The world wasn’t technically ending in 2003 — it just felt like it was. For the two years prior, the vision of our world as I and many other young people knew it shifted substantially. The events on September 11 brought to light much of the hatred and anger lingering beneath the seemingly cordial veneer of some of our communities. The people we looked to for guidance when it came to understanding these kinds of situations weren’t handling any of the “fallout” well themselves, often repeating the same vitriolic rhetoric you’d see being spewed by strangers on the news. Or worse, they were actually taking part in the racist violence that amped up in the aftermath. Adults appeared to be on heightened alert, they were suspicious of the people they once thought of as neighbors or acquaintances, and the U.S. government was busy justifying their freshly legal right to use surveillance technology to peer into the lives of everyone and anyone they wanted.

By the time the American War in Iraq was announced in March 2003, my friends and I were sick of it all, so we gravitated toward people taking action against the war and latched onto what we could: music, literature, art, and film.

In the fall of 2002, we had decided as a group that we were going to “get really into” film. Not as budding filmmakers but as conscious and educated consumers and critics. We wanted to have opinions about films, understand the history of filmmaking, and watch all the classics from long before any of us were even born. We researched, we made lists, we discovered all the ways we could get our hands on DVDs and VHS tapes besides the local Blockbuster, and we spent many Friday nights holed up in the den of my friend’s family home watching our discoveries and trying to have grown up conversations about them.

Movies would lead to more movies. The first time I saw Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later was as a result of one of us stumbling upon Trainspotting. We weren’t blown away by Trainspotting, but we liked it enough to watch The Beach, and liking that enough led us straight to Boyle’s newest release at the time.

28 Days Later is often credited with ushering in the “zombie renaissance” of the early 2000s, though I’ve never been sure if it was right to categorize the hordes of virus-infected, rage-filled people in the film as “zombies.” When we first watched 28 Days Later, we were already well-versed in the history of horror and had watched all of the George Romero and Evil Dead movies we could. I understood what a zombie was in our culture, and I even had an understanding of the racialized origins of the zombie itself, but there was something categorically different about the way they were presented in Boyle’s film.

In 28 Days Later, many people die, but not at the hands of the “undead.” In 28 Days Later, there is a virus that makes people “turn” but they don’t die. They never die. Their anger — every ounce of it contained in their bodies — becomes inescapable and uncontrollable. This “rage virus” turns every living person around the “infected” into an enemy the “infected” must eliminate by beating them to a bloody pulp.

The film opens with disturbing images of militarized violence, war, riots, and brutal attacks led by soldiers, cops, and other state actors in response to people’s frustrations with the state itself before panning out to show that these images are being watched by a chimpanzee strapped down to a bed. Quickly after the opening scene, the film moves to show us a group of activists breaking into the lab in the hopes of exposing the researchers there and freeing the chimpanzees from the torture of the experiments. When a scientist who works at the lab walks into the scene, he desperately pleads with them to leave the animals alone because they’re “infected” with a virus that lives in both their blood and saliva. The activists ask him what they’re infected with, and when he tells them they’ve been infected with rage so that the scientists can create a rage inhibitor, the activists scoff and release one of the chimps anyway. The chimp then flies out of its cage and attacks one of the activists by biting down on her neck, making her patient zero. She attacks the rest of the people in the room before the screen fades to black showing “28 days later…”

We fade back in on a close-up of a man’s face. He’s lying naked on a bed attached to some life-supporting machines in the ruins of a hospital. No one is there to greet him as he wakes from what appears to be a coma, and the hospital is in complete disarray. Jim (Cillian Murphy) finds some scrubs and shoes and makes his way onto the streets of London. Again, he is greeted by complete silence, no one in sight. Trash is strewn through the streets, red double decker buses are toppled over, and eventually, Jim comes to a wall filled with hundreds of missing persons notices. He’s trying to put the pieces together, but he can’t. He slept through it all.

When Jim is subsequently clocked by some of the “infected” and chased through the streets, he’s saved by Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), who take him to their hideout. In the makeshift safe zone, Selena and Mark explain what happened while he was in a coma: the virus’s discovery, its rapid spread throughout Great Britain, the government’s fascistic mishandling and mismanagement of the pandemic, their personal losses and sadnesses as a result of this ongoing catastrophe. Less than a month in, Selena and Mark — Selena, especially — are hardened by the battles they’ve had to fight for their lives and the lives of the people they loved. They’re furious at their government, they feel abandoned and alone, and they openly discuss the possibility of the British Isles being bombed to cleanse the government of its responsibility.

As Jim is listening to them, it occurs to him he has no idea whether his parents are alive or not and persuades Selena and Mark to travel on foot with him to their home. Once there, Jim learns his parents have killed themselves out of fear. Then, Mark is killed by Selena after he contracts the virus in an altercation with a group of “the infected.” After collecting themselves and gathering any supplies they can from Jim’s parents’ house, Jim and Selena take to the streets in search of more supplies and a new hideout. At the top of a large apartment, they notice a crude beacon built by other survivors. There, they meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who are free of the infection but are almost entirely out of supplies. Frank makes Jim and Selena listen to a radio dispatch from Manchester explaining that the British military has built a safe and open quarantine zone there. At first, Jim and Selena are cynical and unconvinced. They don’t believe traveling from London to Manchester is worth the risk, but Frank convinces them because he has something they don’t: a working car.

When the four of them begin traveling together, the film transitions to a somewhat typical road trip movie peppered with moments of intense anxiety and the threat of infection. The crew narrowly escapes danger together when they get a flat tire in an “infected”-infested tunnel; they raid an unmanned grocery store for treats and supplies; they find an idyllic spot in the English countryside to camp out for a night; they laugh with each other, eat together, and get to know one another. Even the survival-hardened edges of Selena’s personality begin to soften, making her feel more amenable and accessible to the rest of the group, while they all get closer and closer. Trust builds fast, as it usually does in these kinds of real and imagined circumstances, and they become bonded in their desperate hope to escape the hell their government has plunged them into. They’re willing to fight for and with each other for that chance, for the possibility of surviving the human-made apocalypse that’s befallen them.

But, at this point, that escape is still far gone. They eventually do make it to the military base at Manchester, and their hopes for something safer and more beautiful are dashed almost instantly. Frank contracts the virus on the base, and as he “turns,” he’s gunned down in front of Jim, Selena, and Hannah by a group of soldiers camouflaged in the surrounding woods. The soldiers round the rest up and take them to a “safe” zone of sorts created by the group of soldiers and their leader, Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). The men in West’s command are brash, annoying, and perform masculinity with an inflated sense of importance. They have no sense of duty toward other humans except to the men they’ve been trapped with. And Major West, well, he’s not only given up on trying to tame them, he’s promised that if they “behave” and “follow his orders,” he’ll find them women and girls to fuck. That was the whole point of the radio dispatch in the first place. Jim learns of West’s plan to drag Selena and Hannah into sexual slavery in the zone and rebels immediately, leading West to order some of the men to kill him. Finally out of sight, West orders the men to “prepare” Selena and Hannah by forcing them to wear dresses and make up. Selena tries to fight back, but they’re far too outnumbered. Jim escapes from his captors, invigorated by the righteous rage that’s built inside of him. He devises a plan to free Selena and Hannah and executes it brilliantly. Not only do they escape the safe zone in Frank’s car, but Jim also sets off a series of events that releases a small horde of “infected” into the safe zone.

Some time passes, and we see Jim, Selena, and Hannah living in relative safety in a home they found in the English countryside. It’s revealed that there’s a plane flying overhead looking for survivors, and the crew has prepared a large cloth sign for the pilot to see as he flies by them. In the final shot, the three of them smile at one another as they stop waving feverishly — they fought and they survived and maybe, just maybe they’ll finally have a real chance to escape together.

It’s easy to understand why a group of teenagers living in the highly polarized, violent aftermath of 9/11 would find something resonant about this film. It almost feels too on-the-nose now to make a direct connection between the post-9/11 atmosphere of surveillance, suspicion, more outward fascism, and isolation to the idea of a “rage virus” turning friends and family into irate, bloodthirsty, irrational hordes of enemies. We saw the connection on that first viewing.

