It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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The second reason: Some of the most interesting details were left as B-plots or insufficiently explored--teases that were frustratingly far more fascinating than what the author had to say about this or that film. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. His writing has also been listed as notable in The Best American Essays , and he is an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. A really terrific collection of essays by a great selection and variety of different authors—both fiction authors, poets, and essayists—about the intersection between queer studies and queer identity and horror movies. His creative and pop culture writing appears in BOMB, VICE, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, North American Review, Narrative Northeast, VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana, among others.

Finally: a smart and serious yet playful book that interrogates the complex queerness of horror and the films that make a horror of queerness. Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine. This is a must-read for horror fans wanting to find connection and community in challenging the heteronormative and patriarchal narratives that can still dominate the genre.It Came from the Closet collects twenty-five takes on twenty-five horror films that make us cringe, crack up, turn away and turn back again—each piece lavishly queer in its intelligence, vulnerability, and wit. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. It Came from the Closet is a fantastic collection of diverse queer perspectives—an accessible, provocative, and much-welcomed addition to the growing body of queer horror analysis of our favorite films, new and old.

HOWEVER, I was completely enthralled by the personal details of his writing, his marriage to a woman while struggling with his attraction to men, but even more, his blossoming secret interest in gaining weight and other men gaining weight.

I decided to watch all of the movies that I hadn’t already seen before reading the essays they were based around. Others discuss how horror allowed them to escape from the real horrors of life, something I can definitely relate to.