I was exposed to queerness from birth as my mom got with her then-girlfriend the April after I was born. Looking back at this, four of the essays that were my most favorite were about films I had seen before, 2 were about films that I would consider new favorites after watching them in anticipation for this collection, and 1 was about a film that I would consider my LEAST favorite film out of all those mentioned in this collection.

There are spoilers for the movies but you don’t need to have seen all of them to gain something from the essays. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. Joe Vallese is editor of It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror and co-editor of the anthology What’s Your Exit? The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.I just made it a point to watch ALL of the films shared in this collection BEFORE reading the essays based on them. Bardzo byłam podekscytowana czytaniem jak zaczynałam, a ostatecznie mnie strasznie momentami męczyła. I will say, I skipped the essays for the movies I hadn't seen yet, but I really loved many of the essays I did read (around half). HOWEVER, I was completely enthralled by the personal details of his writing, his marriage to a woman while struggling with his attraction to men, but even more, his blossoming secret interest in gaining weight and other men gaining weight.

I can see some readers being disappointed if they went into this just wanting straight up film criticism and weren’t expecting personal essays.His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, and North American Review, among other publications. Some essays tend more towards personal reflection and memoir, others more towards analysis of various films through a queer lens; some move into lyrical "creative nonfiction" territory and others take their tone from the humanities graduate student essay or the chatty, freewheeling blog post. Książka ma podtytuł „QUEER Reflections on Horror”, ale równie dobrze mogłaby nazywać się „Gay and Occassionally Trans Reflections on Horror. All in all I think this book really bridges a gap between a queer memoir storytelling and academic media analysis making the topics accessible to a wider audience. It Came From the Closet is at times beautiful, at times funny, at times gorgeously weird and baroque, and always as off-kilter brilliant as the genre, and queerness, itself.

I often start books that include any sort of academic media review assuming that I may put them down due to boredom. As someone always seeking “the otherness” in storytelling because of my identity, these essays spoke to me on many levels. First with Shudder's Queer for Fear series that aired in October, and now with this collection of horror movie analyses through a queer lens. She is also the author of two novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a short memoir, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists.Finally: a smart and serious yet playful book that interrogates the complex queerness of horror and the films that make a horror of queerness. Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously. if you’re looking for a diverse theorization about queer appreciation for the horror (film) genre, look no further!

This book is a must-read, and I hope that there will be another collection following this theme very soon because I'm already craving so much more. In a review published by Autostraddle, Abeni Jones talked about the usefulness of the collection to readers who might not necessarily enjoy horror films but who are looking for queer representation, citing essays on Jaws and The Birds as examples.It Came from the Closet collects twenty-five takes on twenty-five horror films that make us cringe, crack up, turn away and turn back again—each piece lavishly queer in its intelligence, vulnerability, and wit.