URHorror Newsletter: Week of 6.6

Burying your gays; I Saw The TV Glow; queer representation in media

Hello all my horror friends and fiends. HAPPY PRIDE 🏳️‍🌈 Here on the Unbound & Rewound Horror Podcast, being queer has opened my eyes to the way that queer identities are represented in horror. Horror is for the underrepresented. And this podcast is, too. For every letter of the community, this space is for you. All month long, I’m talking gay horror!

If you missed my first Pride episode, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING! Chuck Tingle, a queer, autistic horror author, joined me to talk his Summer 2024 releases Bury Your Gays. I will go down in history as the person who taught him that Kevin Williamson, writer of Scream (1997), is queer.

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Queer Horror: Bury Your Gays

In light of June, and my interview with Chuck Tingle, what better topic to discuss than the trope at the center-focus of Tingle’s book. Hollywood, from the days of the Hayes Code through the AIDs epidemic and up until the last ten years, only allowed queer characters on screen if their trajectory included death and/or villainous urges. Think Ursula in The Little Mermaid: Disney tried to make villains out of the entire community back in the day. I recently watch High Tension, the French 2005 psychological horror film, for the first time thinking I was about to watch a queer horror movie. But look at that release year again. 2005? Yeah, the gays were buried FOR SURE.

The act of “burying your gays” is the simple act of killing off your queer characters. However, in modern light, this can include the erasure of their identity and really any workaround to avoid having a well-rounded queer character design. That’s my opinion at least. If you remember by review of the 2024 movie TAROT, then you already know my thoughts on those queer characters.

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It’s Not That Deep…

But it always is… isn’t it? I Saw The TV Glow has not let me rest since I watched it two weeks ago (or three?). The officially A24 synopsis explains it as:

Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.

I went into this film understanding very little about it: it seems this is a universal experience. However, what you walk away with is a deepened melancholy for your childhood and the media that you developed a strong attachment to. According to TikTok, some people cried after watching it. That was not me, but I did have the feeling.

For queer viewers, we’re reminded of the way we often identified with characters who may not have been explicitly queer but were coded. Maddy believes that she is the masc-presenting character Tara from The Pink Opaque. And over the course of 20 years, we watch her transition from an awkward teen with a feminine style to a cowboy boot-wearing butch. Owen (played by Justice Smith) sees himself in Tara’s counterpart: a teen girl who loves bright colors and fun accessories. Jane Schoenburn says that this film is meant to be a reflection of something they call “second puberty”:

like the last few years of my life, beginning and seeing through the early stages of gender, transition, or becoming.

This is a narrative with a lot of subtext that you either pick up on during your first watch or after a few watches. I don’t know a single person who fully understands the film. That doesn’t change how they feel about it, though. I personally love a film that makes me feel intense emotions: desired or not. So, if you find yourself watching this movie or another and you can’t fully wrap your head around it, don’t be too quick to pass it off.

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That’s a wrap!

Clearly, we say GAY on this podcast. We’re celebrating queer joy and queer stories all June. Next week, we’re chatting with Lindsay King-Miller, author of the Summer 2024 queer horror novel The Z Word. We talk rainbow capitalism, body diversity in media, and zombie movies!

Tune in next Thursday (6/13) at 7P

But, remember that Pride should be all year long. Uplift queer authors, directors, and everyone in between!