Rear Window

"Your friend needs a psychiatrist, not a vampire killer!"

In high school, I had a guy best friend and a girl best friend. Clandestinely, I was deeply in love with my guy friend who, in turn, hooked up with my girl best friend.  She wound up being a lesbian a couple years later and neither of us talk to him anymore, so we all lived happily ever after. 

This is the story of Fright Night.

Fright Night is about three kids who are confused about what to do with their private parts until a couple of gays move in next door and set them right. It's like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music only, instead of Julie Andrews, they’re set right by a gay vampire and the Queen of Old Hollywood herself, Roddy McDowall.

Charlie Brewster is the only child of a single-mom. She’s  always off working and he’s left to his own devices day after day. Usually this is confined to talking trash with his twitchy best friend, Ed, or making out with his best girl friend, Marcy D'Arcy, but all Charlie wants to do lately is snoop on the people next door. 

Charlie finds it a bit odd that his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (along with his “live-in carpenter"),  insists on moving-in all of his priceless antiques in after dark…but you know how private the gays can be, especially in these smaller towns. Charlie’s minor curiosity soon turns into a full-blown obsession. He starts spending all his nights eating junk food alone in his room, staring at his neighbors through binoculars. 

Maybe it’s the pressure of not passing trigonometry or being scared of having to go to second base with Marcy, but Charlie fixates until he has gays literally coming out of his closet!

When my high school best guy friend started dating and kissing girls, my shit got dark. I didn't want to talk about it because then I’d have to come out of the closet and we might not have sleepovers anymore, so I would go running on the beach late at night.  Likewise, with no beaches at hand, "Evil"Ed goes walking alone down dark alleys at night while Charlie and Marcy are off not having sex.  

Lonely and sad, Ed finds himself in the embrace of a vampire who extends his overly manicured hand and makes him full fledged gay vampire himself with the promise of never having to be an outsider again.  Good for him.

In a play for emerging Bisexual Rights, Jerry Dandridge sets his sights on Marcy D’Arcy next, appealing to her inner lesbian by staging the nightclub scene from Basic Instinct.   This straw breaks Charlie's back and sends him to the godfather of all homosexuals, Roddy McDowell, for advice and assistance. 

Roddy Mcdowall as Peter Vincent: Vampire Killer is the heart and soul of Fright Night. Besides being about tangential characters coming to terms with their sexuality through the help of some cashmere-clad vampires, Fright Night is about the divide that existed between the classic Universal and Hammer years of old Hollywood horror movie glamour and the disposable slasher films of the 1980s. 

Peter Vincent is feeling washed up and under appreciated. Kids today don’t care about how Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken killed Natalie Wood or how he coaxed Dame Elizabeth Taylor out of her great depression after Monty Clift’s accident outside her mansion. Only by helping Charlie get those pesky vampires out of town, does Peter Vincent/Roddy McDowall come to appreciate his status as the national treasure that he truly is.  I miss him.

Representation matters and growing up gay and seeing (albeit coded) gay characters in a horror movie made me feel less alone.  Fright Night is a wonderful example of the care and attention that went into horror in the 1980s and not just because three of the five men in this film weep openly. After all the anguish men have caused us over the years, that’s always a win in my book. 

I'm Laura Mars.

"I sat there and watched the blood dry on her face until it was just about the color of your hair."

To those who suggest that homosexuality is a choice and not a genetic predetermination, please explain to me why I watched Mommie Dearest every day when I was 8 years old, staring blankly at histrionic scene after histrionic scene for hours on end. 

There are some impulses (like making out with boys and watching Faye Dunaway videos on youtube) which we have absolutely no choice but to succumb. These impulses are part of our genetic makeup bag. 

Of course, those who think being gay is a choice are the same people who don’t believe in dinosaurs, but let’s not get upset - not today. For today, she is risen.  The Eyes of Laura Mars is gay Easter, a great big basket full of chocolate and marshmallow treats wrapped with a Hermes bow!

The first shot of The Eyes of Laura Mars is a black and white closeup of Faye Dunaway’s eyes over the refrain of a Barbra Joan Streisand Power-Ballad. This pretty much sets the tone for the proceeding ninety minutes.  The Eyes of Laura Mars is a film where our heroine is put through the ringer without ever actually gets her hands dirty or her hair mussed.  Nicole Kidman would later adopt this genre of thriller as her own, but in the ‘70s, all we had was Faye (especially when Streisand and Jane Fonda already passed).

