Horror genre is ‘a space created for us, by us.' NJ LGBTQ community members explain why

Kelly McGovern understands the comfort that can be found in horror.

“Growing up, you kind of feel a bit like an outcast,” said McGovern, a graphic designer who lives in Toms River and is very vocal on social media about her love of horror movies. McGovern, who is asexual, is also well-aware of the overlap between horror fandom and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.

“At the time, in adolescence (and) kind of not understanding even how I would have fit into the queer community … being able to watch people go through horrific events or just feel like these outsiders — that’s either the monsters or the person going through the trauma — it just kind of was empowering, in a way,” McGovern said. “Because it’s like you can make it through unfathomable odds and incredible hardship, and still have yourself and your identity intact.”

The longtime connection between the LGBTQ+ community and the horror genre has become undeniable this Halloween season.

Streaming service Shudder is home to the four-part documentary series “Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror.” A new essay collection “It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror,”now available from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. National cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse has partnered with drag legend Peaches Christ for a Queer Horror retrospective screening series, featuring selections such as "The Hunger" (1983), "Let the Right One In" (2008) and "Bride of Chucky" (1998).

“We always had an inference that horror was for queer people,” McGovern said. “But now, I think we’re getting historical facts basically saying that horror is for queer people, by queer people. It is a space created for us, by us. That’s a really incredible thing to hold, knowing that this is our world.”

‘If you’re going to call me a monster then I’m going to be a monster’

The intersection of the LGBTQ community and horror fandom "is one of those things that has existed for so very long, and now people are starting to finally catch on,” said New Brunswick-based burlesque performer Nastya Nice.

Jamie Clayton, a transgender actress, took over the iconic role of Pinhead in director David Bruckner’s new “Hellraiser” film now streaming on Hulu. That streaming service is also home to the “Huluween Dragstravaganza” hosted by drag stars Ginger Minj and Monet X Change. Minj and fellow queens Kahmora Hall and Kornbread “The Snack” Jete all appear in the Disney+ original film “Hocus Pocus 2.”

AMC's new series based on Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire," fan-favorite Netflix original series "First Kill" and Emmy-winning FX horror comedy "What We Do in the Shadows" each take unabashedly LGBTQ-inclusive stabs at horror's vampiric subgenre.

“It happens a lot in the queer community, we’re always kind of drawn to horror and villainy,” said New Jersey drag star Pissi Myles, who co-hosted the podcast "My Spooky Gay Family" for more than 160 episodes from 2019 to 2021.

Myles of Somerville has been known to incorporate a bit of supernatural villainy into her act. Her 2017 single “Babashook” was a celebration of the titular, top-hatted tulpa from the 2014 film “The Babadook.” The entity was embraced as an unlikely LGBTQ icon after the film was mistakenly classified as LGBTQ content on Netflix.

When Disney cover band The Little Mermen perform locally, Myles often shares the stage with them to perform signature villain numbers such as Bette Midler’s rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” from “Hocus Pocus” (1993) and Pat Carroll’s Divine-inspired Ursula show-stopper “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from “The Little Mermaid” (1989).

“Every villain has a backstory that turned them into a villain, where it was like everyone treated them like a villain and so they became one,” Myles said. “And I think queer people go through that so often where it’s like you’re villainized and you’re talked about like (you’re) this horrible, horrible entity.”

It’s an experience common enough to be reflected in stories from Disney fairy tales to horror movies, Myles said.

“They are using their ostracization to gain power,” she said. “And it’s like, ‘Well, if you’re going to call me a monster then I’m going to be a monster,’ and that gives them power. And I think that as queer people, the idea of getting power — ultimately what that translates to is equality.”

Relating to 'final girls'

Myles’ husband, visual artist David Ayllon, found solace in horror’s iconic “final girls” (such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in 1979's “Alien” or Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode in 1978's “Halloween”), who endured their encounters with monsters and lived to fight another day.

“For a long time, (they were) some of the only representations of a really feminine person kicking ass,” Ayllon said. “So growing up, denying my sexuality for such a long time and really beating myself up for not being more masculine and not being more manly like I was quote-unquote supposed to, to see someone who is feminine but is still powerful really resonated with me in ways that I didn’t fully understand when I was younger.”

Ayllon said he relates to the final girls because, on a fundamental level, they are survivors.

“I’ve been in situations as a queer person where I was very unsafe, threatened with physical violence from people in the streets,” Ayllon said. “I was holding hands in a city or a town where I maybe shouldn’t have been. So that feeling of the final girl walking through a parking lot with something hunting her, those feelings always resonate. And I think I go back to horror because it’s a way to feel that kind of fear, but from a comfortable setting where I’m not actually in danger but knowing full well what that feels like in real life.”

For Nice, the New Brunswick-based burlesque performer, a pair of films — Joel Schumacher’s 1987 vampire flick “The Lost Boys” and the witchy 1996 shocker “The Craft” — acted as entry points to the genre. Both combine cautionary tale and power fantasy for their stories of young adults coming into their own with the help of chosen families.

“It’s this sense of camaraderie in being a misfit. … It’s just kind of that feeling safe in being different and being othered,” said Nice, who is nonbinary.

