‘Keep The Vampires From Your Door’: Collapsing the Borderlands of Queer Love/Horror in All of Us Strangers (Haigh 2024)

Citation

Elliott-Smith D (2024) ‘Keep The Vampires From Your Door’: Collapsing the Borderlands of Queer Love/Horror in All of Us Strangers (Haigh 2024). EUPOP 2024, Tallinn, Estonia, 01.07.2024-04.09.2024.

Abstract
This paper forms part of a new strand of my work – which for a long time has considered sociopolitical and textual analyses of Queer Horror Film and TV, as a purgative, performative vent for sub-cultural desires, fears and anxieties in a new open, less closeted future for the sub-genre. My next monograph focuses instead on the uses of Horror and the Gothic across the sub-genre and wider, that work as a means of cathartic expression of pathologized notions of difference the queer individual feels as Othered in a normative world – where Queer Horror operates to speak about mental distress, isolation, disassociation, guilt and shame. Growing up and living as queer in a straight world, can often be horrific… Living a queer life in a queerphobic and heteronormative society can have a traumatising effect on the queer individual, and indeed can give the queer person a great daily burden to carry. Existing in a world that, for so long has set out LGBTQIA+ identities as non-normative, ‘different’ and Othered has surely influenced many a queer person’s sense of self identity and their own mental health in varying degrees. It makes sense then that queer filmmakers, producers and screenwriters turn to Horror as a means of confronting these feelings of guilt, shame, humiliation, the position of Otherness and the depictions of trauma and violence that we all have experienced in one way or another. While my work to date has largely focused on those texts that can be more easily defined as belonging to a Horror or Gothic genre, I’ve found increasingly that those demarcations have grown more and more diffuse, Queer Horror, often bleeds into the comic, the parody, and the melodrama, whereby the tropes and traits of Horror and the Gothic lend to speak about queer lived experience and memory as traumatic and terrifying. This paper focuses on Andrew Haigh’s drama All of Us Strangers (2024) as a profoundly upsetting rumination on queer loneliness, and the experience of an overwhelming sense of love and loss that can be at times terrifying. Watching Haigh’s film offers a uniquely traumatic experience for some queer spectators. This is not only due to its deeply emotional and upsetting hauntological presentation of an 80’s-infused, painful nostalgic confrontation between the bereaved queer adult character Adam (Andrew Scott) a writer who imagines and engages with the spectres of his long-dead parents (played by Claire Foye and Jamie Bell); but also via the burgeoning queer relationship between Adam and the troubled Harry (Paul Mescal) a neighbour who taps into Adam’s grief and loneliness, experiencing the same disjointed liminal existence in a seemingly empty London tower block. It's also interesting that All of Us Strangers (an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers) comes at a time where there is arguably a relative boom in successful adaptations of (largely YA) queer fiction that promote a positive, unthreatening and homonormative, representation of queer love and experience- here I’m speaking about Alice Osman’s Heartstopper on Netflix, and perhaps less recently Greg Berlanti’s adaptation of Love, Simon – specifically. These have been studied via the theoretical groundwork of Jose Esteban Munoz’s concept of ‘queer futurity’ – an imagined future whereby queer existence is removed from any presence of homophobia/hardship, and what Michelle Ann Abate terms ‘queer retrosity’ a new type of queer speculative fiction centring on ‘the imaginative construction of a past…not dominated by homophobia and the hardships that arose from it’ (Abate, 2019: 3).