Presented in association with GFT Youth Board, join us at GFT to celebrate all things queer and all things horror as we launch new essay anthology It Came From the Closet: Queer reflections on horror, from Saraband publishing. The event will feature a screening of Jennifer’s Body followed by a Q&A and book signing with Glasgow author and horror fan Kirsty Logan.
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.
Recently reclaimed as a feminist, queer cult classic, Jennifer’s Body is a ridiculously fun, satirical horror with a whip-smart script. ‘Babe’ Jennifer and her ‘dork’ best-friend Needy have a difficult friendship that’s further disrupted when a demon takes possession of Jennifer, and she starts killing the boys at their school.
Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. As well as writing her foreword and contribution to It Came From the Closet, she is also the author of two novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a short memoir, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. 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. Copies of It Came From the Closet will be available to buy before and after the screening, courtesy of Category Is books.