My teenage self grew up locked in a closet, convinced that Clive Barker was the only openly gay person devoted to my favorite genre: horror. Fortunately, I was wrong: the presence of LGTBIQ+ characters in fantastic cinema has been a constant throughout its history and has only increased in recent decades. Besides being part of the collective imagination, cinematic monsters from gothic literature — like Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, or Mr. Hyde — were among the first examples of queer representations on the big screen, always linked to the different, the strange, and everything that challenged heteronormativity.
From the predominance of negative clichés — psychopathic lesbians, bloodthirsty bisexual vampires, cross-dressing killers, and many more — to the gradual acceptance of diversity, Scream Queer offers a broad journey through the evolution of LGTBIQ+ representation in the fantastic genre through the analysis of hundreds of films. Along the way, it exorcises traumas and shares the personal experiences that have marked the author: a gay man obsessed with horror cinema.
