Shudder’s ‘Queer for Fear’ series is here to school you on LGBTQ horror

When I first started writing on the internet 20 years ago, there was one subject that sat at the center vector of all my interest circles, and that subject was queer horror. Queer horror has everything — it has queers! It has horror! Like I said — it has everything! 

Queer horror had already been my main focus when I went to film school in the late '90s (you guys have no idea how many different ways you can watch Nekromantic 2). And it turned out that the World Wide Web was full of us weirdos who’d found our queerness more modeled in the shape of Pinhead than that of Patti Lupone. (Although I admit today that I have no idea who’d win in a fight between those two. Give us that battle royale!) 

Anyway, one of those internet weirdos that I bonded with over the subject of queer horror many a moon back was a writer dude by the name of Bryan Fuller, whose television program Pushing Daisies was just about to hit the air. That show, candy-coated though it might’ve been, wore its love for queerness and horror movies loudly and proudly. I could sit here all day listing the referential puns and sight gags, but there is an entire episode named after Dressed to Kill, so case made.

And so it was with very little surprise but very lotta delight that I met the news that Fuller had been tapped to executive produce the four-part docuseries Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror, which is hitting Shudder this week. Bryan and I have been gleefully talking about being penetrated by Xenomorphs for decades. So, I knew we were in capable hands, queer-wise.

From Frankenstein to Freddy, and All the Fright Nights in Between

Credit: Shudder

The series, which works chronologically through the history of horror from its first rumblings inside Mary Shelley’s pansexual laboratory up through the present day, is a comprehensive marvel in the first three of four parts released to critics. Intended as the rainbow-flagged sibling to Shudder’s similar special Horror Noire, which looked at the history of Black horror, Queer for Fear unpacks a moment in time through the stories it was telling — like the criminalization of homosexuality is tied to the trial of Oscar Wilde and his fractured friendship with the closeted Bram Stoker. The conservative McCarthyist witch hunts of the 1950s are tied up with Alfred Kinsey’s revelations that there were queers in every small town, everywhere, and the Body Snatchers-type films that followed. 

We’re walked through all of this intelligently and entertainingly by a colorful swath of talking heads, ranging from gay comic Lea DeLaria (Orange Is the New Black) and Bride of Chucky's Jennifer Tilly to directors Karyn Kusama (Jennifer's Body) and Kimberly Peirce (2013's Carrie) and Oz Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins. Indeed, one of the most riveting segments is the one where Oz (who’s recently become a horror director himself with the fine Gretel & Hansel) talks about his father’s closeted gay life and how that all worked in relation to his infamously queer role of Norman Bates in Psycho. 

As a person who’s been focused on this subject for three decades, some of this stuff was familiar, but even those passages are told here with great wit that brings fresh vigor. Then, entire swaths of it weren’t familiar at all: How I’d never thought about Cat People as a lesbian narrative before is beyond me! (That restaurant scene is straight out of Carol.) And listening to the trans viewers and critics like Emily St. James open up about body horror and transformation narratives as they speak to their own experiences simply wasn’t a thing that was happening when I was in school. All of that feels especially vital today. The wheels keep turning, revealing ever more layers as we go.

Simply said, just like Horror Noire before it, Queer for Fear will prove to be foundational. It will be the killer LGBTQ Horror Film School 101 for so many, so lucky, and it’s about as superb a jumping-off point as one could wish for. This sensational docuseries weaves together history and humor and horror into a tapestry, one might even say a perfectly tailored skin suit, that it slips over a sturdy skeletal frame of knowledge. It fits like a glove, baby. A black leather glove, even, all the better for diving into the so-called gialli films out of Italy and ooh, ooh, ohh — I totally have an idea for a second season, Bryan!

How to watch: Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror's first episode is now on Shudder. New episodes will arrive each Friday in October.