Elliott-Smith D (2024/2025) ‘Every creak, every groan, every tap in the wall, you'll think of me’: Spinning the Web of Trans*-Horror-Metaphors in Cobweb (2023)

Citation

Elliott-Smith D (2024) Elliott-Smith D (2024/2025) ‘Every creak, every groan, every tap in the wall, you'll think of me’: Spinning the Web of Trans*-Horror-Metaphors in Cobweb (2023). https://www.monstrum-society.ca/journal--revue.html [https://www.monstrum-society.ca/journal--revue.html] 01.07.2024. https://www.monstrum-society.ca/journal--revue.html

Abstract
As the Queer Horror Film and TV sub-genre matures, its focus turning to sub-cultural fears and anxieties within LGBTQIA+ communities, the hope that a more enlightened approach to queer fears might be more inclusive in their representations and metaphors also grows. In my previous works (New Queer Horror Film and TV (2020) and Queer Horror Film and Television: Masculinity and Sexuality at the Margins (2016)) I have argued that in recent years the sub-genre has shifted ‘out of the shadows’ of furtive symbolism whereby, as Robin Wood puts it ‘the monster is to “normality” as homosexuality is to heterosexuality’ (PG), and has matured into an art form that allows for informed cultural critique and devoted identification with Otherness for some that can be emancipatory. However Queer Horror emergence from its history of mixed and problematic representations from the past, is still in its infancy. In Harry Benshoff’s work in Monsters in the Closet (1995), Susan Stryker’s (2004) work specifically ‘Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin’ and in my own extension of the study of contemporary Queer Horror we argue that that this identification provides a source of joyful self-recognition, but - at the same time - this affinity with the monstrous is not always entirely pleasurable and is a complex negotiation with pride and shameful elements that the monstrous metaphor is then re-appropriated to represent. Even when studying contemporary Queer Horror that may well appear to be crafted by LGBTQIA+ creatives and allies, we should be mindful of Benhoff’s caution to be wary of the continued monsterisation of homosexuality (and I would add by extension LGBTQIA+ subjectivities) – as it runs the risk of further Othering and pathologising difference. I want to suggest that just as Queer Horror creators are in the process of negotiating the historically toxic tropes from horror film and television and finding ways to mitigate negative associations, thus reclaiming horror for queer stories, lives, and spectators. It is also time for queer and horror theorists to do the same in negotiating with, re-reading, rejecting, and reinterpreting old cis-normative and binary theories around gender and sexuality in order to see ourselves in the texts we study and in the theories, we use to analyse and interpret those texts. The way forward can be seen in some trailblazing academic work. The academic and author Paul B Preciado (a trans man) spoke in 2019 at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne in Paris. In front of a gathering of 3,500 psychoanalysts at their annual conference Preciado delivered the paper, ‘Can the Monster Speak?’, which offered a startling rebuke to the profession that had previously understood him to be ‘a mentally ill person’ suffering from gender dysphoria. Preciado’s work (now published in full) demanded changes of the psychoanalytical establishment and offered a challenge for it to affect a paradigm shift allowing for marginalised voices (like his own) to be part of the academic establishment. He argues for the discipline to break its complicity with the cis-heteronormative colonial ideology of sex, gender and sexual difference, stating: And so it is from the position assigned to me by you as a mentally ill person that I address you, an ape-human in a new era. I am the monster who speaks to you… …As a trans body, as a non-binary body, who’s right to speak as an expert about my condition or to produce discourse or any form of knowledge about myself is not recognised by the medicinal profession, the law, psychoanalysis or psychiatry. I have done as Red Peter did. I have learned the language of Freud and Lacan, the language of the colonial patriarchy, your language, and I am here to address you. (19) So, following on Preciado’s call to arms, the challenge is this - we have an obligation to ensure that as LGBTQ+ fans, creators, and researchers of horror to learn the language of the genre, and of psychoanalysis, and of cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised us. And instead, we need to reinterpret it, re-express it and re-present it, in doing so this allows us queer filmmakers, fans and theorists to take up that mode of address and offer critiques of our own subcultures, and of those that still oppress us. However as with Queer Theory’s frequent failure to speak about and for trans* subjectivities (see Stryker’s aforementioned article (2004)) the horror genre can also fall foul of problematic attempts to symbolise LGBTQIA+ experiences as horrific when universally folding all subjective experiences into an amorphous Queer Horror umbrella. The recent release Cobweb (Bodin, 2023) arguably does exactly this. Bodin’s film, is a competently directed, effective hidden monster/haunted house fusion that is academically literate in its approach to Horror/Gothic