It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

Product Information

I decided to watch all of the movies that I hadn’t already seen before reading the essays they were based around. She is also the author of two novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a short memoir, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. If you have a hard time understanding what people mean when they say, "horror is queer," then read this book, and you'll have your answer.

A really terrific collection of essays by a great selection and variety of different authors—both fiction authors, poets, and essayists—about the intersection between queer studies and queer identity and horror movies. Bardzo byłam podekscytowana czytaniem jak zaczynałam, a ostatecznie mnie strasznie momentami męczyła. Other standouts included: Carmen Maria Machado’s convincing reclamation of Jennifer’s Body for queer audiences; an essay on The Blob that morphed into a striking meditation on gendered bodies; an exploration of the remake of Candyman that probed connections between being gay, Blackness and San Francisco’s racist housing policies; a look at the unexpectedly queer erotics underpinning Spielberg’s Jaws; a lovingly nostalgic examination of the lesbian subtext of Hitchcock’s The Birds; slasher movies, the Aids crisis and the demonization of gay men; and an unusual take on Eyes without a Face and being trans. Joe Vallese is Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised.Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. A diverse collection of thoughtful and incisive essays that show that queerness and horror are natural (or occasionally, supernatural) bedfellows. The insight from these memoirs is wide; in addition to tackling on queer subjects as: being gay or lesbian in a religious household, growing up trans and dealing with gender issues, how bisexual visibility and queerbaiting seem to go hand in hand; there is also discussions about class, race, disability, abuse, fertility treatments, proving once more that we can’t analyze these matters in an isolated environment, everything is connected, and the only way to deal with it is voicing our experiences.

This was simply fantastic, a collection of intimate essays contemplating classic horror films through various lenses of queerness. The Halloween, Child's Play, and Elm Street essays will stick with me, and I really liked the Get Out, Us, and Candyman essays as well. I will say, I skipped the essays for the movies I hadn't seen yet, but I really loved many of the essays I did read (around half). Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection.

This book is a must-read, and I hope that there will be another collection following this theme very soon because I'm already craving so much more. Zapadł mi w głowę prześwietny esej osoby agenderowej na temat postrzegania ciała i seksualności, bardzo egzystencjalny w wydźwięku; co ciekawy, był to jedyny esej, w którym pojawiło się słowo „aseksualny”, a to i tak tylko przy wyliczaniu postaw wobec seksu. There are a couple essays in it that push past the line of pretentious academia enough to be mildly annoying. These clear, insightful, and deeply personal essays reveal the real reasons why we've all been so scared. Jones also praised the essays for not being overly analytical, saying "[t]hese are personal essays, not queer theory papers.