As Oct. draws to a close and Halloween creeps ever closer, the season is ripe with horror tales to be told. Looking to find some horror media that features queer characters and narratives? Look no further. The old days of straight characters populating all of horror are gone. Queer horror, which focuses on lead queer characters and is often created by queer writers, puts LGBTQ characters at the forefront of their terror. It is not too late to get your queer horror filling before the season is over: dive into these horror books, TV shows and movies that centralize queerness.
Books:
Her Body and Other Parties
“Her Body and Other Parties” is a horror short story collection written by author Carmen Maria Machado and published by Minneapolis’ own Graywolf Press. The collection won numerous awards, including the Shirley Jackson Award, and was nominated for many others, including the National Book Award and the Nebula Award. The collection includes stories such as “The Husband Stitch,” in which a woman refuses to show her husband what secrets lie beneath the green ribbon around her throat, “Inventory,” where a woman describes her sexual experiences chronologically r as society crumbles due to a fatal plague and “Especially Heinous,” in which Machado reinvents the entirety of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” into an entirely new tale of doppelgangers, ghosts and girls with bells for eyes. “Her Body and Other Parties” spins horrific tales featuring a large cast of queer female characters written by one of the leading queer short story writers of our time.
Our Wives Under the Sea
When Miri’s wife, Leah, returns from a deep-sea mission in Julia Armfield’s “Our Wives Under the Sea,” she thinks their lives could go back to normal. However, something deeply wrong happened in that submarine, and Miri fears that Leah has brought part of whatever happened on the ocean floor back home with her. In a tale of love, grief and the horrors that lurk far beneath the water, Armfield blends terrifying horror with a story of true love and devotion.
TV Shows:
Interview with the Vampire
“Interview with the Vampire” is a 2022 television series based on the original 1976 novel by Anne Rice. It centers around Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), a nearly 150 year old vampire who tells his life story to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). The story flips to 1910s New Orleans, in which Louis falls in love with the charismatic vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid). The happy couple is soon thrown into turmoil as they adopt teenage vampire Claudia (Bailey Bass) and Louis grapples with his new identity as a bloodthirsty killer. Daniel realizes Louis’s account of events is not all as it seems, as he starts to notice faults within his story. Dark, bloody, hilarious and featuring an entire main cast of queer characters, “Interview with the Vampire” is a show you do not want to miss.
The Haunting of Bly Manor
Mike Flanagan returns to ghostly horror after the success of “The Haunting of Hill House” with “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” a gothic queer romance set in the English countryside. The story begins in 1987 when governess Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) moves to England to escape her past back in America. She takes charge of two children at the sprawling estate of Bly Manor and soon starts to fall for Jamie Taylor (Amelia Eve), the gardener of the estate. The house has more history than Dani ever imagined, and she soon starts to see ghostly apparitions that want her and the children dead. A story of ghosts, love and grief, “The Haunting of Bly Manor” is a horror story that will make you reflect on how much loss it takes to create a ghost.
Movies:
Bodies Bodies Bodies
“Bodies Bodies Bodies” begins when Bee (Maria Bakalova) joins her girlfriend Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) to attend an overnight party hosted by Sophie’s rich friend David (Pete Davidson) at his family mansion. That night, the party guests decide to play “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a murder themed game in the dark. The group dissolves into chaos as a storm wracks the mansion resulting in a power outage, and David is found outside dead with his throat slashed. With no way to leave the mansion and no way to call for help, everyone in the house becomes a suspect in the murder, one set on killing them all. A hilarious satire on class and privilege, a nail-biting murder mystery and an analysis of Gen-Z culture wrapped into one, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is a horror movie that will make you laugh and scream in turn.
I Saw the TV Glow
The 2024 A24 horror film “I Saw the TV Glow” sets its tale in 1996, in which teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddie (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) bond over the young adult TV series “The Pink Opaque.” After Maddie goes missing and inexplicably turns back up a decade later, Owen realizes “The Pink Opaque” is more than it seems, and his hold on reality as he knows it begins to crack. A devastating transgender allegory about what can happen when a person restrains their true self, “I Saw the TV Glow” is one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching horror movies you will ever see.
It is never too late to get your horror fixing for the fall season. Crack open a novel, turn on your TV, or open up your laptop and begin one of these truly horrifying queer tales.