Faye Dunaway is playing Faye Dunaway as Laura Mars, the most glamorous photographer in the world. So keen is her photographer’s eye that she begins to see gruesome murders happen, psychically. In the 1970s, photography was still controversial. People in the art world weren't ready to embrace the medium and they certainly didn’t want to embrace Laura Mars, who specialized in tableaus of naked women splayed out in gruesome and beautifully shot crimes of passion. Edgy!  So a lot of people wanted Laura dead. 

Being the World's Most Important high fashion photographer, Faye is surrounded by homosexuals. Her best friend and confidante is an ascot wearing, feathered hair, stonewall-rock-throwing queen named Donald. Donald is very fond of Laura, going so far as wearing her dresses and heels from time to time - evoking the rare outbreak of internalized homophobia where I find myself wanting the killer to kill the gay.  This is my issue, not his. I can only imagine how stressful it must be to try and be Faye Dunaway's gay friend. All the scheduling and film-loading and grocery shopping and crime-solving is invariably left to her token gay while Faye just emotes and yells his name in random locations.

“I’m very serious about my work, by my own standards.”

The thing is, if you take away Faye’s delivery and her vanity lighting, The Eyes of Laura Mars is a gritty and effective little thriller. Shot entirely in Manhattan, Raul Julia and Tommy Lee Jones and Brad Dourif completely get lost their roles. There are times, however, when it's clear that Irwin Kirshner (he who hath birthed The Empire Strikes Back)  just had to turn the camera off to end a scene because Faye would otherwise keep going and going, inserting pauses and intense staring and hair flips like the energizer bunny in a silent movie until everyone died of starvation.

How do you solve a problem like Faye Dunaway? More importantly, why would you want to?  She’s arguably the greatest bad actress of all time. You can’t take your eyes off her! I’m an old school queen who believes that most homophobia is rooted in misogyny.  This isn’t necessarily the time or place to dissect queer identity in relation to the notion of “camp” or why we as gay men often hold actresses interests above our own (spoiler: it has to do with the fact that we lack representation in media and have always had to project our own emotions, wants and desires onto the female protagonist), but I hate to see women get a bad rap.  It happens constantly in Hollywood and I think we can do better. I digress.

Faye never was appreciated as a contemporary to Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, so she kinda snapped.  Fair. But as a result or her having “had it,” we got some of the most over-the-top, queer-identifying films in our canon (specifically: Supergirl, Mommie Dearest and The Eyes of Laura Mars).

The pedigree of Laura Mars is unrivaled. The film was adapted from a script by John Carpenter, whose film Halloween came out a few months later.  Heard of it? It’s also one of Laura Ziskin’s first credits - she went on to produce the Spider-man films.  And, no film about the ultra-glamorous New York fashion scene would be complete without gowns!  The only thing capable of holding its own opposite the scenery-devouring Ms. Dunaway (who was paid a million dollars for this movie, having just won her Network Oscar) is Theoni Aldredge’s costumes. Furs, plaids, slit skirts, silk scarves, capes, and more furs! It’s a hate-crime that they never made Laura Mars dolls.

I wear my sunglasses at night.

“I’m at the mercy of your sex glands, bud.”

The 1980s was an awesome time to be a gay kid with a single mom. There was positive reinforcement all around us! Dynasty, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Facts of Life, jelly bracelets…and, with the advent of cable television and mall culture, no matter where we lived, our chubby little fingers were on the pulse of everything! Amidst all that delicious capitalism, the whipped cream on the Entenmann’s danish of 1980s gay boy culture was the advent of the two Coreys (Feldman and Haim, respectively).

Once upon a time, a white gay named Joel Schumacher was an assistant to the wardrobe people on The Wiz.  That’s a great job.  Anyone who has a Wiz credit on their IMBD page to has me at hello. 

Joel Schumacher went on to make a slew of fair-to-middling movies in the years following his work with Miss Ross, but he also made some good ones.

Flatliners is one of the tightest thrillers ever made (I'm a sucker for a good DP). St. Elmo’s Fire, a film indelibly trapped in the year it was made for all time, answered the question “what happened to The Breakfast Club after graduation?” - it also features an extended montage wherein Demi Moore trys to kill herself by leaving the windows open on a cold day.  If that’s not extreme gay behavior, I don’t know what it! I’m even in the minority of people who think that Batman and Robin was an impressionist meditation on excess and a better film than Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. 