But we kept watching it. In the spring and summer of 2003, I must’ve seen 28 Days Later over 20 times. It’s hard to remember why it felt so important for us to see it over and over again, but mostly, I think I interpreted it as a warning from Boyle and the writer of the film, Alex Garland, about what happens when governments provide no viable or healthy solutions to their people for the tragedies of their communities and then abandons them to figure it out for themselves. The “rage virus” that infected the people of 28 Days Later felt like a corollary to the anger, despondency, and political and social partitioning growing in our culture. The people fighting to survive the virus felt like all of us who were screaming and fighting — begging, even — for it to end. The vicious savagery of the soldiers who tried to kill Jim and rape Selena and Hannah seemed like a stand-in for the government’s response to our changing culture, for their need to respond to violence by giving into it, by pushing it even further. I’d interpreted the film as a cynical and somewhat hopeless vision of a future that was waiting for us if we didn’t reverse course somehow or, even better, make a new course to follow entirely. Thinking back, I know how badly I wanted to heed that warning. I never wanted to succumb to the “virus,” and I never did, though after the summer of 2003, I didn’t think much about 28 Days Later until earlier this year when my partner was asking me about horror movies she should see.

28 Days Later popped into my mind, and it felt especially strange to suddenly appear there when I didn’t even think of it during my early-COVID rewatch of every pandemic movie I knew, a sick form of exposure therapy where I was trying desperately to find meaning in what we were experiencing and to remind myself we’d get through it if we just kept working together. When we finally got around to watching it a few months ago, I didn’t feel like I was thrust back into the general ambience of the time when I first saw it. Although the post-9/11 cultural moment looms so large in my mind because I was so young at the time, the film aged so well it felt like it was speaking to the current moment, too. Or maybe it just felt like it was speaking to what the last 22 years have been like since it was originally released. Or maybe it just felt like it was speaking to the horrors “Western” countries have always wrought on their citizens and the people of the places they tried to claim as their own. Or maybe I was just a little delusional, a little tired and weary of the despair birthed by the COVID-19 pandemic, by the government’s mishandling and mismanagement of it, by all the preventable death and sickness, by our culture’s growing appetite for more fascistic governmental control than we already have, by so many people’s misplaced and misappropriated rage, by how people keep turning each other into enemies who must be torn down until nothing is left but the bloody, beat up pulp of their bodies.

Like Jim when he finally stands up to West and his soldiers, I’d come out of the last few years much worse for wear than I’d ever been in the history of my fighting and community organizing life. My cuts and bruises were showing everywhere I went — in my relationships, in my classroom, in my organizing activities, in the way I interacted with good news and bad news, in my ability to practice the hope I’d always been able to easily access — and I knew that though I had neither the intention nor the energy to address them. As I often do, I was relying on my absurd sense of humor and my ability to compartmentalize my feelings to keep me moving forward, and they did but as usual, that also comes with a cost.

Watching 28 Days Later that night with my partner, I recognized that my younger self missed something incredibly vital about the events of the film and the film’s message. While the ending of the film isn’t definitive, it is — for all intents and purposes — happy. And that comes on the heels of several happy moments dispersed throughout the film’s violences, tragedies, and close calls. From the moment Jim and Selena meet Frank at his apartment, he’s honest about why he put up the makeshift beacon in the first place: He needed to find people who would make the journey to Manchester with him, because if only him and Hannah embarked on the journey, then Hannah would be left to fend for herself if Frank was infected or killed along the way. He never says the word “community” explicitly, but in that moment, Frank understands exactly what it would take to survive this mess: a community of people working together to fight their way forward. He makes his case to Jim and Selena in the best way he knows how. This honesty, along with the fact that they agree to have each other’s backs as they press on, creates an immediate bond between all four of them. When they come up against the first test of their ability to work together, they pass it, concretizing their status as an improvised community of survivors brought together by the horrific circumstances of the pandemic and their righteous anger at their abandonment by the government that was supposed to protect them. In those happier moments interspersed throughout the film, they act with genuine vigilance toward one another, they attempt to figure each other out, and they poke fun as anyone would with someone they deeply care about. When Frank is infected and then killed by West’s soldiers, Jim, Selena, and Hannah react in horror together. They grieve his death, and they argue that Hannah should be allowed to bury and honor her father.

