Education and pop culture can intersect, and I found that to be the case for my Critical Studies classes. Our final project involved giving presentations on “texts” (which could include books, movies, shows, or even real-life places with symbols or messages we could interpret) and discussing how the messages connect to real-world struggles. The one that stood out to me the most was the commenatry on queer horror.
I hadn’t heard of most of the texts my classmates picked, but two ended up presenting on one of my favorite shows, “Hannibal.” The show follows a cannibal named Hannibal (I know, very clever) and an FBI investigator named Will Graham, who has an unusual ability to understand the minds of psychopaths, based on novels with the same characters by Thomas Harris. The presenters pointed out how the show doesn’t display Hannibal and Will’s attraction to each other in concrete ways. They also discussed how the show demonizes Hannibal’s queerness. It also often portrays Hannibal as more masculine than Will, not to mention someone who has a disconcerting amount of power over him.
I wanted to refute these arguments, for the sake of this show. But they made accurate arguments, even if I didn’t like them.
For decades, popular culture has intertwined queerness and horror. Due to anti-queer sentiment, most of the creators queer-coded this content rather than explicitly showing it, but you notice it. The Victorian Era offers numerous examples, like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde (which the court used as evidence during the author’s trial for sodomy). In the story, a painter, enchanted by the beauty of the titular character, creates a painting of him that never ages.
You also have stories like “Dracula,” where the titular vampire imprisons a lawyer in his castle; the novel depicts the lawyer as being very drawn to Dracula. And, of course, you have the connection between horror and crossdressing, from characters like Norman Bates in “Psycho” to Pennywise in “IT.”
In modern movies and books, you can also still see the pattern of a same-gender or gender non-conforming character seducing a hardworking, repressed person.
You also see this in “Jennifer’s Body” (a horror comedy where a female succubus seducing her best friend), “Interview With the Vampire” (which depicts a toxic queer relationship where a character is dependent on another as they learn how to be a vampire), and “The Book of Bill” (which involves an ostracized scientist, seduced by a demon, building a portal to connect their worlds that could wipe out all of existence).
However, modern depictions generally do not directly label queerness as evil, the way past stories have. For example, the drama film “I Saw The TV Glow” provides an allegory about the horror of being transgender in a non-accepting world. Books by authors like Andrew Joseph White (who writes, for example, about a community hunted by an extremist Christian cult in an apocalypse) or Clive Barker, can act as reclamations of queer horror. These stories also tend to show the horror of a world that forces people to conform to arbitrary standards, rather than the people themselves being the cause of the horror.
The stance queer people can take towards these stories reflects broader issues of representation.
Is it a problem that queer stories have more darkness, and sometimes outright demonization? What kind of message does it send if these stories disproportionately associate love with terror and corruption, as compared to “normal” love stories featuring heterosexual couples? Is the insistence that queer relationships are just like heterosexual ones “sanitizing” them, or a refusal to acknowledge that, because of discrimination, there is a difference?
Speaking only for myself, what intrigues me about these stories is their boundlessness. They do not bother to prove their normalcy to attain legitimacy; instead, they choose to be chaotic, with the confidence they will be adored for all they are, and the determination to speak anyway, even if they won’t be. They also don’t fall into the trap of making queer stories soft or “inspiring,” or of making queer characters unrealistically perfect just so people can sympathize with the character and queer people in general.
However, while people can like whatever pieces of media they please, we cannot deny the patterns in how we often tell stories.
When you realize this, these stories don’t have power over you, allowing you to make your own decision about people who are different from you. The fact that we still tell so many queer stories as a terrifying lovers does not say great things about the world we live in, one where we point out those who “deviate” from the norm.
Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash
