return to camp blood

"Doesn't it bother you that he's a fag?"

Queer Horror is a genre.  There are podcasts about it and books about it and Shudder has a curated queer section and Fangoria even did an ugly gay pride shirt this summer.  Eight-four years after Bride of Frankenstein, fags are having a moment in the mainstream of a subset. Good for us. This wasn't the case when I started this blog ten years ago, but I was hardly a pioneer.

They say you always remember your first and for me, as a twenty-something struggling at a day job and desperate for community, my first exposure to the musty caverns of queer horror came from Campblood.org 

It's thanks to Brian Jeurgens at CampBlood that I learned about a lot of movies - foremost among them, Night Warning - aka: Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker - a movie so queer that it defies language.  This was a film so gay that I had to buy a VHS copy on ebay because it was otherwise out of print.

"Keep your queer hands off me!"

Night Warning is about a sad boy named Jimmy McNichol (brother to Kristy McNichol and best friend to Kim Richards who is the sister of Kyle Richards from Halloween and the “fuck all of you” gif I like).  As a toddler, Jimmy’s parents die in a horrific car crash and he’s left to be raised by character actress Susan Tyrell.

Actresses need a lot of attention, so it’s tough to be Jimmy McNichol.  At school, he's got Julia Duffy constantly trying to get in his pants.  Then he comes home and Susan is crawling into bed with him, licking milk off his chest and purring like a kitten in his ear every morning.  Their unhealthy co-dependent single-parent-only-child dynamic is only exacerbated by the fact that he’s on the precipice of going off to college.  Susan is getting more and more manic as the college offers start coming through.

"Do you know that homosexuals are very very sick?"

One night, with a few minutes to herself before Jimmy gets home from school, feeling stressed and lonely, Susan murders the TV repairman for refusing to have sex with her because he’s gay.

Normally, a middle-aged character actress continually trying to have sex with her nephew and murdering a gay repair man would be enough to classify a movie as “queer,” but there’s absolutely nothing normal about Night Warning.

You see, there’s a police detective in town whose defining characteristic is his violent contempt for gay people and, it turns out the TV repairman refused Susan's advances because he was married to Jimmy's basketball coach.  

"The victim was a fag.  The coach was a fag. And the kid is a fag."

The bigot detective is sure that Jimmy murdered the TV Repairman because he was having a secret affair with him behind his coach’s back and proceeds to call them both "faggot" all over town.  LOTS of homophobia ensues.

This sounds like an insane soap opera, but this stuff happens!  I had a good friend who was caught hooking up with a married guy in a public restroom when he was in high school and he got harassed by the police for weeks.  It was too horrible.  They'd call his parent’s house at all hours of the night.  Even twenty years later, he would start to shake at the thought.  That's pretty much what happens to poor sad Jimmy. 

To get much deeper into the bonkers plot of Night Warning would spoil the surprises of truly deranged film but know that every twist and turn is secondary to the fact that Susan Tyrell gives THE camp performance of all time. 

Susan woke up one day, saw Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and decided that Bette Davis played it way too naturalistically – she could do better.  And thank god she did!  Her character in Night Warning is scarier than Freddy - she's more horrific than Michael Myers – she's more manic than Leatherface. In John Water's new book, he says Susan Tyrell was the most difficult actress he ever worked with and, to me, that's weakness.  Because of her performance, this movie is gay horror gold.  So what if you have to have an EMT on set because she's always blackout drunk and keeps giving your leading man a black eye?  Film lasts forever!  She deserved an Oscar.

I salute you, Brian.  Thank you for CampBlood.  

It's not easy being a trail-blazer.  Just ask Susan Tyrell!  

back to school shopping

L'Shanah Tovah!  It's finally September, but it's still hot outside and I can't go to Target until next week because I just know they won't have their Halloween business up yet and I can't face another disappointment.

