drama — a lot of that comedy so completely nailed by standout Rachel Sennott — proving that probably the most lethal weapons aren’t candlesticks or lead pipes, however backstabbing bitchy gossip.
The way to watch: Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies is streaming on Prime Video and accessible to hire or buy on Apple TV.
Let’s speak about that stunning ‘Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies’ ending, with director Halina Reijn
The Lure
The Lure has been described as a lesbian mermaid horror musical, however one way or the other even that does not come near capturing what this audacious Polish movie is. Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s debut characteristic is the darkest retelling of The Little Mermaid you can think about, incorporating grisly violence and the intercourse work business into that basic fairytale.
After two younger singing mermaids, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Gold (Michalina Olszańska), are invited onshore, the ladies grow to be the latest members of a cabaret-like band the place they strip and dance on stage. The ladies have legs when out of water however no genitals (a lot to the male characters’ frustration), which turns into a focus for Silver, who turns into more and more determined for an operation to vary that. The one catch is, shedding her fin additionally means shedding her voice.
That is the place The Lure turns into a trans tackle the basic mermaid story. It is a metaphor for medical transition, a grim love story with incisive commentary on transmisogyny, and thru the characters of Silver and Gold, the movie explores two completely different trans female views on transition, in addition to their very own queer sexuality. The Lure is a gory, thrilling, and daring spectacle that is in contrast to something you have ever seen.
The way to watch: The Lure is streaming on The Criterion Channel and Max, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
The Worry Avenue Trilogy
Credit score: Netflix
Leigh Janiak’s Worry Avenue trilogy is the queer horror thrill journey of each ’90s child’s desires. Spanning three time durations with two separate casts and a queer couple because the protagonists, the Worry Avenue motion pictures deliver R.L. Stine’s ebook collection to the display screen with loads of blood, spooky lore, teen romance drama, and a few killer ’90s needle drops on the soundtrack. The story facilities on a bunch of pals who attempt to undo a decades-old curse on their city that is led to it being dubbed the homicide capital of the nation. Most enjoyable and revolutionary is how every movie in Janiak’s trilogy pays homage to a distinct horror subgenre, from Worry Avenue Half 1: 1994 evoking the slasher vibes of Scream and I Know What You Did Final Summer time, the Friday the thirteenth terror of Worry Avenue Half 2: 1978, and the pagan people horror of the witchy finale, Worry Avenue Half 3: 1666.
However these motion pictures aren’t simply on this listing for merely having queer leads. Janiak’s trilogy is keenly conscious of the historical past of horror as an avenue to subtextually discover queer identification. As an alternative of enjoying into that legacy of coding, she makes use of the basic tropes of the style to present us a story that’s explicitly about queer repression, and in flip, unabashedly celebrates the facility of queer love.
The way to watch: The Worry Avenue trilogy is streaming on Netflix.
The Bride of Frankenstein
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Many pre-code basic horror movies are gurgling with queerness, and far of that’s due to the work of brazenly homosexual filmmaker James Whale. Every little thing from Frankenstein to The Outdated Darkish Home and The Invisible Man has been dissected by queer movie historians, nevertheless it’s Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein that is still the queerest of all of them. It is a film in regards to the methods homosexual male relationships are consistently thwarted by society and deemed, nicely, monstrous.
Positive, the sequel is in regards to the creation of a feminine mate for Boris Karloff’s Monster, however that preoccupation with heterosexuality is kinda the purpose — she’s the beard. After all, nobody on this film is overtly homosexual, however you’ll be able to learn the Monster discovering security with a blind man as him discovering a homosexual companion, and even the Bride’s creation scene as two males’s try to make use of their energy to create life regardless of their incapacity to procreate collectively. From the layers of queer coding and campy humor throughout Whale’s sequel, it is little doubt Elsa Lanchester’s Bride has grow to be cemented as a fixture of drag tradition.
