Homoerotic Horror: 7 Movies That Put the Adam and Steve Into All Hallow’s Eve

Audiences may not have caught on right away, but as the years have gone on, a nexus of horror fans and gay fans, two groups who trend toward the dedicated, have spread the word far and wide about the campy second installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Having moved on from tormenting Nancy Thompson in the first film, Freddy Krueger has now targeted young Jesse Walsh, who is never explicitly labeled as gay or closeted in the film, but everything about the film’s subtext points in that direction, including the actor, Mark Patton’s, performance. Jesse dances in his bedroom, wanders into gay bars, and talks about the man in his dreams who’s trying to get inside him. At some point, the film hits a point of critical mass and goes beyond mere 7th-grade snicker material into actual subject material. Patten and screenwriter David Chaskin pointed fingers for years as to whether the gay subtext came from the performance or the script, but the bottom line is that horror audiences who are so inclined can find an early example of queer horror in one of the most profitable and popular franchises of all time.

Where to stream A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Originally conceived as a vampiric spin on the Peter Pan tale — hence the title — this late-’80s Joel Schumacher movie outfits the gang of bad vampires like a hair-care-commercial’s version of a street gang. Vampires have always been prime material for gay subtext in horror. When biting on the neck is your primary form of aggression, it’s not to far of a leap to the homoerotic. Keifer Sutherland’s attempts to seduce Jason Patric into becoming a vampire are, in fact, a seduction, no matter how you look at it.

Where to stream 'The Lost Boys'

If the vampiric seduction in The Lost Boys had a teaspoon of gay subtext in the mix, Interview with the Vampire broke out the measuring cups to dole out its same-sex spin on the creatures of the night. Louis (Brad Pitt) spins his tale of being brought to the dark side by the endlessly alluring Lestat (Tom Cruise). The moment Lestat ushers Louis into the fraternity is one of the all-time great make-out scenes. And that’s not even getting into horny-ass Euro-trash vampire Antonio Banderas later in the movie, who stares at Louis like he’s the cheese plate and gets off on running his fingers through an open flame. This movie is dripping with very gay, very sexual vibes, and it’s fantastic. Director Neil Jordan, who’d just prior seen a ton of success pressing Western culture’s gender and sexuality buttons in The Crying Game, put the two hottest movie stars in America into a quasi-sexual relationship, and it made a hundred million dollars. What a time to be alive! Or, you know, not, in this case.

Stream Interview with the Vampire on Netflix.

There’s actually not a ton of actual gay subtext in Scream, unfortunately. But it’s a great example that when gay audiences yearning for representation latch onto a product, they will ferret out whatever is available. So it is with thrill-killers Billy (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu (Matthew Lillard), who’s teaming up to murder their classmates as an act of revenge (Billy’s) and lunacy (Stu’s) is horrifying, but their kitchen-counter bickering once they’ve been unmasked has the unmistakable air of a longtime couple arguing over the best route to take home from the dinner party. Billy and Stu became unlikely avatars for homoeroticism in Scream and in the modern teen-horror wave of the late ’90s in general. (Another example: the omnidirectional fuck vibes Josh Hartnett is shooting at everyone, male or female, in Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty.)

Where to stream Scream

The Forsaken was the ideal homoerotic horror movie for the WB generation. The teen horror craze that sparked with Scream in 1996 dovetailed with the teen TV wave that dominated the WB network, with shows like Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, Roswell, Felicity, and the ever-important Jack & Jill. Three of the above-pictured quartet of actors spent their time in the WB salt mines, which made this movie very attractive to the teen set. But whether the film, a fairly transparent gloss on Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire road movie Near Dark, was explicitly intended to appeal to gay audiences, it can’t be a coincidence that the cast included this many gay-adjacent faces. Schaech was a veteran of queer auteur Gregg Araki’s films. Smith played groundbreaking gay character Jack McPhee on Dawson’s Creek. And former MTV VJ Simon Rex had … starred in some gay porn videos. The whole movie was one big dog whistle, and if you were, say, barely out of your teens and closeted and into vampire movies for [reasons], this movie had some appeal.

Stream The Forsaken on Prime Video

If The Forsaken was the perfect homoerotic horror movie for the WB generation, then The Covenant was the perfect homoerotic movie for the CW generation. Starring recognizable hunks from Gossip Girl Chace Crawford and Sebastian Stan, the film also lingered on the perfect bods of Taylor Kitsch (who would debut in Friday Night Lights almost exactly a month after this movie opened) Steven Strait (currently of The Expanse), and Toby Hemmingway (who is honestly just so pretty). The movie is pretty terrible, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that four of these hot boys (Stan is the outlier OR IS HE?) are in a coven called the Sons of Ipswich. Teenage prep-school porno fantasies were made of these.

Where to stream The Covenant

Homoerotic horror: not JUST for the boys. While women in horror have always held a place of esteem — what with all those Final Girls and all — there are fewer prominent examples of homoerotic ladies in these movies. The female spelunkers of The Descent certainly cast off a defiantly bisexual vibe, though that movie is way too concerned with jangling every last one of our nerves in claustrophobic terror than with teasing out any girl-on-girl business. And too many male-centered horror movies have tried to cheat their way to titillation by teasing undulating succubi (a la Bram Stoker’s Dracula, say). But a movie like Jennifer’s Body, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama, gets it right. Jennifer (Megan Fox) goes demonic and suddenly her toxic friendship with Needy (Amanda Seyfried) gets injected with a little sexual element to boot. Rather than exist to titillate the boys, though, the kiss only further complicates the fucked-up dynamics in the friendship.

Where to stream Jennifer's Body