‘Queer Horror’ night of short films, live drag and burlesque, at Wesleyan
Wesleyan University in Middletown will present “Queer Horror: Gravest Hits,” an evening of short horror films by queer filmmakers, as well as live entertainment, on Oct. 15 at 7 p.m.
The show, which has been an entertainment staple in Portland, Oregon, since 2015, is having its East Coast premiere at Wesleyan.
Anthony Hudson, a Portland drag performer known as Carla Rossi, founded and stars in “Queer Horror.”
“We overlap horror and queerness with drag performers and burlesque performers and spooky, scary lip syncs and performances between the short films,” Hudson said.
Hudson said that horror is an intrinsically queer genre for several reasons.
“The evolution of horror, going back to the Gothicists — ‘Carmilla,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ — focused on forbidden longing for the other. In the matter of homosexuality, that comes up with ‘Carmilla’,” Hudson said. “And when monsters were depicted on film for first time, ‘Nosferatu’ by F.W. Murnau and ‘Frankenstein’ by James Whale, both of those filmmakers were talking about being queer in code through their monsters.”
He added that queer audiences can’t help but identify with the monsters.
“The monsters deal with that same otherness that you grew up with it. You feel, like they do, ‘something is wrong with me, I can’t tell people, how do I live with this?’” he said. “What does it mean to live with this burden, with this secret, with this longing. Today, that theme has probably shifted as gayness is more accepted but it still relates to transness and so many identities that are treated as abject.”
The evening at Wesleyan will open with a live one-act drag play performed by Carla Rossi and Pepper Pepper. “It’s a twist on ‘The Silence of the Lambs’,” Hudson said. Additional live drag and burlesque sketches will be presented between the films.
The films to be shown are “Goat Witch” by James Sizemore, “Don’t Wake the Baby” by Gula Delgatto, “Pizza Sluts” by Sign of the Beast Burlesque, “The Susan and Denise Halloween Special” by Susan and Denise and “In Satan’s Closet” by Stacie Ponder.
Ponder and Hudson are co-hosts of a queer feminist horror podcast, Gaylords of Darkness.
The show is in the Goldsmith Family Cinema in the The Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies at 301 Washington Terrace on the university campus in Middletown. Admission is $25, $20 for senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni and non-Wesleyan students; $8 for Wesleyan students and youth younger than 18. Tickets can be bought at wesleyan.edu/cfa.
Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com.