With this said, at the height of ‘80s excess, Joel Schumacher made a vampire movie called The Lost Boys. While The Lost Boys is not a gay love story as much as it is about brotherly competition (a bromance), I don’t think I’m off to point out that the main character, Corey Haim, is definitely a ‘mo.

Corey Haim just moved to Santa Carla, California with his recently divorced mother, Academy Award winning character actress Dianne Weist, and his brooding brother, Michael. He spends his days changing outfits, shopping for Rob Lowe midriff posters, and reading comics (much as I like to spend my days). 

While most films use a characters’ homosexuality as his tragic flaw, Corey’s otherness keeps him safe and keenly aware of the impending doom around him.  He’s hyper-vigilante. His mother and brother are the ones who are off fucking vampires, leaving Corey to his own devices. 

I have a best friend who loses his shit if a girl pays him any interest. He’ll give her his car, his money, anything! The same can be said for Corey’s brother, Michael.  Michael is so completely dickmatized by Jamie Gertz that he finds himself involved with a group of adrenaline-junky vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland (the Julia Roberts years). 

Even though all the vampires are boys, there’s really no gay vibe in the Michael storyline (aside from their fabulous outfits and impeccably moussed hair).  Michael's descent into vampirism is a metaphor for a kid getting wrapped up with the wrong crowd to impress a girl and maybe getting in over his head with drugs. Drugs are bad. 

In a truly transgressive twist, gay Corey saves the day.  He gets Michael into rehab, saves Dianne Weist from herself, and still makes it to the mall before they close to get one of those "I love to shop" tshirts!

You can tell Joel Schumacher was a designer in his past life because The Lost Boys is stylish as fuck.  It benefits from the MTV age in that it’s super slick (shot by the DP of Taxi Driver) with a soundtrack that aged like a fine Bordeaux.  Everyone from the actors to the set designers was on the same page, tonally, which is elusive. Initially this was meant to be a Richard Donner film but he passed for fear that the finished product would be a Fright Night retread and thank Goddess he did.  Without Joel Schumacher, we wouldn’t have this diamond of a film that manages to be something super specific to its era and really queer. 

When I was a little boy, I used to want nothing more than an older brother who was taller than me and who'd take me shopping with his girlfriend and turn out to be a vampire who would lie on top of me at night sometimes.  I’m blaming the The Lost Boys for this.  What a gift.

The Day of the Locust

Few things in life imbue me with unadulterated joy that comes from watching a big budget movie that goes completely off the rails. My favorite films are those that are so fantastically off, so absolutely ludicrous, so wrong in every way, so lost in the universe that I have no choice but to love them until the day I die.

In the years following her possession by the demon, Pazzuzu, Linda Blair has been eating her feelings in a major way. I can relate.  She tries to stay on top of her figure by performing in musical numbers at her private school, but she's fighting a losing battle. Her famous mother, Ellen Burstyn, has left her to live with the nanny, Sharon, in a fabulous Manhattan penthouse. 

Ellen feels guilty for abandoning Reagan so she pays for her to see the finest therapist in town, Nurse Ratched. Things are going well. Nurse Ratched works in a state-of-the-art underground facility specializing in autistic and mentally handicapped children (the real evil) where everything is shaped like hexagons and the doors open themselves like the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D. 

Then Richard Burton comes along, drunk on arrival. He’s pretending to be a priest who wants to clear Father Marron’s name.  It looks like saving a girl in Georgetown from a demonic possession that leads to your untimely death has the other priests a little spooked and they're calling Father Marron a heretic. That’s organized religion for you! Richard only speaks in rhetoric and old testament quotes. He even looks directly into the camera from time to time to make sure that we understand just how important all this is. This, my friends, is The Exorcist II: the Heretic!

Also, Reagan is magic this time around. She can commune with locusts and she can heal the sick and she’s teaching herself how to fly - but, wait. There’s suddenly another movie happening! 

Linda Blair’s movie loses out to a new movie where Richard Burton is in Africa and he’s speaking french, there’s postulating involved and indigenous people are trying to stone him to death and Reagan falls during her big tap number and suddenly Ned Beatty is there and he’s driving a plane… it’s a lot.

