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Elliott-Smith, Darren. Queer Horror: Film and Television - Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. New York: I.B. Taurus, 2016. 252 pp. hb. ISBN 978-1-78453-686-2. $94.00.
Darren Elliott-Smith examines the complications resulting from "queer appropriations of horror conventions" in Queer Horror: Film and Television - Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins (3). In considering the apprehensions that ensue when gay men experience "judgement by heteronormative standards" that are inherent in the horror genre, Elliott-Smith argues that "these anxieties encourage a homonormative apeing of heterosexual culture which, in turn, feeds further anxieties surrounding the cultural conflation of gay masculinity with a shameful femininity" (3). To address these concerns, Queer Horror conducts a multifaceted psychoanalytic interrogation. Though he offers this framework as a method for understanding how the phenomenon of queer horror works in general, he notes that "these readings ... rely on close textual analysis and interviews with the directors and producers of these films, who themselves invest, to a varying degree, Freudian theory in relation to the horror films into their work" (9). Considering that recent theorists like David Halperin have called the ongoing stigma of psychiatric brokenness into question and considering how long queer individuals have labored to rid themselves of the negative stereotypes associated with cinematic depictions of themselves informed by psychoanalysis, many queer theorists would understandably shudder at any attempt to traverse this troubled terrain. However, Elliott-Smith treads this path carefully, providing space for his work to make a critical and useful intervention in the perilous field of Queer Horror.
Elliott-Smith emphasizes specific texts to ground his analysis throughout the six paired chapters that are grouped roughly into three parts. Chapter 1 addresses the complexities of monstrous femininity depicted in Brian De Palma's 1976 film, Carrie. This film remains central in Chapter 2 where it becomes literally incorporated into a short film by Charles Lum that deals with anxieties about HIV and AIDS. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on films that embody what Elliott-Smith calls "Gaysploitation" horror. Chapter 5 addresses the messaging in Paul Etheredge-Ouzts' 2004 queer-inflected slasher film, Hellbent, whereas Chapter 6 deals with recent and ongoing homo-horrific representations including those in limited television series.
Because celebrated iconoclastic filmmaker Brian De Palma famously claimed Alfred Hitchcock's psychoanalytically inflected narrative style as a...