The way to watch: The Bride of Frankenstein is streaming on Prime Video, and is offered to hire or buy on Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Blackening
Credit score: Glen Wilson
“Title a horror film the place the Black character survives” is the primary trivia query to kick off the twisted homicide recreation on the middle of The Blackening. Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharoah) are stumped, and understandably so, given the style’s exploitation and tokenizing of Black characters (though simply in case you additionally end up in an analogous recreation of life-or-death trivia, there are a handful of movies the place Black people do certainly stay).
A intelligent slasher comedy that makes use of the style to touch upon the historical past of Black stereotypes throughout horror and Hollywood general finds a bunch of pals reuniting at a distant cabin within the woods on Juneteenth. The group will get pressured into enjoying a racist board recreation whereas being hunted by a masked killer, all whereas relationship tensions and drama pull the buddies aside. Dewayne Perkins, who co-wrote the movie with Tracy Oliver, additionally stars because the group’s token homosexual man, which provides one other layer of playful and refreshing commentary on each the Bury Your Gays trope and on homosexual masculinity in Black tradition.
Mashable Prime Tales
The way to watch: The Blackening is streaming on Netflix, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Starvation
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Few issues are hotter than the picture of Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as cool-as-hell historical vampires sauntering round an underground nightclub as they cruise for his or her subsequent meal. However Tony Scott’s cult favourite The Starvation is memorable for greater than its handsome and trendy leads; it is also one of many sharpest examples of the vampire story as a metaphor for queerness.
On the earth of those vampires, love, want, and companionship goes past gender, and whereas Deneuve and Bowie’s Miriam and John Blaylock have been lovers for hundreds of years, Miriam begins to set her sights on a brand new companion as soon as John turns into unwell: Susan Sarandon’s physician Sarah. Past the lesbian love story, Scott’s 1983 movie may also be learn as a commentary on the AIDS disaster by way of John’s sudden onset of an incurable sickness that his docs mindlessly dismiss. There’s additionally a pervading sense of grief and loneliness throughout the movie that feels true to the experiences of many LGBTQ+ people who survived the AIDS epidemic — a haunting disappointment that Miriam, probably the most historical of vampires, is condemned to all through her immortality, as she’s pressured to eternally grieve the lovers she outlasts.
The way to watch: The Starvation is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Hitcher
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In The Hitcher, a younger man driving throughout the nation to his dream vacation spot of California stops in the midst of a wet evening in who-knows-where to select up a hitchhiker. Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) can hardly maintain his eyes open, so hopefully this stranger will assist him keep awake. The stranger who calls himself John Ryder, performed by a terrifying and close to impassive Rutger Hauer, is the precise kind of hitchhiker your mom warned you about selecting up — a maniacal killer.
On the floor, The Hitcher might be learn as a basic highway horror film a couple of deranged psychopath who taunts and terrorizes with no motive. However queer coding is throughout this ’80s movie — a lot in order that Hauer does not precisely make John’s advances on Jim refined — and the movie may simply be seen as a horror thriller a couple of homosexual man hell-bent on unleashing his rage on heteronormative society, and maybe searching for a companion to go on that killing spree with him. It is a hair-raising chiller with some stunning moments of violence and loads of suspense.
The way to watch: The Hitcher is streaming on DIRECTV and Cinemax through Prime Video or through Hulu.
Hereditary
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Guess you by no means thought of how Hereditary is a horror film about transmasculinity. On the floor, Ari Aster’s gory nightmare is a couple of household discovering a long-kept secret tied to the ladies of their ancestry. However when it’s learn by way of a trans lens, it is also a narrative in regards to the agonizing expertise of dysphoria as a transmasc particular person in a physique deemed feminine by society, and the next demonic try to vary that. With out spoiling an excessive amount of for these unacquainted, Hereditary is suffering from small exchanges of dialogue — Charlie saying of her late grandmother, “She needed me to be a boy” — and imagery that a number of trans people, myself included on first viewing, have noticed. In a implausible piece analyzing the transition allegory of Hereditary, author Sasha Geffen analyzes the way in which Aster’s movie “understands simply how deep gender goes” in society, and in a really heightened anti-trans political interval, crammed with ethical panic round transmasculine identification. Seen by way of that lens, Aster’s movie takes on a complete new which means.
