It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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This was overall a very solid collection of essays. Keep in mind the fact I have not read the essays that pertained to movies I have not seen (with the intention of watching the movies and then returning to their respective essays). It’s ironically quite hard to summarise an accessible collection such as It Came From the Closet– much like the writers and essays buried within, they are fraught and messy and complicated, filled to the brim and overflowing with trauma and delight, anguish and joy, all through the veins of horror media. Horror is a genre that can cause violent, unbridled reactions within the viewer, forcing them into the place of the villain, the victim, the survivor.

There are several showdowns in the film’s climax and denouement: Needy interrupts Jennifer killing her boyfriend; later, she suits up and goes to Jennifer’s bedroom, where the two of them wrestle, levitating in the air before Needy plunges a box cutter into her heart. Needy is sent to an institution; she escapes. As the credits roll, Needy hunts down the band, killing them gruesomely in their hotel room. Andrew was sitting on the edge of the couch the game still patiently waiting for him to start playing again. Rex sat at his feet, as though on guard. Horror attracts fans and detractors of seeming equal enthusiasm, but I’ve mostly viewed it with ambivalence. I’ve seen a few classic scary movies over the years, and enjoyed them, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see one. Horror as a genre, in my admittedly somewhat ignorant view, seems to carry a lot of misogynistic, sex-negative baggage, and I’ve always been more interested in a villain whose motivations I can understand rather than an unstoppable, inscrutable killing machine. Before reading this book, I couldn’t remember the last horror film I saw. So, what does the genre have to offer someone like me?Personal essays where people use horror films to discuss their sexuality and gender? Sign me up! This is a great collection, the use of horror films to write about queer topics provides so many different avenues for the authors to go down. All of the essays here feel so unique. Andrew was about to turn around to scold Rex, but he’d already moved into the corridor, towards the closet under the stairs. Andrew put down the controller and followed him. Rex was pawing at the door, whining quietly, the way he did when he needed to be let outside. He put his hand on the doorhandle and slowly pulled it. It creaked open and the sound in the quiet house seemed as loud as a train hitting the brakes at a busy station. For a while, I was furious at her, for all the reasons you might expect. My friends comforted me, assured me I’d been used, told their own stories of identity misfires and capricious lovers and x-sexuals-until-graduation they’d known. She started dating a new guy, and eventually married him. Even invited me to the wedding, though I declined to go. I have no idea if she’s slept with women since then, if she ever thinks about it, if she identifies as something other than straight. For a long time, I remembered that conversation on the beach—the nakedness and vulnerability of my want—with a dense and unctuous emotion you could probably call shame. I was determined to be angry.

Which I think of as a mix of (understandably) hungry for queer media, (understandably) cynical about queer representation, and extremely sensitive to even a whiff of phoniness.His mom stopped talking and both her and Andrew whipped around at the same time. It was dad, and it was coming from the closet under the stairs. It Came from the Closet is a heterogeneous anthology and even though the essays are short, the authors dig deep into their personal life experiences while using horror to reflect on their queer identity, and vice versa. Through the lens of horror—from "Halloween" to "Hereditary"—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. When I was older, and home from university for a holiday, my laptop broke and had to be taken into a shop to be repaired; they had to keep it overnight. Over the course of the evening, I became convinced that they would find something illegal on there, that the authorities would be summoned, that I would be arrested and vilified. Anxious thoughts like these grow, matching the shape and length of installments of a sci-fi series, the unreality of each one being expanded, extended and deepened. The fact that an anxiety may be irrational is not a comfort; a rational fear can be reasoned with, or explained; an irrational one has no counterweight, it cannot be over-thought by sense, because it is an unreality that you find yourself living in. It begins as a droplet in the mind, and ripples outwards, gets in your blood, is pumped around the body. That night, I woke at 1 or 2 a.m., convinced I heard a car pulling up, a door slamming, that the police were here to take me away. Another installment, a few months after this left me unable to board a bus to attend my lectures, convinced that if I did, I’d suddenly need the toilet, and because there wouldn’t be a way to stop the bus, I’d wet myself.

Dinh lays out his own experience as a budding gay teenager who attended summer camps at the peak of the slasher movie’s popularity. He points out the ambiguity of Sleepaway Camp; where the slasher movie’s Final Girl shares Angela’s resistance to sexualizing herself and, often, her androgyny, he writes “we’re left with the possibility that Angela—with her intense stare, her literal embodiment of masculine traits—serves as both Final Girl and killer.” He emphasizes its homoeroticism. Sleepaway Camp throws away its sympathy for Angela, who has good reason to fear violence if she reveals her body, for the sake of its ending, but up to that point, it’s quite empathetic toward her plight.All in all I think this book really bridges a gap between a queer memoir storytelling and academic media analysis making the topics accessible to a wider audience. But, all of that aside, I truly just enjoyed this book and the voices within. It was a fun read, whatever it is.