When I can't go to Target, anything's on the table.  I've been known to blackout in Bloomingdales, emerging from an Orange Julius stupor hours later with a collection of overpriced tops and a shredded Amex Gold Card.  I guess there's a reason it's called the Chopping Mall (no one calls it that)...

Chopping Mall is an important film because its characters live out my now and forever fantasy of getting to have a sleepover party in a 1980s mall.  That's what I want a time machine for.  That's it.  All I want is to be able to buy vintage Nikes and action figures for pennies on the dollar while enjoying a vanilla frappe from Brigham's.  Couple that with the thrill that only comes from running away from homicidal security robots???  Nothing's better!

This is a movie about a bunch of twenty-something kids who spend the night inside a mall and die at the hands of robot security guards who come to life after the mall is struck by lightning.  Genius.  Chopping Mall is genius.

This movie also features one of my favorite tropes: the slutty short guy.  I don't just say this because I struggle to maintain my 5'8" stature (thanks, Boniva), but it has been scientifically proven that short guys have more sex than tall guys because we have something to prove.  Chopping Mall isn't afraid to go there.

The cast of Chopping Mall is a veritable who's who of 80s horror - Barbara Crampton from Re-Animator - Gay Russell Todd from Friday the 13th Part 2 - Kelli Maroney from Night of the Comet.  Keep your eyes peeled and you'll even see Joey from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies shoplifting records.  But you don't have to take my word or even wait for a repertory screening, Chopping Mall is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

crossing party lines

My biological family is dead, so the closest thing I have to the experience y'all have of being simultaneously mortified by a loved one's behavior, but still desperately craving their love and attention, comes from watching Joe Bob Briggs.

After Elvira went full Hollywood and Rhonda Shear got tired of maintaining her upper register, Joe Bob owned horror movie nights on cable.  First on The Movie Channel in the 80s and then over at TNT where Monster-Vision reigned supreme through the mid-late 90s.  While I worshiped at the altar of Up and Night and wore out my VHS copy of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Joe-Bob had something they didn't - specifically, he was hot as fuck.

I'm not one to lust after straight men, but Joe Bob wasn't just hot, he was smart too - he wrote books!  He knew everything about the films he was showing, the making-of the films and the context in which we received the films.  His graphics packages were all day-glo and he had icons like Linnea Quigley come to visit his DIY trailer park set to chat.  I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it.


When a little birdie told me that Shudder was bringing back Joe Bob to work his magic on some titles in their streaming library, I was skeptical - more than skeptical, I didn't want it.  He's a straight white guy from Texas - proudly.  More complicated than being a straight white guy from Texas, he's a boomer.  With that, comes a lot of messy opinions and a general lack of desire to "read the room."  He doesn't really care about the hideous underpinning of the supreme court case on gay cakes, he casually mocks the controversy around Colin Kaepernick and he still loves to objectify ladies in bikinis.  This isn't a person I would be friends with any more than he'd want to come over my place to talk about Light in the Piazza and how quickly Antoni from Queer Eye sold out his entire online footprint to sponsored content (good angle for a Phantom of the Paradise reboot - you're welcome).

So, this last Friday the 13th, me and my bestie Mark sat down to watch The Last Drive-In on Shudder.  We had beer and pizza and we were prepared for anything.  Apparently we weren't the only ones, the feed crashed before the show even started.  Joe Bob broke the internet.

Three minutes in and he makes a reference to "Indians" and he's dropped a casual rape joke, but you know what?  We're doing this.  It's fine.  We're fine.  Like a couple of Patty Hearsts, we sat there transfixed by Joe Bob's dulcet tones.  If we closed our eyes, it was 1996 and we were safe in the comfort of something tied to our adolescence playing out as though no time passed.   It also didn't hurt that the first movie was Tourist Trap - a gay mid-summer classic!

"They're not perverts" - Joe Bob, re: the Trans community.

