By admin Here we are again. For the fourth year in a row, Autostraddle will spend the month of October publishing sticky, squelchy, bloody good essays by queer and trans writers about horror movies. Most of those movies we write about are not explicitly or obviously queer in nature, but from them we will excavate hidden meanings and metaphors. In addition to those personal essays, we’ll also present you with some more service-driven articles that do highlight explicitly queer works of horror, including lists of books, films, and shows to lose yourself in during this fearsome month.
Horror Is So Gay (dubbed HORROR IS SO G4Y in this fourth year) is hands down my favorite project I’ve launched since becoming Autostraddle’s Managing Editor in 2021. Through these four years, we’ve published some incredible essays, and I encourage you to dig through the archives in addition to jumping into the new work we’ll publish this month. There is never an explicit theme to the series, but every year, it seems as if one emerges organically. This year, unsurprisingly, HORROR IS SO G4Y is greatly informed by the real-world horrors we’re writing these pieces from within. Horror movies so often act as warning beacons, signaling the dangers of real-life threats from AI to capitalism to state-sanctioned violence. What can we learn from those warnings? What do Final Girls teach us about the art and urgency of survival?
We’re also going to have fun with this series, I promise. We always do, even as we’re wading through the muck of monstrous stories. We hope you’ll discover a new horror recommendation, weigh in with your favorites, and briefly immersive yourself in something other than The Horrors™. As I wrote in my first introduction to this series, “horror is quite possibly the queerest genre” — historically so, not just in recent years. This series is a celebration and dissection of that.
Let’s start with a conversation in the comments, inspired by Ghostface:
What’s your favorite scary movie?
