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A review by justinlife
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
I'm rating this higher than I thought at first because the overall curation of essays is really good.
Queer people's relationship with the horror genre is something that I'm glad was explored and Vallese found essays from almost every type of queer experience. It's quite impressive. Not all the essays worked for me. I was honestly hoping for more queer readings of films than personal stories and some of the stories only seemed loosely connected to the the movies they were writing about.
I appreciated a lot of the perspectives- the relating to the monster, the body issues, the family issues. Some of the queer subtext people found I never saw (here's looking at you Jaws and Exorcist). But that's cool. Love this for them. There were some essays that felt too personal and too intimate- The Child's Play essay, the Friday the 13th one are examples of essays where I was like "does your partner/child know you wrote this, because awkward."
I think there's a lot worth liking and it was definitely interesting to read. I would read another volume.
Queer people's relationship with the horror genre is something that I'm glad was explored and Vallese found essays from almost every type of queer experience. It's quite impressive. Not all the essays worked for me. I was honestly hoping for more queer readings of films than personal stories and some of the stories only seemed loosely connected to the the movies they were writing about.
I appreciated a lot of the perspectives- the relating to the monster, the body issues, the family issues. Some of the queer subtext people found I never saw (here's looking at you Jaws and Exorcist). But that's cool. Love this for them. There were some essays that felt too personal and too intimate- The Child's Play essay, the Friday the 13th one are examples of essays where I was like "does your partner/child know you wrote this, because awkward."
I think there's a lot worth liking and it was definitely interesting to read. I would read another volume.