In 1973, The Exorcist defined verisimilitude in horror and showed us just how impactful genre story-telling could be in the modern era. The entire nation lined up to see it.  Can you even imagine having to wait in a line to see a movie? That’s commitment.  

After making a huge profit for Warners, the powers-that-be scrambled to get a sequel into production. This was no longer a movie, it was an IP!  

While the first film relished in a coherent narrative and naturalistic, emotionally driven performances, The Exorcist II: the Heretic went in a decidedly different direction. John Boorman made Deliverance for Warners in 1972, a small film that was audacious and unexpectedly scary. Why not give him the reigns to The Exorcist sequel (after Kubrick passed)? 

On paper it was foolproof: they got Richard Burton and Louise Fletcher for gravitas, Linda Blair was contractually bound to partake and, even though Ellen Burstyn wouldn’t go near it with a ten foot pole, Kitty Winn was available! Then something went terribly wrong. Catwoman wrong.

Homeosexuals love an underrated character actress and part of what makes this incoherent mess of a film so much fun is the performance of Kitty Winn. She was thanklessly at Ellen Burstyn’s side as Sharon in The Exorcist, but this time around she is front and center. 

Part of what makes this movie so delicious is that Sharon clearly hates Reagan. She ran away and stayed gone for two years, but what happened in the first film was so fucked up that the only time she can relax is when she’s near Reagan. Sis has a case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Behind every gesture, there’s a look of pure dread on Kitty’s face – clearly expecting it to all happen again. Apparently no one told Kitty that this wasn't a real movie and she's acting her ass off, she even wears a turban and shows her boobs. Oscar! Sharon has the only character arc to be found in the Exorcist II: the Heretic - it’s tragic, it’s over the top and she relishes every single moment of it! Did I mention the fact that James Earl Jones is dressed like a giant locust? 

Louise Fletcher went all kinds of method in researching her role as psychotherapist and wound up taking far too many pills. To call her line delivery monotonous wouldn’t do it justice, she’s phoning this movie in from her dining room with her Oscar firmly clutched her the other hand. 

In my opinion, the loss of Mercedes McCambridge was the films fatal flaw. Her demon voice is a big part of what made The Exorcist so scary. In The Exorcist II: the Heretic, the demon sounds ridiculous - like when I used to run around the kitchen pretending to be a little girl pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the West while my Nana was making boxed Devil’s Food cake.   Much like that cake, I love it. The Heretic is a camp classic upon which I am bestowing my gay-stamp of approval. If you disagree, get your own stamp at Paper Source - they're usually half off the day after Pride if you get there early enough.

Looking for Mr. Gaybar

"It's Halloween, bro."

What happens when a generation no longer has to fight for the right to dance in their small town? What happens when we're raised from kindergarten to be well aware of safe sex practices and how we are all free to be you and me? What happens, my dear friends, is the arrival of the "Post-Gay" gay film. These movies no longer ghettoize the gay characters and I can count them on one hand. 

Queers no longer have to be a martyr so the heroine can live happily ever after (Single White Female, I'm looking at you!); we are no longer sexually repressed into manic rages and killing sprees. Despite the fact that their numbers are few, their existence should nonetheless be heralded from every bell tower! My favorite of these post-gay gay horror movies is Paul Etheredge's Hellbent.


Hellbent opens on a happy couple of bros walking through the mythical West Hollywood forest at night. They're on a date and ready to go all the way in the front seat of a 1970 Chevy Nova full of balloons. Nothing is hotter. Nothing.  Bro #1 leans his head out the window to give bro #2 a better angle. Unbeknownst to bro #1, this is the perfect angle to get his head chopped clear off. You see, there's a killer on the loose and he's hunting gays...in West Hollywood...on Halloween.  This is progress!

Eddie is a misguided Hot who wants to be a cop for some reason like his dead dad before him but his Sammy Davis Jr. glass-eyeball keeps him tied to a desk job. Like Halloween’s Laurie Strode before him, studious and chaste, Hot Eddie partakes in lollipops in favor of having drinks with the boys and spends his time off papering the neighborhood with flyers warning of a killer on the loose (good thing gays don't read more than a couple paragraphs at a time). But there is a scratch in Eddie's goody-two-shoes veneer: has a taste for bad boys! 

He sets his sights on Jake, a piece of rough trade he can't seem to stop running into all over town. Faster than you can say "Scarecrow and Mrs. King," they are out to solve the mystery and do everything in their power to make it out alive so they can finally hook up.