Next up is Sleepaway Camp and I want to die.  Joe Bob goes on for about twenty minutes about trans bathroom bills and "gender confusion," but is he woke?  Maybe.  He's mocking the notion that someone would carry a birth certificate with them to go to the bathroom and all the wasted resources that went into bigotry and, you know what, I'll take it.  In addition to being the gayest summer camp movie, I forgot how spectacularly vulgar Sleepaway Camp is - there's something truly magic about underage children swearing like they're in a Scorsese film!  

Then grown-up Felissa Rose shows up on the Joe Bob set wearing the most horrible pair of patent pleather, baby pink, bargain-basement stripper shoes with black tights and a thick black glitter dress (in the middle of summer).  I think it's safe to say Felissa isn't doing a lot to advance trans representation - if she had a queer friend, she'd know that you can't clash lipstick with your shoes, but what do I know.  Maybe this wasn't the place to have that conversation.  Maybe I'm part of the problem. 

Then came Rabid, a Cronenberg movie I'd never seen that Mark referred to as "gnarly" before heading out to a midnight screening of Jason Lives.  I have a strong aversion to vaginal body horror, so I had my first nap while Joe Bob talked in my dreams.

I woke up the next morning like Christmas day - racing to the TV with my Eggo waffles to catch up.  Joe Bob was still at it - maybe it was my coffee, but he was making good points about our over-dependence on cell phones and late-stage capitalism.   I love him.  Is this how the gays felt at Jonestown?

So much of my identity is has been tied to rejecting straight culture, avoiding the water cooler at work, rebuking sports, defying buffet lines and refusing to be a member of a club that not only doesn't want me as a member, but a club that's proven itself completely illegitimate.   The one thing Trump culture has done is expose that "traditional marriage" and "the rule of law" were all a gag.  These were systems put in place to give people power over other people.  We were lied to - straight, gay, all of us.  But here I am, watching b-movies and momentarily forgetting all that self-righteous indignation - allowing myself to enjoy a television program, homophobic warts and all.

So, yeah - we contain multitudes.  Joe Bob talked about AIDS, the FLQ,  he mocked Streisand and the first amendment and there was gay-panic humor and I still had the time of my life watching this entire marathon.  I want this on every Friday until I finally die. 

Long live Shudder - Long live the new flesh!

Back from the Dead

"time time time - see what's become of me" - Susanna Hoffs, also me

Once upon a time in Hollywood, I was an assistant who had a really bad breakup and started a gay horror blog - then the gay horror blog got me a job as a Development Executive at a horror cable network, which was like Videodrome but without problematic James Woods.  I had fun - people gave me things and I got to meet all my heroes (let me tell you: Heather Langenkamp is a CLASS ACT), but then the network shut down and no one would talk to me anymore (DM me and I'll name names - spoiler: they're all at Blumhouse now).



I stopped writing because horror movies stopped being fun and they stopped being gay, plus I lost at least a year to being a slut after I got on PrEP - but now we're stuck in the dredges of summer (don't trust anyone who likes August) and I think we could all use a little something special to get us motivated for better days.  So, here I am - it's just another Sunday night of dreading work tomorrow.  I'm here at home, minding my business, trying to figure out how to lose 15 pounds by September using myfitnesspal and I'm watching FRIGHT NIGHT for Drew Mackie's podcast and guess what...

I'm inspired.  It's been almost ten years since I started this blog.  The world is different, but we are still starved for queer representation.   I'm a little older, a little wiser and, starting here and now, I'm officially back to continue my exploration of the gay horror films that made me who I am and the films that continue to inspire and disappoint.

It's good to see you again.
Joe Seely, I'll call you tomorrow.

xoxo
jeff

fried green lesbians

1991 was the year that the Gloucester Cinema opened up and I could walk through the woods and a couple of bogs to a movie theatre all by myself without needing a ride.  That was the summer of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.  I was LIVING.  By September, the theatre staff knew me by name.  I saw EVERYTHING - People Under the Stairs, Sleeping with the Enemy, Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2!  A couple movies stand out in particular.

Child's Play 3
8.30.1991

This is not a good movie, but it's the first horror movie I ever went to by myself.

