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Lost Boys - my aunt let me watch it with her when I was probably WAY too young to see it, and I'm pretty sure we ate oreos and drank rootbeer during the movie
Society views queer people as on the periphery. As Nancy Downs says in The Craft, we ARE the weirdos. While not always the case, many of us are bullied or othered when we're young. When I watch horror, I often see myself in both the ignored protagonist AND the justified villain out for revenge.
For those of us who came out in the 90s and 00s, the world sent two messages at once: “be yourself” but don’t forget that “gay” is an insult. Living inside that contradiction warps your relationship with comfort. You stop trusting it. So it makes sense that we'd gravitate toward media that doesn't offer it. Rejecting feel-good cinema to embrace discomfort reflects the imperfect, somewhat ugly, sometimes frightening world we actually inhabit. And when the villain finally snaps? That's not just catharsis. It's recognition. It’s retribution. It’s representation.
No one validates your lived experience? We see you, Jesse Walsh. We see you, Needy Lesnick. We see you, Owen and Maddy (I Saw the TV Glow). There's something uniquely stressful about feeling like you're screaming your truth at the top of your lungs and no one can hear you - or worse, they just don't believe you. So it feels good to choose to look directly into your fear when the world so often forces you to live in it.
I could talk about this forever, but the tagline is ultimately this:
When there's no illusion of control over our lives and no avoiding the distorted way some see us, choosing to scare ourselves feels better than being scared - because agency fucking matters.
Clive Barker, no contest! I've been obsessed since I read The Hellbound Heart in high school and honestly, it kind of broke my brain in the best way. He gets that desire and fear aren't opposites - they're the same thing wearing different clothes. His monsters don't want to destroy you, they want to TRANSFORM you, and there's something REALLY queer about that. The Cenobites aren't villains, they're just done pretending the polite world has anything to offer. That hit different when I was a teenager just trying to figure out who I was. Slightly smutty body horror is absolutely my favorite subgenre and Barker is basically its patron saint!
Honestly, "good forher" horror is my whole thing. Carrie, Midsommar, Jennifer's Body, Pearl, Jakob's Wife, Sleepaway Camp - there's something deeply satisfying about watching a woman (or girl) who hasbeen ignored, diminished, or outright abused just... burn it all to the ground! Society spends a lot of energy telling certain people to be palatable and small, and horror is one of the few genres that looks that deal square in the face and says “take your fucking hands off me.” I will never get tired of it!
Any of the Terrifier movies - I could watch David Howard Thorton cut a woman in half or Sam Scafidi drink cannibal smoothies from an esophagus on repeat forever.
Frankenhooker (1990)!!! Honorable mention to Vampire’s Kiss (1989) and Glorious (2022)
Absolutely! Cons have been huge for me, and I've met some of my closest friends there. Horror fans tend to be pretty accepting. No one really cares where you come from, only that you aren't going to yuck their yum. When everyone's a weirdo, no one really is, and there's something genuinely comforting about being around people who share the exact interests that make you weird out in the everyday world.