If there was one lesson we all learned from those years of Sex and the City, it's that friends are the family you make for yourself!  As queer people, we are here for one another - even that bitch we hate with the book deal and the fancy apartment you have no clue how he pays for - if he’s in trouble, we’re there.  That’s what we do. That’s why the straights are so scared of us. We have community.  

The real heart of Hellbent is found in the dynamic between Eddie and his friends. These boys are a good family. They help each other with their problems (having a crush on a guy who you can never seem to get away from his bitchy queen friends, being chased through the Halloween parade by a homicidal muscle daddy, etc) and they love each other a whole lot. No one is winking at the camera, no one is playing the gay panic, they all just exist.  How crazy that just seeing people exist on camera is a revolutionary act, but here we are. 

Like John Carpenter's Halloween, this movie takes time to establish character and context. Hellbent has some great visuals, lots of blood, and more intermittent-fasting-induced abs than you can shake a stick at. 

If A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is the Citizen Kane of gay horror, then Hellbent is definitely the Showgirls.  At least I think that’s so.

Sleepover with the Enemy

“Evil is a word people use when they’ve given up trying to understand someone.”

When an actor feels like he’s being typecast or decides that he wants to win some awards, he plays gay. Macauley Culkin, hot off the runaway success of Home Alone and at his peak earning potential, was no exception to this rule. Thusly, The Good Son (1993) was born. The Good Son was written by Ian McEwan as an early-90s domestic thriller/woman in peril film. Only, somewhere along the line, Elijah Wood wound up playing the woman role.  Fabulous.


When I was about 9 years old, the boy who lived next door showed me his junk in a fort we made. Two days later he tried to kill me by throwing bricks at my face and we weren’t friends anymore. That’s pretty much what happens in The Good Son.

Elijah’s just lost his mother so he’s real raw, blaming himself and crying a lot. Naturally, this is the perfect time for his dad to pawn him off on his Aunt (who is also in a period of deep grief, having just lost her son in a mysterious bathtub drowning). 

Once Elijah makes a new friend in town, internationally renowned child star, Macauley Culkin, he feels much better.  Sometimes being celebrity adjacent makes people feel like they matter more. After your second party at Joyce Dewitt’s house, you learn that’s all a scam, but Elijah was still young.   Next thing you know, they stop going to school - they start going to the same stylist - Macauley shows Elijah how to eat a lobster and crank call CAA. They play tickle wars in a treehouse, they even see the same therapist. A classic bromance.  But when hormones start raging and there’s no place to put all that sexual tension, all good things must end. Three weeks later, they’re taking their confused dynamic out on small town New England: throwing dogs down wells and causing twelve car pile-ups on the freeway.  A regular Bonnie & Clyde! 

When Macauley’s blood lust grows out of bounds and Elijah’s aunt is too preoccupied with her hours standing on a precipitous cliff side staring out at sea and pontificating while her gay son is off on killing sprees, it’s up to our heroine, Elijah Wood, to take matters into his own hands.

Call me a faggot, but I just love a movie where parents send their kids to live far away! When this film works best, it plays like a 1940s women in prison film. There are genius moments, like when Elijah’s aunt slaps him square in the face on the ocean bluff and when Macauley looks at Elijah, takes a beat, and says “…don’t fuck with me.” Much like the Beyonce/Ali Larter epic, Obsessed, The Good Son’s final scene makes the entire film well worth the seventy-five minutes leading up to it.  Good, indeed.

When I was 12, this film was shot in my hometown.  They came to pick out extras for one of the big action scenes.  Finally! My big break. I still remember lining up on a Saturday morning at my now-abandoned and clearly haunted elementary school in Gloucester, MA.  I was at my absolute chubbiest and I would try to cover that up by wearing blousy silk tops like Parker Lewis who Couldn’t Lose. The casting people didn’t like me. It was an ice skating scene and they were afraid I’d crack the ice,  but then I wound up getting invited to Elijah Wood’s on-set birthday party because there were no kids his age around except the production designer’s daughter who was named Rosilyn and whom I was completely in love with. I invited her on a date to see Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but she brought another girl so it wasn’t a date.  In fairness, I didn’t have a crush on her as much as I just wanted to be her: star adjacent and visiting from Los Angeles, not stuck in small town New England. Elijah Wood went on to star in the Lord of the Rings movies and I have a horror blog so I guess everything works out in the end.