Queer for Fear docuseries trailer teases history of LGBTQ+ community and the horror genre
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Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror is taking a deep dive into the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and the horror genre.
EW can exclusively reveal the trailer (below) for the four-part documentary series, which premieres on Shudder Sept. 30 and covers everything from the genre's queer literary origins to the "lavender scare" alien invasion movies of the mid-twentieth century to the AIDs-obsessed bloodletting of '80s vampire films. The series is executive-produced by Bryan Fuller, the gentleman who brought us Pushing Daisies and the deliciously horrible and homo-erotic Hannibal TV show.
"Shudder wanted to do a follow-up to Horror Noire, which is a fantastic documentary about the history of Black people in horror films and how exploitation films are often the gateway for marginalized people to get into the industry," Fuller tells EW. "I'd seen an early cut of [Queer for Fear]and volunteered my services to help get it into shape and then it slowly evolved into less of a movie, like Horror Noire, and more of a series."
Shudder Poster for 'Queer for Fear'
He continues: "[We're taking] a broad definition of queer horror which includes includes Hitchcock films and women-in-prison films. In certain interpretations, a movie like Blade Runner can be seen through the lens of queer horror as a very specific story about marginalized people who want more rights and more life. So there's a wide variety of interpretations of queer horror and also of queerness. It just seemed that the project is so sprawling this really cannot be contained into an 80- or 90-minute narrative, because there are so many letters of the LGBTQ+ alphabet to cover."
Fuller's own earliest experience of queer horror involved Ridley Scott's science fiction classic Alien.
"I had been exposed to it through the photo novel that had been released with the film and had poured over that," he says. "Every time my mom went to the grocery store, I hid in the magazine area, and would pore over it, and study the cinematography and the production design. It is such a lovingly constructed film that is elevated with such savvy psychological production design as penis-headed monsters and vagina-shaped doors and all the Freudian and Jungian implications of a mother that betrays her family for the giant cock that just came to roost. Those things I perhaps was not aware of as a ten-year-old [laughs] but certainly once I started understanding that the monster was a big dick-head, the queer implications of that were readily apparent."
Exclusively watch the trailer for Queer for Fear below.
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