Queering the cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a horror icon in Charles Lum’s Indelible

Citation

Elliott-Smith D (2010) Queering the cult of Carrie: Appropriations of a horror icon in Charles Lum’s Indelible. In: Smith IR (ed.) Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation. e-book: Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, pp. 138-156. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2009/culturalborrowingsebook.pdf

Abstract
This chapter discusses Queer appropriations of Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) from cinephilic and fan-oriented cultures. Shifting from drag-Carrie theatrical parodies, of both De Palma's excessive Grand Guignol aesthetic, to the failed Carrie the Musical, drag-Carries demonstrate a queer reinterpretation of the central text as a coming-out tale, albeit one mired in gynaephobia. The article then focuses on death-drive fantasies and notions of abjection in Charles Lum's experimental on Carrie and De Palma's film The Fury, splicing it with hardcore gay pornography, and replacing the showers of blood with showers of semen to capture a fascination and fear of body fluids set in place via the 80's AIDS crisis.

Keywords
Queer Horror; Experimental Film; Pornography Studies; Horror Film; LGBTQ Studies