allegories. However, despite its attempts at symbolically materialising the trauma and anguish of the oppressed young trans* body (via its central protagonist Peter (Woody Norman) it is via its frequently on-the-nose metaphors of gendered-doubling that run the risk of offering up a paint-by-numbers approach to LGBTQ-adjacent Horror that fails to capture the nuances of queer and trans* existence. The androgynously presented Peter is bullied at school and is prevented by his seemingly over-protective (yet oppressive) parents from taking part in trick or treating at Halloween due to their fears of abduction, the town is haunted by the real-life instance of the disappearance of a young girl several years earlier. Peter begins to be woken at night by a knocking and later a young girl’s ‘voice’ (Sarah (Debra Wilson)) from behind his bedroom wall asking for help. She reveals that she has been held captive in the walls of the house by his parents and is his twin sister whom his parents locked away after deciding they didn’t want her anymore. She convinces Peter that the same fate may well fall on him if he doesn’t help her escape her immurement. Interpreting Cobweb from a trans or queer perspective might well open-up the repression of Peter’s ‘sister’ as an enforced oppression of his true femininity, that then in its enforced entombment becomes monstrous because of those same heteronormative, patriarchal forces and – being released - returns to effect revenge upon those same structures. Sarah operates as a floating queer/trans signifier in the text, and the spectator is never quite in full belief of her status as ‘simply’ Peter’s sister. She may well be, but she also represents Peter’s repressed passivity (deemed feminine by cis-hetero-patriarchal culture), the ‘lost’ girl who went missing on Halloween (who may or may not have been murdered by the parents or Sarah herself). More abstractly Sarah could well be seen to represent what Jack Halberstam (2005) suggests is a ‘living death’ that trans* subjects experience, a feeling of being alive but still associate with death (dead names) and the trans body for Halberstam in its unfinished, fragmented form is a reminder that all human subjectivity is in a state of becoming. Peter (a fitting in-joke perhaps as to this binary biological genital indicator, but also a reference to the central antagonist Peter/Angela from the historically traumatic trans-horror film Sleepaway Camp (1983)) teams up with Sarah to escape his parents’ essentialist grip – freeing her by accessing a tiny door to her domain hidden behind a fittingly ‘chrononormative’ (Freeman, 2011) Grandfather Clock. It is later revealed that Sarah was locked away due her non-normative ‘monstrous’ bodily appearance, deformed at birth – she takes the form of a murderous human with arachnoid attributes, she then turns on Peter jealous of his life in the light, out of the feral darkness that she had been forced to dwell in. This video essay attempts to reveal the problematic thin line that Queer horror films often tread between utilising metaphor and allegory to represent LGBTQ+ anxieties/fears and trading in sometimes harmful and/or stale tropes that offer confused conclusions to their narratives. Utilising a recurring visual motif of shattering, more specifically imagery and sounds of fragile glass panes breaking or fragmenting, I want to draw attention to the hackneyed pattern of splitting when representing binarised gender and sexuality, but to work the concept further to offer a multiplicity of possibilities that shatter the gender binary and break out-of-date metaphors. Peter’s bedroom wall, at one point, acts as a cinema screen projecting out some key regressive and progressive examples of horror film past and present that deal with trans and queer bodies in the genre (ranging from the problematic, Psycho (1960), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), to the more affirmative (T-Blockers (2023), to the slippery and suggestive (Let the Right One In (2009), and finally to the hauntingly toxic Sleepaway Camp (1983)). Using Stryker’s concept of the ‘Evil Twin’, I hope that video essay suggests that Cobweb, walks a thin (webbed) line of open symbolism and allegory that allows for some positive identifications with the position of an oppressed child/children who doesn’t ‘fit in’ to societal demands (of body, of gender, and perhaps of sexuality), resisting those harmful parental structures. The embrace of monstrousness and Otherness that is often thrust on the ‘different’ being, can be revelled in via the emergence of Sarah as a vengeful, non-normative subject and her, often comic, destruction of the domestic space and its toxic masculine invaders. However, the web of metaphors of queerness and transness begin to fall apart upon further inspection, revealing a collapse into problematic, monstrous femininity that must be imprisoned to allow for a normative conclusion to the narrative and for Peter to emerge into the symbolic as a ‘securely’ and ‘traditionally’ gendered child. This video essay argues via Cobweb that producers and creators of horror films that flirt with LGBTQ+ allegories and counter-readings need to be more aware of the Othered voices that are present and precisely who it is that speaks through the symbolism of the genre.

Keywords
Queer Horror; Trans Horror; LGBTQ Studies; Film Studies