Cape Fear
11.13.1991

Scorsese.  DeNiro.  Split dipoters.  This was the moment when Jessica Lange became the embittered, callous, chain-smoking Jessica Lange parody we know and love (and fear) today.  If I had a dollar for every time I walked down the hallway to middle school chorus, imagining that I was Juliette Lewis walking into the auditorium, intent on finding an older man determined to put his finger in my mouth, I could buy us about seven grilled stuft nachos.


Freddy's Dead
9.13.1991

THIS.  Another movie I insisted on seeing alone as to not mar the experience.  I remember how everyone in the audience wore the 3D glasses for the first ten minutes before we realized that it wasn't in 3D until the last reel.

Tomorrow I'll be sure to tell you about how I wrote a four page fan letters to Norm from The Real World and how I got momma's credit cards shut down after one too many calls to Marina Sirtis on QVC.

has anyone seen my flux capacitor?

Ryan over at Shock Til You Drop did a nifty list of horror movies from the 90s and it sent me into a deep reverie in the manner of a Tennessee Williams heroine.

The world around me faded and was replaced by crystalline memories of walking to parochial school, still thinking about last night's episode of Parker Lewis Can't Lose.   On special days, I'd get a tuna sandwich from The Yellow Sub, the good kind with the chunks of dill pickles on the top, and try to avoid getting beat up and/or called faggot until it was time to go home and I could watch my stories.

Reading Fangoria magazines in the local bookstore, this era was the apex of my horror fandom.  It was a time when everything was possible and all my dreams were real.  Ironically, much like today, the 90s was a period of horror backlash. Coming off the glut of 80s slashers, audiences would become far more interested in Sharon Stone's sexcapades than a return to Camp Crystal Lake.  So, while everyone is away at Sundance, let's take a moment to throw is back.

The Exorcist III. 

8.17.1990

1990 came hard.  Don't believe me?  Watch this movie.  The Exorcist III petrified me, quite literally. If it came on television, I'd be rendered motionless, for fear that movement would draw the spirits and some monstrous, possessed elderly woman wielding gardening equipment would spring out of the hall closet, covered in mom's sheets from last year.  One night The Exorcist III came on and I had to call Vanessa to come over and turn it off for me while I covered my head with the pillow.  It holds up.

Gremlins 2: the new batch

(6/15/90)

Phoebe Cates got a bob for the Gremlins sequel!  To 12 year old Jeffrey, this was the epitome of chic.  I also have a soft-spot for horror movies set in high-rises.   They had Gremlins 2 merchandise in the supermarket, coloring books and those magic erase boards with the plastic stylus - I was deep in it.  High-concept, phantasmagoric, this movie was clearly left alone by the studio and, as a result, Marla Bloodstone will live forever in homosexual lexicon.

It.

11.18.1990

Anyone who's met me knows that all I ever want to talk about is the fact that, a few years back, Warner Bros hired Cary Fukanaga to remake It as a big-budget, two-picture, R-rated tentpole.  This happened!  It will surely never see the light of day, but it happened on paper.  This is the world I want to live in.  The 1990 It mini-series predates The Walking Dead and all the glorious horror entertainments on television that we now take for granted.  Tim Curry is spectacular and there are a few genuinely subversive moments despite the fact that the project had to be approved by many network censors.  Between It and Twin Peaks, 1990 was a banner year for horror on TV.  If you haven't read the book It is based on, you must.  It is far and away my favorite Stephen King book. Gang bangs, monsters, homeless queer mashers, children holding one another and weeping - what's not to love?

Honorable mention goes to the Tom Savini directed Night of the Living Dead remake, not because it's particularly remarkable (though Molly Shannon is fantastic in it), but because they played a teaser trailer for T2 beforehand and it's all that mattered at recess that fall.

I'll be back tomorrow to talk about 1991 - the year momma pulled me out of Catholic school because I was being bullied and had managed to gain 20 pounds from all the tuna sandwiches.