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Nice’s love of horror is readily apparent in their on-stage persona. That includes an act inspired by iconic horror host and “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (1959) star Vampira, which they will bring to “Fangs, Blood and Lore!: A Tribute to the Myth of the Vampire” presented by Magical Girl Burlesque at the Kraine Theater in Manhattan on Friday, Oct. 28, as part of Frigid NYC’s Days of the Dead festival.

“This is the premiere season for me to be booked, so I am incredibly busy, so that’s kind of the curse of being a spooky performer,” they said. “But it’s great because I get to share my very specific brand of spooky and horror-inspired burlesque to an audience during this time because they’re more open to seeing that (in October).”

We’re existing in a post-COVID-lockdown cultural moment, Nice explained, where audiences are longing for more forms of escape at the same time that acceptance of and visibility for the LGBTQ community is on the rise.

“People are maybe more willing to engage in different forms of escapism, and a lot of people escape through horror,” Nice said. “And so many of us relate to that feeling of otherness, so I think that’s why queer people specifically are escaping to that horror realm.”

Book covers decades of personal history

Joe Vallese, a writer and editor based in Palisades Park, gives readers an in-depth look at the connections between the LGBTQ community and scary stories with “It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.”

“It is the book I always wanted to read and could never find,” said Vallese. “There is plenty of academic writing about queerness in horror and queer coding in horror and camp in horror movies, and all of that is wonderful, but it’s not really something that I enjoy digesting.”

“It Came From the Closet” offers more than two dozen highly personal narrative essays curated by Vallese, with the writers offering both empathetic readings of the likes of “Hereditary” (2018) and “The Exorcist” (1973) or dissecting the painful side of horror, such as the rampant transphobia and homophobia in “Sleepaway Camp” (1983) or the ableism of “The Ring” (2002).

“I kept wondering, ‘Where’s the personal essay that uses horror film as a lens to think about queerness and vice-versa?’ ” Vallese said. “And I kept waiting around for a book like it to appear and it never did. And then I said, ‘It’s time to be a good gay Virgo and get to work and do it myself.’ ”

Between his introduction to the book and “Imprint,” his essay incorporating elements from the 2009 film “Grace,” Vallese covers decades of personal history, from using horror as a means of connecting with straight family members — “I always saw horror as the most machismo thing that existed about me,” he said — to employing “Grace” as a counterpoint to his and his husband’s tumultuous path to parenthood via surrogacy.

Vallese said he hopes “It Came From the Closet” inspires voices from other marginalized communities to explore their own connections to horror, akin to Robert R. Means Coleman’s 2011 book “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1980s to Present” and its accompanying 2019 Shudder documentary.

“When you look at it horror is so wonderful in so many ways — however, it’s been so exclusive and it can stereotype and it can do harm and it can do all these things that make somebody feel outside of [it], and yet it can also be incredibly subversive, and any good horror movie has a strong social message at the heart of it,” Vallese said.

From scared school boy to 'Jannifer's Body'

Director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody’s 2009 horror comedy “Jennifer’s Body” is among the films to have benefited from an LGBTQ-centered reassessment in recent years, with Carmen Maria Machado extolling its virtues as a work of bisexual cinema in “It Came From the Closet.”

The film has also received the drag celebration treatment courtesy of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” franchise scene-stealer Jan, who grew up in Old Bridge, and New York-based performance collective the Neon Coven in “Jannifer’s Body,” a stage show celebrating the film and its pop-punk soundtrack.

"Jennifer's Body" starred Amanda Seyfried as a high school girl at odds with her former best friend, played by Megan Fox, who is possessed by a demon and devouring their school's student body one boy at a time. The movie failed to capture the attention of critics and the box office upon release, but has since attained cult classic status.

“I just don’t think that at the time this movie was released people were ready to see Megan Fox in that kind of a role and in this kind of movie,” said Jan. “I think that this movie is so camp and has so many nods to camp and queerness, and I think that as time goes by people are starting to open their eyes up to it.”

“Jannifer’s Body,” which debuted in 2021, returns for performances Wednesday, Oct. 12, and Thursday, Oct. 13, at Brooklyn’s 3 Dollar Bill, presented as a special late night double feature with a secret second show.

Jan, who attended St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic elementary school in Old Bridge and Christian Brothers Academy in the Lincroft section of Middletown, was a self-described “very scared Catholic schoolboy.”

“I remember seeing ‘It’ in the eighth grade, and that was a big shock to the system — they showed it to us in our Catholic school and I was like, ‘OK, wow, I’m going to go the bathroom and just miss this scene,’ ” Jan recalled. “That was very much my vibe as a younger person dealing with seeing horror for probably one of the first times.”

Jan credited Neon Coven co-founder Andrew Barret Cox with her growing love of horror, and said the genre’s current resurgence in popularity is a consistent with how the LGBTQ community can often be found on the cultural vanguard before artistic movements break into the mainstream.

“The intersection of both (the LGBTQ community and horror) is just a testament to how powerful the queer community can be with change,” she said. “I mean, there’s so much happening for queer people in horror right now, it’s amazing.”

Alex Biese has been writing about art, entertainment, culture and news on a local and national level for more than 15 years. Alex can be reached at abiese@gannett.com and on Twitter at @ABieseAPP.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: NJ LGBTQ community members explain connection to horror genre