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cipheramnesia · 2 years

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Good Queer horror movies?

I've probably got like three other asks like this floating around but what the hell we got halloween around the corner, let's take another spin.

Like, how good and how queer right? For example, I would put Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation solidly in the queer category. However, they do require a little bit of background reading and review to grok the queerness. There are also buckets of old movies with queer coding and queer subtext, but I lean more modern, so I'm gonna put down some favorites where the queerness is the text. The down side is it means I'm missing out on some movies I probably should recommend, but I can't sit here and parse out fifty titles.

Anyway, off the top recently I would say Sound of Violence has been a huge favorite of mine, with a queer and murderous protagonist, following an exploration of body horror and synesthesia of sound evoking a sexual response. This isn't for everyone but I adore it.

All Cheerleaders Die is a regular recommendation of mine on queer horror, although parts of it haven't aged very well. But on the other hand the theme of love and queerness is delicious, with a witch whose powers and love for her girlfriend are so strong they literally bring her back from the dead. More recently released is Seance, which is good but a bit middle of the road insofar as horror goes. Still and all, has a bit of the vibe of All Cheerleaders Die but with less of the tone deaf bits.

Der Samurai is, probably unintentionally, my favorite transfeminine horror movie. One trans woman, one katana, one cop trying to repress his queerness, one small town of bigots, and one night of explosive bloodshed. I've watched this movie three times and it always leaves me breathless.

Equally beautiful is Titane, a transmasculine horror movie with strong body horror elements and a great deal of unreliable perspective from the camera. While we can't tell everything that is real all the time, the hallucinatory journey is full of moments of heartbreak and beauty. I actually had to turn it off a moment in overwhelming happiness at the line "you have always been my son."

The trans horror that gave me the most intense experience, and the most trauma, was Boarding School, about a child experiencing the first sense of being trans, but while also undergoing a combination of abuse and trauma and generational trauma at a school where parents leave children they want to forget they have. Between the throughline of the protagonist's Jewish heritage, the moments of self-discovery which transform swiftly to shame or violence, and the moment of claiming themselves for themselves like a phoenix, if you are trans, this movie will both fuck you up and call you out really bad.

I recently saw Jamie Marks Is Dead, a gay ghost story that is also a wonderful illustration of how limited the idea of horror being about "scary movies" is. It's painful and sad and true and had me weeping. Spiral (2019, aka "the good one") is an excellent killer cult / satanic panic type of movie which also really explores the differences of the gay experience a white guy has vs a black guy, with a big heaping of gaslighting and PTSD. While I think Jamie Marks is a more soulful movie, Spiral stands apart as a great example of how a horror movie can be a very good conventional horror movie that happens to have queer protagonists, while including lots of juicy subtext to make it a deeper and richer experience.

There's a few more solid wlw movies I'm gonna toss in at the end here, which I think are pretty good but don't have the energy to go into a lot of detail: Thelma, Raw, and Bloodthirsty. Of course there is one widely Tumblr-popular wlw horror movie that you might notice hasn't been included in the body of this text. The omission is intentional, and judgemental.

#queer horror #horror movies

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ninja-muse · 7 years

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One Sentence Reviews

Tagged by @accidentalspaceexplorer. Thank you!

Rules: When you get tagged, write a one sentence review for each of the last three books you read. Feel free to have a little fun with it. Then tag three (or more) friends to keep it going :)

1. The Brightest Fell by Seanan McGuire - Toby Daye stars in another solid mystery and adventure with the usual world-expansion, cool new characters, and absolute heartbreak, if slightly less bloodshed.

2. A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2 by John Romer - Romer strips away all the Western assumptions about Egyptian culture and builds us a new picture based on actual evidence that I found very beautiful and compelling.

3. The Clockwork Dynasty by Daniel H. Wilson -This was a fun sci-fi thriller that deals with robots, vendettas, and immortality—but it’s just a bit forgettable.

4. Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee - A perfect blend of superhero sci-fi, teen dystopia, and queer romance, this book hit a lot of my favourite tropes and made me miss my bus stop during the climax.

5. Voyager by Diana Gabaldon - I found this to be decent historical fiction and an all right romance, but it was so loosely held together that it felt like filler (and then there were all the issues with diversity and Those Tropes).

Tagging @turnt-pages @manuscripts-dontburn and @nightmare-in-the-stacks!

