The 5 Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies
At some point, possibly in the 80s, Hollywood decided that a good horror movie needed to be built on a strong foundation of homoerotic subtext. We're not saying it's a bad thing, this is 2009, after all.
What we are saying is that their strenuous efforts to both cram in as much homoeroticism as possible, while avoiding actual gay characters or storylines, is the stuff unintentional comedy is made of. For example...
The Lost Boys (1987)
Summary:
A handsome young man is targeted by vampires. Everyone is dressed like members of WHAM!
After moving to the flamboyant new town of Santa Carla, Michael falls in with a crowd of bad dudes after being attracted by the gang's sole female member, Star. Strangely, none of the fellas in the gang seems to be showing any interest in her, forcing Michael to conclude that they're all in serious relationships with other female vampires.
Michael follows Star back to the vampires' lair, where the leader of the pack, David, tricks Michael into swallowing some of his bodily fluids. Or maybe it's not a trick, and Michael is just so impressed at having been invited over to Jack Bauer's house that he does it voluntarily.
Pretty soon, Star is nowhere to be seen, and Michael demonstrates his loyalty to vampire-Jack Bauer by jumping off a bridge. He then lets his family know about his new lifestyle by coming home sporting the international sign of vampire-gang membership: a single ear piercing. Even his younger brother, Sam, who prides himself on his flamboyant "young Elton John" wardrobe, seems shocked by this.
Later, there's a rushed sex scene with Star which is obviously added to draw attention away from the flaming sexual tension between Michael and pale-Jack Bauer. However, it's not enough to distract us from the moment that propelled this movie onto the list. A moment that makes the gleaming man with his saxophone and studded codpiece seem as hetero as Brett Favre.
The moment to which we refer comes when Sam opens his not-at-all-metaphorical closet, resulting in a shot which has led to years of speculation by experts.
That's Rob Lowe, folks.
Best Quote:
"My blood is in your veins!"Wait, Are You Sure This is "Unintentional"?
Look, it was a different time. And that different time was the 80s.
It was an era of men with waxed chests, in towels. Of moussed hair and pastel shirts. The whole world was flamboyant and nobody felt threatened by it. The Lost Boys seems to have been filmed purely as a time capsule for the era that gave us Top Gun. Show the film to an amnesiac or somebody born in 1991, and they'll say "Oh, that's what you mean by 'ambient gay.'"
So what if Corey had Rob Lowe in his closet. Lowe starred in St. Elmo's Fire, director Joel Schumacher's last film before he directed The Lost Boys. The picture on Sam's closet was probably more a jokey director shout-out than anything else.
On the other hand, Schumacher is openly gay and was responsible for putting the nipples and enormous dong on the batsuit.
Okay so maybe it was a little bit intentional.
The Covenant (2006)
Summary:
Caleb is the leader of a gang of "undercover" male witches who spend a lot of time showering together. He is obsessively targeted by a mysterious stranger, Chase, the new kid at their exclusive private school.
We don't want to read too much into the fact that the school's female students are featured mostly as blurry, indistinct figures in the background. Why read anything at all when we have an all-male naked locker room fight scene to watch?
"I'm gonna cast a magic spell. A magic ass spell. On your ass."
Yes, it's the classic story of male friendship: One man defends another in a naked brawl, sparked when one of the men is called gay. Our memory is a little hazy, but we're fairly certain that's how Mel Gibson met Danny Glover in the first Lethal Weapon.
After their bond if forged through butt-naked combat, Chase and Caleb hit some bars together and engage in extended male swimming competitions while wearing tiny, tiny shorts. Their relationship reaches its climax when Caleb discovers the secret that Chase hides away from the world in the clos ... cupboard deep within his soul. We're of course talking about the fact that Chase is also an undercover witch.
Chase becomes desperate to consume Caleb's magic, when he learns that Caleb has a special magic that will only fully develop once he turns 18. Chase stalks him, threatens his friends and eventually holds him down and kisses him.
"This is how we steal magic, right?"
This brings us to the final conflict, and the point at which the film pretty much whips the audience in the face with the homoerotic symbolism: In the climactic scene, the two men hurl magic translucent white globs of power at each other as Chase begs for Caleb's consent.