I started to think that maybe it wasn’t a warning but a parable instead, even if Boyle and Garland didn’t intend for it to be either. The way that this improvised community of strangers with disparate backgrounds and disparate understandings of the world around them came together in the face of the most monumentally dangerous moment they’d ever live (or not live) through abruptly reminded me of the way queer and/or leftist communities were often formed throughout our calamitous and tumultuous history of oppression and the way they’re coming together in the face of the grotesque state violence all over the world and our cyclical intensified persecution now. Jim and Selena were faced with a choice in that conversation with Frank: They could agree to go with him or leave Frank and Hannah stranded on their own. Selena was instantly hesitant about the whole endeavor, because she had been fighting mostly alone for the majority of that month, but the reality was that she and Jim needed community also. They could continue fighting and working together, and they might stay alive for a long time. But what Frank was suggesting was the creation of an actual faction, a small militia of dreamers to take on the rage-filled hordes around them as they pushed toward the potential of a better future. Their commitment and loyalty to one another is constantly and consistently tested, and they never fail in their unspoken and undefined duty to protect each other at all costs.

When we reach that climax of the film when Jim is able to save Selena and Hannah, Jim’s fury fuels a rampage of his own that is almost identical to the way the “infected” attack their perceived enemies. Selena witnesses this with a look of anxiety, but she doesn’t kill Jim as quickly as she claimed she would earlier in the film — she has to know for sure if he contracted the virus or not, and she can’t do that if she reacts in a split second. This encounter becomes one of the most powerful moments in the film, a moment that could’ve easily ended in utter disaster, enhancing the already catastrophic nature of the events they’ve had to endure. Selena’s loyalty to Jim, her belief in his willingness to fight as valiantly as he could to avoid contracting the virus, wouldn’t have been there without the bonds the crew created through their time together. In that moment, Selena, Jim, and Hannah fully understand the power of unity in the face of tyranny, subjugation, and death.

As far as I know, neither Boyle nor Garland identify as queer. Being that Boyle is white (albeit Irish) and Garland is generally perceived as white despite his mixed heritage, I can’t imagine they’ve encountered the kind of psychic torture marginalized people experience every day in the “West” and beyond. Although the cruelty of the misogyny of the patriarchy is highlighted through the actions of West and soldiers in the film, factors like race and sexuality are pretty much nonexistent in the overall narrative. Regardless, the strength and potentiality of what happens when people unite as a “found family” to defeat the gruesome and ghoulish brutality brought on them by their government and its foot soldiers takes over the latter half of the film so viscerally that I wonder how I missed it in those earlier viewings of the film.

Of course, the science here is a fantasy, but if we go back to the beginning of the film, the “rage virus” emerges from an act of state-sanctioned violence on animals forced to repeatedly interact with the sights and sounds of people committing cruel and barbarous acts on one another. From that short glance of the videos, we see the state’s violence begets suffering which begets more violence and desperation which then creates so much wrath in the chimpanzees’ bloodstreams that it’s possible for them to pass it on to other creatures through an attack. What’s produced by the “rage virus” isn’t righteous or noble like Jim’s or Selena’s or Frank’s. It’s just there, and its targets are totally unremarkable. Its targets are any people who are living without it, anyone different. This creates an extraordinary juxtaposition between the anger of the survivors and the rage of the “the infected.” The survivors’ anger is righteous and rightfully placed, whereas the “infected” experience an irrational rage bred from the violence of the forces that try to control us, aimed at nothing aside from the closest living person in their sight. I’m not sure if anything better exemplifies the current moment we’re in. State violence engenders more violence, but so little of it is truly justified or aimed in the direction of the parties who deserve it the most: the state, its actors, and the ruling class. Instead, so many people take their sadness about their living situations and their desperation for better lives out on the people around them who are also trying to survive the onslaught of daily injustices we’re forced to face.

Like “the infected” in the film, this gets them nothing except more resentment, outrage, isolation, and a life with very little meaning or purpose. 28 Days Later provides us with a reminder that there is always a way out of this, a reminder of something that queer leftists have always understood and have always tried to make people understand. With the loyalty, support, and sometimes even love of people who suffer similar circumstances as you do, it’s not impossible to escape the “rage virus” or even build a life worth living amongst the ruins of what the virus has created. In the face of the ongoing attacks against our individual and collective personhood and the fascist extremism bred as a result of those attacks, we always have the power to make a choice, just like Jim and Selena did: We can form those small militias of dreamers, outfit them with the supplies they need, and learn how to work together in service of destroying the ruined and ruinous world we live in to build a new one in its place — or we can throw up our hands and give ourselves over to the destruction we’ve seen and the destruction ahead. Even if there’s a little hesitation, I think the choice is clear.

HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.

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“In my dreams, I’m beautiful and bad.”
– A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

“Put on your masks and watch.”
– Halloween III: Season of the Witch

“I hear the sound of your terror ticking like a clock.”
– The Exorcist III

“I’m here with you. Can’t that be enough for now?”
– Friday the 13th Part III

“If you talk about things, they happen.”
– Poltergeist III

“The past is not at rest.”
– Scream 3

***

I love horror threequels. And shouldn’t I, if I call myself a queer horror fan? The weirdos, the freaks, the misfits of their series, the threequel is the closeted gay cousin at Christmas, the one no one really knows how to slot into things, perhaps including themself.

I’m doing the thing I tend to do, projecting myself onto something abstract in order to understand myself more concretely.

Yes, I can relate to a threequel.

A threequel is the point in a horror franchise where things go off the rails. Threequels overwrite rules, add new mythology or even undermine the old one, replace characters, generally fuck shit up. By the time you get to a threequel, a formula has been established. The first movie writes the world, makes the rules. The second continues or heightens the story. Direct sequels are common in horror, picking up shortly after where the first left off. If you watch Halloween and Halloween II back-to-back, there’s barely time to breathe.

If you create a formula in the first, then perfect it in the second, well, in the third is when you fuck it up. The formula works, so now throw it away. Write a new one. Just because something technically works doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reinventing. Many threequels are considered the worst installment of a franchise’s original trilogy. I count myself among the few fans of Scream 3, and still, knife to throat, I’m going to concede the first two are better, they just are.

But there’s something intoxicating about Scream 3’s weirdness, its willingness to push its meta framework to the most absurd limits, to go gleefully off the rails. The more recent Scream films attempt and ultimately fail to run wild. For all their big kills, they’re still playing it too safe. Threequels never play it safe. I used to, until I didn’t.

***

In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the teen descendants of Freddy Krueger’s original murderers are haunted by the monster their parents unknowingly immortalized the night they decided to kill him for his crimes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is easily the gayest film in the Nightmare franchise, dripping with homoerotic horror, oozing an allegory for repressed (queer) sexual desire. But A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is queer in the threequel sense, in its refusal to follow the rules. It takes place six years after the first and sees the return of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy, a still traumatized but at least now medicated young adult, her alcoholic mother dead and her father taking up the alcoholic mantle. Dream Warriors is more connected to the first film than Freddy’s Revenge, but it still rewrites the rules. Here, the teens don’t just dream of the same monster. They can have the same dreams. Patricia Arquette’s Kristen can pull the others into her dream so that they all share dreamspace together, a collective world where they collectively fight to undo the trauma they’ve inherited.

The Nightmare films are some of the scariest of the popular slasher franchises, but they’re also occasionally very silly, and that’s true of Dream Warriors, which includes a sequence where the shapeshifting Freddy —disguised as a hot nurse —seduces Joey and then enlarges his tongue in Joey’s throat before spitting out a series of detachable tongues that bind him to the bed. Tongue bondage. Very silly (not to mention, homoerotic).

This is just like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, I might have said, when trying to pull others into my (day)dreams.

I daydreamed obsessively for a very long time. Maybe I daydreamed a normal amount. I wouldn’t know because I rarely talk about it, these daydreams. Maybe what I’m calling daydreams are just regular thoughts, interiority, but I don’t think so.

I constructed an entire alternate version of myself for these daydreams, a character really. Her name was Carmen, because I began to build out this daydream world when I was a couple months shy of my ninth birthday and had just seen the movie Spy Kids, in which the preteen protagonist is named Carmen. This is already sounding silly which I guess is why I didn’t really talk about it.

I tried out loud only once. At a sleepover at my house, my best friend Kelsey asked me to tell her a secret. She did it as an excuse to tell a secret of her own, which she did, which was that she’d made out with a particular boy on school grounds. I had only a vague understanding of what constituted making out and how it differed from just kissing, but as I often did with her, I pretended. A year before, I pretended to know why when she told me maybe I should stop spelling “come” like “cum” over AIM. I was too scared to Google it.

