Queer For Fear is another excellent horror documentary series on Shudder, this time re-examining the classics of the genre through a queer lens. The episodes viewed take in the literary world of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde – plus giants of queer and mainstream cinema alike, directors James Whale and Alfred Hitchcock. A series of talking heads alongside extensive clips from the films themselves detail how the sexuality of writers like Wilde, Stoker and Shelley coded into their work and subsequent interpretation of their canon.
Wilde’s Picture Of Dorian Gray uses a metaphor for the corruption of hiding your true self; Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, again suppressed his homosexuality allowing it to filter through his work of a bloodsucking vampire capable of bewitching men and women with a forbidden bite. Bisexual proto-feminist Shelley, her monster created by man, is a parable about the toxicity of masculinity, the need to play god, as well as being the birth of horror and sci-fi. Their cinematic iterations and offshoots at the birth of cinema, with the likes of gay director FW Murnau’s Nosferatu swiftly followed by Universal’s legendary monster movies of the 1930s and James Whale’s Bride Of Frankenstein, further emphasised the fear of the outsider, the different – and made it part of subtextual queer culture, but in plain sight.
Full of insight from the likes of Mark Gatiss, and other queer writers, directors and actors like Karyn Kusama, Bryan Fuller, Kimberly Pierce and Don Mancini to name a few, this is a fascinating deep dive into the genre that could embrace and upset traditional storytelling norms. Subsequent examinations of Hitchcock include his cast of subversive characters from queer source material – Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and Rebecca, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers On A Train – and there’s also a heartfelt examination of Hitchcock’s Psycho himself, Anthony Perkins, whose closeted sexuality the director exploited to add depth to the serial killer.
Overall, Queer For Fear is a revealing series packed full of queer insight that shines a light on the hidden layers, intentionally or otherwise that exist within horror itself.
Dir: Bryan Fuller (15, 45 mins per episode)
Queer For Fear is streaming on Shudder now
words KEIRON SELF