Best Line:
"How about I make you my wi-atch?"Wait, Are You Sure This is "Unintentional"?
"Be careful, my magic is very sticky and if it gets in your hair, you'll never get it out."
In this case, at least, all of the homoerotic subtext lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes prominently above it) seems to be a strange, misguided attempt to appeal to the young women who this film was plainly aimed at. The filmmakers must have spent some time in some chat rooms, and decided that homoerotic fanservice is all that is needed to sell tickets in these modern times.
To be fair, the obligatory girl-girl make-out scenes in modern slasher flicks demonstrates that producers don't have a much higher opinion of male horror fans.
The Forsaken (2001)
Summary:
Young man befriends vampire, ignores attractive woman for 90 minutes.
Don't let the scantily-clad female on the cover fool you into renting this movie for your men's beach volleyball after party. Actress Izabella Miko appears in approximately 10 minutes of footage, and the rest is devoted to a lengthy bromance between Sean and half-vampire Nick. The naked women, gratuitous violence and vampire car chases thrown in throughout the film just make the homoeroticism stand out more, the same way that Al Pacino's presence in The Devil's Advocate made Keanu Reeves look even dumber.
The plot kicks off when Sean is asked to transport a car cross country, and given a specific no-hitchhiker rule by his employer. And he's able to follow it until a young blond hitcher, named Nick, catches his eye and asks, "Use some company?" Oh, we know the answer to that one.
Sean keeps Nick around even as he gets him fined by the cops, steals his food and money and randomly strips an unconscious girl naked in his hotel room. Unfortunately, this loyalty doesn't pay off because both the girl and Nick turn out to be vampires, and Sean gets his ass bitten (not literally).
Nick then explains that Sean has been infected with a blood disorder that can only be slowed with a cocktail of drugs.
"Also you have to let me stick my finger in your mouth. To cure your blood disorder, you see."
The two young men team up to attract and kill the head vampire, a Frenchman who also seems to have a thing for Sean. The head vampire, though, is no match for the most powerful force in the universe: white hot, masculine love. The film ends as the two men stare meaningfully into each other's eyes, and ride off into the sunset together.
Best Quote:
"I need all the muscle I can get!"
Wait, Are You Sure This is "Unintentional"?
It hardly seems possible; after all, the subtext is so obvious the guy who played Sean was asked about it (before this film, he was best known for playing an openly gay man on Dawson's Creek).
This certainly doesn't look like a vampire movie.
But, he did deny it. So, hell, maybe it was just a case where the chemistry of the two male actors combined to create a flash of spontaneous homoerotic combustion. It happens. If you've ever hung around a college fraternity, you know what we're talking about.
Jeepers Creepers II (2003)
Summary:
It makes sense that a man-eating monster might eat the occasional half-naked teenage boy. But when it's all he eats, the other monsters might start asking questions.
The first time we see the winged monster from Jeepers Creepers, he's preying on a young boy in a cornfield. Next, he targets a bus of mostly shirtless high school football players. Their team is called the Bantams, a name which prompts its members to sing lengthy songs about "fighting cocks" while the three token female students sit up the front, bewildered.
When the bus suffers a mysterious flat tire caused by a ninja star made of human body parts...
We weren't kidding. Surprise!
... the boys disembark and then take the opportunity to, uh, do this.
They also spend a long time urinating together, all the while accusing each other of being gay. The idyllic scene is interrupted when the monster starts hunting the team from the air, first carrying off the adults. The boys do what any other person would do after seeing three brutal murders occur in front of them: continue to accuse each other of being gay.
The monster eventually appears, winks at the boys, licks the glass and makes what can only be described as the world's most terrifying orgasm face.
Then he starts hunting them, and first kills a young man after ripping off his shirt. The half-naked corpse lies provocatively on the ground for the remainder of the film, the camera often pausing on it lovingly.
He continues to hunt down male victims, until he is shot and brought down by the father of the first boy he killed.
Best Quote:
"Thinking you're going to come onto me and every other swinging dick on this bus makes me nervous!"
Wait, Are You Sure This is "Unintentional?"