The way to watch: Hereditary is streaming on Max and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
Thelma
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In Thelma, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier takes the queer subtext of Brian De Palma’s Carrie and brings it proper to the floor. On this 2017 psychological horror thriller, the titular Thelma (Eili Harboe) is a shy and repressed younger lady who leaves her sheltered, conservative Christian residence for the primary time to go off to varsity. There, she discovers queer want when she meets and turns into infatuated with Anja (Kaya Wilkins), together with a sudden onset of violent seizures that trigger a collection of unusual happenings. Thelma’s powers, like Carrie’s, emerge as an outward manifestation of a suppressed lady’s want for company and management. What makes Trier’s movie so visceral is how he makes use of the trimmings of horror and supernatural storytelling to inform a really queer coming-of-age story as Thelma grapples with expressing her rage and identification abruptly.
The way to watch: Thelma is streaming without spending a dime on Kanopy, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
Wendell & Wild
Credit score: Netflix
Wendell & Wild, the newest stop-motion horror fantasy from Henry Selick (The Nightmare Earlier than Christmas, Coraline), follows the titular pair of demonic brothers determined to flee the clutches of the underworld and their overlord father. The duo, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, give you a scheme to dupe a younger orphan into inviting them into the free world of the dwelling. Kat is a green-haired 13-year-old lady who blasts punk music by way of the halls of her new, all-girls Catholic faculty.
As a lot because the demon brothers and their satanic residence might look like the principle dangerous guys of this story, the actual villain of Wendell & Wild is fairly stunning: It is the jail industrial advanced. The true evil in Kat’s city is led by the Klaxons, a personal jail company that is been shopping for up all of the native companies. By means of a collection of spooky resurrections, Kat and her new pal Raúl, a younger trans boy voiced by trans actor Sam Zelaya, try and defeat the Klaxons and get her deceased mother and father again.
The way to watch: Wendell & Wild is streaming on Netflix.
The Craft
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Subtextual queerness in motion pictures does not solely imply unstated nods to sexuality, nevertheless it additionally displays the inherent otherness of rising up as a queer particular person — that is very true for the horror style. Within the case of The Craft, queerness comes by way of within the type of 4 teenage women whose goth aesthetic, rejection of the established order, and witchy doings could be seen as a stand-in for the abnormality and derogatory distinction that is lengthy been related to being queer. In The Craft, it is the weirdos, the freaks, the outcasts who flip to the supernatural to wield some sense of management over the strait-laced hetero world that rejects them so readily. What’s gayer than a bunch of women exploring their energy over their very own our bodies with just a little “Mild As a Feather, Stiff As a Board” sleepover seance anyway?
The way to watch: The Craft is streaming on Paramount+, Prime Video, and on Tubi with advertisements, and is offered for hire or buy on Apple TV and VUDU.
Seconds
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In John Frankenheimer’s masterful sci-fi movie Seconds, a middle-aged man who lives an unfulfilled life as a banker discovers an organization that provides individuals alternate identities through cosmetic surgery. Arthur Hamilton (performed by John Randolph) decides to endure the process that turns him into the person of everybody’s desires circa 1966: Rock Hudson. Arthur is now Tony Wilson (performed by Hudson), a sizzling younger artist with a beachside villa. However the transition into a brand new life, and protecting the key of his previous one, begins to torture Tony.
Seconds is an interesting psychological horror sci-fi hybrid that speaks to trans and queer identification on a number of ranges. A whole essay might be written in regards to the trans themes of its narrative, from the emotional and psychological technique of medical and social transition to the societal pressures to assimilate right into a cis and hetero-centric life. Individually, Seconds additionally performs like an express commentary on Hudson’s personal closeted life. Hudson’s efficiency as Tony, simply probably the most unnerving of his profession, seems like a wanting glass into what many assume was his personal expertise as a serious star pressured to maintain a secret and stay a double life in early Hollywood.
