It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

By Kirsty Logan, Carmen Maria Machado, Samuel Autman and 23 more

“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.”

The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.

Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.

Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saraband
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913393984

Kirsty Logan

KIRSTY LOGAN is an award-winning writer based in Scotland. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies all over the world, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, displayed in galleries, and translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. She has received fellowships from Hawthornden Castle and Brownsbank Cottage, and was the first writer-in-residence at West Dean College. Logan lives in Glasgow, where she is active in feminist and LGBT culture. She has previously worked as a bookseller, and is now a freelance writer and literary editor. Her debut story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, won the Scott Prize. In 2013, she was named one of the 40 Scottish Storytellers of the Future.