God, we hope so. The "creepy old monster preys on young boys" theme takes this one way past the homoerotic horror zone and into a whole different, leather chap clad territory. You see, writer/director Victor Salva, following the well-worn path of pederast filmmakers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, was convicted of having sex with an underage boy in 1988. He was not allowed to be alone with children on set while filming this movie.
Victor Salva.
A Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Summary:
Freddy Krueger spends an entire movie trying to get into a young man's body.
Young Jesse, who has just moved with his family into a house on Elm Street, is suffering from intense dreams that make him wake up shirtless and sweaty, often times not wearing pants.
Jesse's habitual pantlessness continues at school, where he is always either at gym having his shorts pulled down, or else in the locker room, being tormented by a cruel coach. Eventually Jesse's friend, Lisa, finds a diary in his room that contains the story of Freddy Krueger, along with an erotic description of Johnny Depp.
That night, Jesse dreams of going to a bar, where he is ambushed by his leather-clad coach. The coach takes Jesse back to the school, makes the boy run laps and then shower while he watches. But don't worry, the coach gets his comeuppance in the most appropriate way possible: By being attacked by balls.
Balls balls balls.
Black balls, white balls, all different types of balls. The balls shower him, filling the locker room and bouncing in front of the screen as the coach cowers in a mixture of terror and fascination.
If you think we're stretching on the whole "slapped in the face by balls" thing, well, next he's dragged into a shower, stripped naked and whipped.
The next day at school, Jesse finds out that the coach really has been murdered. Jesse is disturbed about this, but not as disturbed as a few scenes later, when Lisa tries to seduce him at a party she's hosting. Lisa's come on (and not the revelation that he can kill people with his dreams) cause Jesse to totally freak the hell out. Like most teenage boys, Jesse expresses his anger by running away into one of his male friend's bedroom, declaring "someone is trying to get inside my body!" and then asking the poor dude to watch him sleep.
Disgusted, his friend falls asleep, so Jesse transforms into Freddy and kills him. He then returns to the party, where he first goes to kill a female. Just before slicing her up, he remembers that horror movie deaths are supposed to be a metaphor for sexual violence, so he turns away in disgust, goes outside and starts killing off male partygoers.
At this point, the movie switches to the more natural horror progression, with Lisa morphing into a "final girl" and convincing Jesse to overpower Freddy. Freddy, apparently realizing that Jesse is just not that into him, begins to lose power. Lisa kisses Freddy, which evidently greatly disgusts him. Freddy's skin falls off and Jesse is there again, revealing to the audience that the teenage boy was inside Freddy the whole time.
Best Quote:
The entire film.
Wait, Are You Sure This is "Unintentional"?
This film is the perfect storm of homoerotic horror: the "boys being stalked" theme mentioned above, coupled with 80s camp and topped off with a layer of extreme, pure, gratuitous capital "G" Gay.
There is nothing logical that can explain the level of homoeroticism in this movie. Rumor has it that the main part was originally written for a girl, but that doesn't come close to covering it. If Jerry Falwell had been right, and there really was a covert lobby trying to convert people to homosexuality through entertainment, the lobbyists would have seen the script for this film and said "Whoa, tone it down a bit, guys."
And here, perhaps, we get to the real cause of all the flaming homoeroticism in modern horror. Just as film makers figured young girls would like seeing cute guys wrestle around in tiny shorts, they also knew what would disturb young boys.
Just take all of those fears young men have when they are their most sexually insecure, and run with them. It's not just a movie about a boy being targeted by a male aggressor. It's a two-hour spectacle featuring crotch shots, giant snakes wrapping around faces, board games on shelves libeled "Probe" and giant rectums drawn on boards.
So either Wes Craven was intentionally pushing homophobic buttons, or his dream journal reads like the most disturbingly homoerotic piece of fanfiction on the Internet (a summary of which you can read here).
Read more stuff from C. "Sephira" Coville at her website.
Don't forget, they're trying to turn you gay through rap also! Check out The 11 Most Unintentionally Gay Rap Lyrics Ever. And check out which celebrities need to come out of the closet... the Scientology closet (see what we did there?), in The Top 10 Secret Celebrity Scientologists.
And go check out the totally gay boobs in Cracked.com's Top Picks.