The way to watch: Seconds is streaming without spending a dime on Kanopy and on Pluto TV with advertisements, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
Scream
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All gays know Scream is queer. It is canon (no, actually). The long-lasting slasher franchise has queerness throughout it — and the writers lastly gave us an overt queer character within the newest installments, with Jasmin Savoy Brown‘s Mindy. Nevertheless it’s the reveal of the killers behind the Ghostface masks on the finish of the primary Scream that basically solidified issues. Skeet Ulrich’s Billy and Matthew Lillard’s Stu have been so clearly homosexual, a lot in order that even the primary Scary Film stated it proper out loud. Even Scream author Kevin Williamson has revealed lately that the 2 characters have been based mostly on famed homosexual killers Leopold and Loeb. None of that affirmation was obligatory although — the camp of Drew Barrymore making Jiffy Pop and fondling a knife in her cream knit sweater whereas gabbing on the telephone with a homicide? Homosexual as hell.
The way to watch: Scream is streaming on Paramount+ and AMC+ through Prime Video, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
Interview with the Vampire
Ah sure, the movie that gave us Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as a homosexual vampire couple. Whereas the curse of being a blood-sucking creature of the evening has lengthy been related to queer identification, it has extra typically favored lesbian storytelling; nonetheless, Interview with the Vampire lastly gave us two queer males bonded of their blood lust. After all, the 1994 Neil Jordan movie by no means made that homosexual relationship express, however there is no doubt that when Cruise’s historical vampire Lestat turns the younger Louis (Pitt) into one in every of his variety, the 2 start a life harking back to any closeted homosexual couple. They even flip and lift a younger lady (Kirsten Dunst) as a toddler of their very own. After venturing overseas, the little vampire household is threatened by the attract of one other highly regarded, very homosexual vampire in Antonio Banderas’s Armand. Whereas the latest AMC collection made Louis and Lestat’s romance extremely express (and extremely sexual), we’ll all the time have the hush-hush homosexual want of two of the ’90s largest main males sucking one another’s necks.
The way to watch: Interview with the Vampire is streaming on HBO Max and Tubi with advertisements, and is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
“Interview with the Vampire” is an excellent homosexual fever dream
We’re All Going to the World’s Honest
We’re All Going to the World’s Honest is a horror movie for and about anybody who grew up with the web. This micro-budget indie from filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is actually Creepypasta the Film. Casey (Anna Cobb) is a lonely teen who joins a web-based position enjoying recreation and begins to develop paranoid that one thing unusual is going on to her thoughts and physique. Schoenbrun’s movie is not scary within the conventional sense, apart from some freaky creepypasta-esque imagery, however extra so a movie that goals to indicate the psychology of maximum loneliness, despair, and alienation — all intense, scary issues that many queer people who grew up on-line skilled.
Whereas the movie is not explicitly queer, it has been hailed as a trans horror movie by a number of critics, and it isn’t onerous to see why. Schoenbrun, who’s nonbinary, has made a movie that evokes the fixed unease, terror, and anxiousness of gender dysphoria earlier than chances are you’ll even know what that’s, and the urge to flee into one other actuality (i.e., the web) to search out your self. In a single scene, Casey buoyantly dances in her room to a pop tune earlier than all of the sudden stopping, as if to understand she’s been possessed. She lets out a horrifying shriek, then goes proper again to giddily dancing. It is haunting in an indescribable manner, and speaks to a continuing masking and toggling between identities that is all too acquainted to the expertise of dysphoria.
The way to watch: We’re All Going to the World’s Honest is streaming on Shudder and Kanopy, and is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.