#book reviews #read in 2017 #tag memes #adult booklr

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recentanimenews · 7 years

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A Small Charred Face

Author: Kazuki Sakuraba Translator: Jocelyne Allen U.S. publisher: Viz Media ISBN: 9781421595412 Released: September 2017 Original release: 2014

Kazuki Sakuraba is a fairly prolific author in Japan, having written numerous short stories, essays, and novels; sadly, only a small handful of those have been translated into English thus far. Although Sakuraba is probably best known as the creator of Gosick (which, I’ll admit, I still need to actually read), my introduction to her work was through Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuhchibas, an award-winning, multi-generational epic which I thoroughly enjoyed. When Haikasoru, Viz Media’s speculative fiction imprint, announced that it would be releasing Sakuraba’s A Small Charred Face with a translation by Jocelyne Allen in 2017, I immediately took note. I was previously unaware of A Small Charred Face, originally published in Japan in 2014, and I’m not especially interested in vampire fiction, but with Sakuraba as the author, Haikasoru as the publisher and Allen as the translator–a winning combination with Red Girls–it instantly became something that I wanted to read.

The Japanese town in which Kyo lives is bathed in blood, a hotbed of organized crime, murder, and vice. With a population willing to avoid looking too closely at the surrounding bloodshed, resulting in a plentiful and readily accessible supply of food, it’s the perfect place for the Bamboo, vampiric creatures originating from the deep mountains of China, to secretly coexist with humans. Carnivorous grass monsters but human-like in appearance, the Bamboo are extremely powerful and resilient but vulnerable to sunlight, never age but are still mortal. Up until the point he meets one, Kyo was never quite sure if the stories he heard about the monstrous Bamboo were true or if they were just told to frighten children. Confronted with the immediacy of his own impending death while only ten years old, his mother and sister having already been killed by a group of hitmen, Kyo is unexpectedly rescued by a Bamboo. Mustah, impulsively acting in blatant disregard for the rules of his own kind by taking him in, saves Kyos’ life and in the process changes it forever. But even while Kyo, Mustah, and Mustah’s partner Bamboo Yoji form a peculiar, tightly-knit family, it will never be entirely safe from the dangers presented by humans or the Bamboo alike.

At its very core, A Small Charred Face is about the curious, complex, exhilarating, and often fraught relationships that evolve between Bamboo and humans. The novel is divided into three distinct parts–three tangentially related stories which can all be connected to Kyo and his personal experiences with the Bamboo. In some ways the stories are able to stand alone, but the references they contain make them more powerful when taken together as a whole. The first and longest section, “A Small Charred Face,” focuses on Kyo’s life with Mustah and Yoji. The two men are fascinated and enthralled by his humanity, at times treating him as something akin to a pet but also raising him as family while protecting him through his adolescence. To Kyo, Mustah and Yoji are his saviors, parents, and something even more which is difficult to define. The second part “I Came to Show You Real Flowers” serves as an epilogue of sorts to the first, following another Bamboo who becomes incredibly important to Kyo as well as a young woman who plays a crucial role late in his life. Finally there is “You Will Go to the Land of the Future,” a story which delves into the history of the Japanese Bamboo. Linking back to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it traces the tragic origins of the Bamboo’s strained relations with humans and the strict, harshly-enforced rules implemented to guard their society and existence.

A Small Charred Face opens with the brutal aftermath of the rape and murder of those close to Kyo with him facing a similar fate. It is a horrific, gut-wrenching scene, but the story that follows becomes surprisingly beautiful. Though still punctuated by moments of extraordinary violence and devastating heartbreak, A Small Charred Face is a relatively quiet and at times even contemplative work. The relationships shown are intensely intimate, with love, desire, and devotion taking on multiple, varied forms. The characters struggle and frequently fail to completely understand one another–the worldviews, life experiences, and fundamental natures of humans and Bamboo occasionally at odds–but the strength of the connections that they form regardless of and in some cases because of their differences is tremendously compelling and affecting. There’s also an inherent queerness to the stories that I loved. It’s perhaps most obvious through Yoji and Mustah’s partnership and the fact that Kyo spends a significant portion of his life presenting himself as a girl for his own safety, but many of the novel’s essential underlying themes explore found family, the need for acceptance, and what it is like in one way or another to be a hidden outsider within society. While A Small Charred Face resides firmly within the tradition of vampire fiction, Sakuraba’s contemporary take on the genre is still somewhat unusual and unexpected; I enjoyed the work immensely.

Thank you to Viz Media for providing a copy of A Small Charred Face for review.

By: Ash Brown

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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