Postgraduate Conference 2020

This keynote builds upon my previous and current research into the emergence of the New Queer Horror subgenre in film and television (Queer Horror Film and TV: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins (2016) and New Queer Horror Film and TV (forthcoming 2020)).  Here I argue that, in recent years, the longstanding monstrous-queer metaphors that have existed in the Horror genre since its inception have ‘stepped out of the shadows’ in contemporary films where queerness becomes explicit rather than implicit. My central research argues that when monstrousness as a metaphor for the threat that queerness poses to heteronormativity ceases to be coded and instead becomes open, it then operates to turn the focus of fear upon itself, its own communities and subcultures. It projects contemporary anxieties within queer subcultures.

The central tenet of Queer Horror focuses on supposed aberrations of eroticism, sexuality, and gender. These in turn work to expose and highlight the hypocrisies and inconsistencies within seemingly normative power structures, and draw attention to the failure to maintain imaginary boundaries and borders that demarcate ‘normalcy’ from ‘deviancy’. Queer Horror  also reveals contemporary critiques of and within queer communities around, post-AIDS anxieties, masculine/feminine shame, homonormativity, homophobic violence and assimilation anxieties.

This particular keynote, presented in the form of a Video Essay, however, attempts to understand a particular trope of Queer Horror whereby the queer spectator re-reads the text’s intricacies by way of an always-already-present historical conflation of monstrousness with non-normative sexuality via the concept of Queer Hauntology. The application of Hauntology to Queer Horror allows for a queering of the dominant understanding of time and of history as linear, and a queer rejection of binaries enforced between past/future, Us/Them, then/now, dead/alive. Queer Hauntology then can be seen not as an act of productivity and forward momentum, but one of endless re-production, and of connection with a past and future that are still, in many ways, present.

To demonstrate, the keynote will focus on examples from Queer Horror Film and TV that exemplify Queer Hauntology as a means through which to confront impositions of, what Elizabeth Freeman calls, ‘chrononormativity’ upon queer identities and indeed within the queer community and how the development of homonormative values only mimic and reproduce these same values as a result of contemporary ‘acceptance’ and ‘assimilation’ of queerness into the mainstream.  Examples will include: an experimental queer appropriation of De Palma’s Carrie (1976); the draggy-excesses of long running horror serial American Horror Story (2011-); spectral queer thrillers like: Rift (Rökkur) (2017) and Jamie Marks Is Dead (2014); erotic and nostalgic ‘queer-ial’ killer films Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Knife + Heart (2018), and queer zombie narratives Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008) and In the Flesh (2013-2014).

N.B. This keynote contains references to suicide and may contain some explicit sexual and horrific/violent images and references.