The Rocky Horror Image Present
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Rocky Horror won’t be a film that’ll offer you nightmares — except you are afraid of kinky, sexy queers going bananas at a deranged home get together, and if that’s the case, get outta right here! Nonetheless, the wacky cult basic is a spooky season staple. A riff on B-movie sci-fi and monster motion pictures of the previous, the musical horror comedy takes us, together with Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick’s square-as-can-be couple, on a wild journey to Transsexual Transylvania. There’s Time-Warping and Tim Curry’s Frankenstein-esque monster-making, there’s ax-hunting and laser weapons and seduction and dancing — a lot dancing! Rocky Horror is a joyously bizarro basic that belongs to the weirdo queers and us alone.
The way to watch: The Rocky Horror Image Present is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Haunting
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The Haunting is a basic horror movie a couple of basic kind of horror story: a haunted home. You will not discover any low-cost leap scares or acts of violence on this 1963 movie, although. As an alternative, director Robert Sensible and cinematographer Davis Boulton use a mixture of revolutionary visible strategies and digicam tips, from gliding monitoring photographs and anamorphic lenses, to create an environment of complete paranoia and unease that is genuinely unnerving to observe.
The movie, based mostly on the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill Home, follows a bunch of strangers who arrived at a haunted mansion to show the existence of ghosts, together with the timid Eleanor (Julie Harris) and the daring Theo (Claire Bloom) — sure, the identical queer Theo from Netflix’s Hill Home collection. Theo is the uncommon instance of an explicitly lesbian character in basic horror, a lot much less basic cinema general, and most notably, her queerness isn’t handled with disdain or mockery. Whereas her sexuality is not overtly said, it is an interesting component of a narrative about ladies selecting to expertise the evils of a haunted home to flee the real-world anxieties and trauma of their every day lives.
The way to watch: The Haunting is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
Border
An underseen gem, 2018’s Border is a Swedish body-horror romance about otherness that can converse to anybody who is aware of what it feels wish to lastly discover somebody such as you. Tina (Eva Melander) is a customs officer with a capability to scent guilt, making her particularly good at catching contraband at her job. Tina additionally believes she has some kind of developmental dysfunction, describing herself as an “ugly, unusual human with a chromosome flaw,” which ends up in an remoted and lonely life. However someday a person with comparable bodily options to Tina’s seems at her work, and it is a highly effective second of recognizing that perhaps she is not alone, and perhaps she’s lastly discovered her particular person.
Border is a wild, extremely authentic story stuffed with unsettling twists that is additionally tremendous trans. Amid its darkish fantasy and suspense, this Cannes Movie Competition winner is a transfixing and emotional story about spending a lifetime considering one thing is improper with you, the fashion and ache that may fester from it, and to lastly really feel seen as you’re for the primary time.
The way to watch: Border is streaming on DIRECTV and Tubi with advertisements, and is offered to hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV and VUDU.
The Misplaced Boys
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In The Misplaced Boys, we get vampires within the type of a biker gang, and actually, there’s nothing gayer than that. When brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) transfer to a beachside city in Northern California with their mom (Dianne Wiest, who, by legislation, makes each movie campier, gayer, and higher), eldest brother Michael quickly falls in with an area bike crew who additionally occur to be blood-suckers. Whereas it is a lady who first catches Michael’s eye, there is no denying the large queer power that quickly evolves when he is initiated into the vampire group. Kiefer Sutherland as David Powers, the platinum blonde leather-clad chief of the gang, oozes homoerotic want in the direction of Michael, whose vampiric transformation could be learn as a coming-out of types. Even Haim’s Sam could be learn as queer by way of small however unmissable character particulars, like a really suggestive Rob Lowe poster hanging on his bed room wall. The Joel Schumacher movie brings campy, queer goodness to a style storytelling staple that was foundational for a lot of younger queers.