The thing is, I was itching to tell this secret, to let someone into my daydream world, the world of Carmen, who I imagined storylines for in a never-ending novel of sorts — or, more like a set of serialized fanfiction. The world was populated not with characters I made up but with existing ones, pulled from all my favorite shows, movies, and books. Don’t make me list them; this already feels unbearably vulnerable. It’s one thing to recap a dream for someone, another entirely to let you actually see the ugly, strange, naked mess of it.

I tried to tell Kelsey about this daydream world, but it wasn’t cuming out right. She asked if I was talking about playing pretend, asked it in a way that implied we were too old to still be doing that, even though she had vague ambitions of becoming a model-actor-dancer, which surely involved some level of pretending. She said her mind wandered sometimes, too.

No, no, no, no, she wasn’t getting it.

My mind wasn’t wandering when I daydreamed. My thoughts felt sharp when I slipped away, my mental focus like a single light beam from a flashlight. All my desires, everything I wanted to be or do, I could do in these daydreams, and it almost felt realer than real life. I could rewrite the rules over and over. In real life, I obsessed over following the rules given to me, to the extent I had a reputation as a good girl, a nerd. It was already causing a rift in my relationship with Kelsey, who by comparison was more attracted to risk and rule-breaking.

I tried to tell Kelsey about this daydream world, but the part I couldn’t quite articulate without using a million mixed metaphors and euphemisms was that “Carmen” was me but a better version of me, a more experienced version, too. As in Carmen had sex. I, a person who didn’t understand the connotation of cum or even what really constituted making out, was trying to explain how my daydreams doubled as sexual fantasies. After my failed attempt to come out as Carmen, this idealized but also slanted version of myself who was somehow a witch and a spy and a dancer, a hero and a slut, I never tried to tell anyone again.

If Kelsey didn’t get it, no one would.

In my dreams, I’m beautiful and bad.

***

In Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a group of witches —though they’re never actually called that in the film, despite the title, perhaps because they’re mostly men and that goes against dominant cultural assumptions —plan a mass murder on Halloween rooted in an ancient Celtic ritual. The ritual hinges on children’s Halloween masks and a hypnotizing television program masked as a horrorthon.

There is no final girl in Halloween III. Laurie Strode is exchanged for a doctor slash alcoholic deadbeat dad played by Tom Atkins and his much younger love interest, the daughter of a dead man. It’s unclear if we’re meant to root for this bad dad who uncovers the mask conspiracy. But perhaps not all horror films need heroes.

Nobody wanted Halloween III. Or, rather, no one wanted the Halloween III they got. Despite the success of Halloween and its direct sequel Halloween II, original franchise collaborators John Carpenter and Debra Hill were done with Michael Meyers. They were only keen on making another film if it shifted focus away from him in a new direction. Well, the final result —which changed writer and director hands a couple times —doesn’t just veer left; it’s a complete departure. It’s not even the same subgenre of horror, slasher slashed in favor of a supernatural thriller. Of all the threequels I write about here, it’s the most freakish compared to its franchise siblings.

Carpenter and Hill wanted a Halloween anthology series, a set of disconnected films all taking place leading up to and on Halloween night. But audiences wanted what they knew already. They wanted Michael Meyers, even if it stretched credulity to see the same masked killer shot, stabbed, lifeless, resurrected over and over. People wanted something that was the same or close enough, even if it didn’t make sense, even if it limited the imagination rather than letting it run wild.

I have a soft spot for Halloween III for this reason, the movie no one wanted. It isn’t particularly good, I can concede that, but as far as my gay cousin analogy goes, it’s the finest example.

This is just like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, I might have said, when I wore masks that seemed harmless but in reality were a danger, something that could destroy if worn too long.

Gay cousin is just a nice way of saying family freak.

When I came out, one of my aunts said she wasn’t necessarily surprised but also that she hadn’t been certain I was queer or just…

Or just what?

Different, she said. Nerdy, she said. Interesting euphemisms for queer. The point was, I think, that I was a little strange, a little difficult to slot in.

