Queer Horror Cinema

Abstract

More than any other genre, the horror film has provided an outlet for queer images and characters. While not widely recognized as a genre until the early 1930s, even the earliest films in that decade's horror cycle featured queer imagery. For example, Gregory W. Mank talks of Boris Karloff's appearance as the title character in The Mask of Fu Manchu (dir. Charles Brabin, 1932) having an “Ann‐Margret smile, false eye‐lashes, Adrian‐designed gowns, dragon‐lady fingernails, and [a] lisping, come‐hither delivery.” Such imagery would continue in the horror film through the coming decades, from the lesbian connotations in Dracula's Daughter (dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936) and The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963) through to more explicit depictions of male homosexuality in more recent films such as Bride of Chucky (dir. Ronny Yu, 1998), Cursed (dir. Wes Craven, 2005) and the films of cult low‐budget filmmaker David deCoteau—and everything in‐between. This entry gives an overview of the various types of queerness depicted in the horror film through the decades and discusses why the horror film in particular has been an outlet for these images. This entry draws on the work of Mank (1994), Dyer (1988), Benshoff (1997), Lang (2002), and Brown (2016).