The way to watch: The Misplaced Boys is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Image of Dorian Grey
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The Image of Dorian Grey is a giant, homosexual, gothic horror story about two wealthy older queens obsessive about the radiant fantastic thing about a younger closeted dandy, and the way that younger dandy sells his soul to remain eternally beautiful and younger. Positive, the Oscar Wilde novel that Albert Lewin’s 1945 movie relies on is about vainness and the superficial wishes of a bunch of aristocratic white males, nevertheless it’s additionally about dwelling with the insufferable torture of queer repression and internalized homophobia.
When the 22-year-old Dorian Grey (Hurd Hatfield) gazes upon his luminous portrait and desires to by no means age a day, one thing magical occurs — Dorian’s dashing appears stay mounted, and the portrait ages as a substitute. It additionally begins to replicate the sins of Dorian’s habits. It is unattainable to not learn Dorian Grey by way of a queer lens, given Wilde’s private life, in addition to the flamboyant performances and attitudes expressed by the movie’s three male characters. It is a story about doing completely every part in your energy to suppress your true self to the surface world, and that regardless of how onerous you attempt, you will be pressured to have a look at the wretched toll it takes in your soul.
The way to watch: The Image of Dorian Grey is streaming on HBO Max, and is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
The Form of Water
Credit score: Okay Hayes / twentieth Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock
Nobody blends fantasy and romance with horror and suspense fairly like Guillermo del Toro. The 2018 Greatest Image winner is a film the place probably the most otherized characters — a girl who makes use of ASL to speak (Sally Hawkins’s Elisa), a closeted homosexual man (Richard Jenkins’s Giles), a Black lady (Octavia Spencer’s Zelda), and an enormous fish-man (Doug Jones) — are focused and labeled because the monsters threatening society. Del Toro takes the basic monster film horror theatrics of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and reshapes it right into a shifting, heroic story about these on the fringes of society combating again and liberating themselves from the actual monsters — on this case, Michael Shannon’s terrifying colonel set on looking down Jones’s creature to take advantage of for the Sixties area race.
However The Form of Water can be a love story that queers conventional hetero narratives by way of a swooning romance between Elisa and the fish-man. In del Toro’s fantastical world, two lonely and ostracized characters lastly get to expertise love, acceptance, and pleasure collectively — and that pleasure is extremely sexual, because the filmmaker supposed. With gorgeous visuals, an unbelievable mix of sensible and CGI results, some grisly gore, and plush romance, The Form of Water just about has all of it.
The way to watch: The Form of Water is streaming on DIRECTV, and is offered for hire or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, and VUDU.
Rebecca
Credit score: Selznick / United Artists / Kobal / Shutterstock
Many basic Hitchcock movies are brimming with queer undercurrents, from the transfeminine villany of Psycho to the homosexual murderous couple of Rope, however Rebecca gives a distinct type of queer story. Within the 1940 psychological thriller, Joan Fontaine’s second Mrs. de Winter and her new husband, Maxim (Laurence Olivier), arrive on the gothic mansion that’s to be her new residence, solely to find that that house is deeply haunted by echoes of the primary Mrs. de Winter. It is Maxim’s late spouse, the never-seen Rebecca, who consumes our otherwise-unnamed protagonist with jealousy and self-doubt.
The place the queerness arrives most notably is within the type of the icy housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who reveals her not-so-subtle obsession with the late Rebecca. In a single famously analyzed scene, Mrs. Danvers provides a tour of Rebecca’s previous bed room, caressing her dressing robe, displaying her underwear drawer as if it have been treasure, and talking of Rebecca as if she have been a longtime secret lover. This suggestion of a lesbian affair between the ladies is not merely hypothesis, both. Rebecca writer Daphne du Maurier was stated to have been bi, and even throughout the 1940 movie’s manufacturing, the Hays Code despatched threatening letters to producer David O. Selznick to take away the queer subtext. But, homosexual Rebecca continued.
The way to watch: Rebecca is streaming on Roku.
UPDATE: Oct. 22, 2025, 5:23 p.m. This listing was first printed on Oct. 1, 2023. It has been up to date to replicate streaming choices.