I tried on various masks not just to hide but to explain, explain the ways in which I felt I was failing. I didn’t date, didn’t seem to have much luck with boys. I claimed I was cursed, not by witches but by something planetary. (“In the end, we don’t decide these things, you know, the planets do,” the main villain of Halloween III says.) I called it my love curse, told others I was destined to only fall for guys who were unavailable, who already had girlfriends or who were gay. Ah, the irony.

Put on your masks and watch.

***

The Exorcist III is known for one scene in particular, a sequence so stunning and terrifying it’s often listed as a scariest movie moment and indeed stuns even more than some of the iconic scenes in the original. The film is full of long monologues and long shots, this particular long shot of a nurse going about her tasks during a night shift. It’s so long; it’s so quiet. It lulls you into a sense of calm while also placing you on edge, because you know something is coming, but what?

Like Halloween III, the Exorcist threequel diverges from the franchise’s first film and its sequel, though not quite as drastically. While it overwrites the events of the second film, the story of Regan MacNeil hangs over The Exorcist III, which trades its possessed little girl and her tormented single mother for a doubly possessed man and a Lieutenant. It is, perhaps, a film about friendship between men. It is, without a doubt, a film about deep possession.

This is just like The Exorcist III, I might have said, when I was possessed by the thoughts and dreams of others.

When I was the most determined to play the role of Heterosexual Woman, to wear my ticking clock of a mask, the performance more closely resembled that of a Heterosexual Man. I liked blowjobs and sex without condoms and winning at beer pong. (Like these horror films, I am relying on, reinforcing stereotypes.)

Or, at least, I wanted people (men) to think I liked these things. I liked that people thought that I liked (heterosexual) sex and talking about it. I was fine with people thinking of me as a perversely sexual being but a perversion generally accepted and even applauded by society —the perversion of a heterosexual man, the only type of demon allowed to have a high sex drive. On tumblr, which had become like another version of my daydream world, this performance was rooted in the same overall impulse but different: I actually did lust over actresses and female characters. It was easy on tumblr to be extremely horny for women and still claim heterosexuality; just ask any of the friends I met on there who eventually, like me, came out. This horny posting still mimicked the way I thought men thought and talked, something I wanted access to, like I was begging for possession.

It’s difficult to know now which desires from then were my own and which I performed for others.

The magic of The Exorcist III is in its ability to transfix and terrify without ever showing you any of its most gruesome details. Characters describe the horrific things they see —the crucified body of a young boy, decapitation, severed fingers, stab wounds, and a body drained of all its blood —instead of the camera actually showing us.

Yes, sometimes it is better to tell than to show.

One of the twists at the core of The Exorcist III is that the possessed character known initially as Patient X is Father Damien Karras, from the first film. More significantly, he’s the former best friend of the threequel’s protagonist, William F. Kinderman. For a very long time, Kinderman thought Karras was dead.

“He was my best friend,” Kinderman says. “I loved him.”

I tell this story a lot, because it’s an easy story to tell when I package it up neatly, like a formula: When I came out as queer, I also came out as a horror fan, emerging from two conjoined closets.

Kayla’s a scaredy cat was something said in my family often. My sister liked to hide and scare me on purpose. I only liked scary stories when I was the one telling them, reading to that same jumpscare-happy sister and our cousin from the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark books.

In kindergarten, I saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, not a horror film by anyone’s classification other than my own. I have a false memory about how the movie ends, was convinced E.T. killed Elliot and everyone in a bloody mass murder. Here is what I’m pretty sure happened: I was indeed scared by something in the movie, and then I had a nightmare that looked like this gory alternate ending. My lingering fear of the film became a recurring joke in my family. Everyone still loves to tell the story of the time I came home from first grade in tears and fearfully explained we had been learning to spell words like pet, get, and set. The teacher kept saying ET!!!!!!!!!!

Needless to say, I didn’t love scary movies. I could barely handle the ones that were only scary in my mind. I avoided horror religiously. In fact, sometimes I used religion as my excuse, telling girls at sleepovers I wasn’t allowed to watch a certain scary movie everyone else was eager to squeal at because of my parents’ rules. That somehow felt less embarrassing than confessing I was simply too scared.

I was a fearful child. I was also a child fascinated by fear. From fifth grade to seventh, I pretended to be afraid of slugs because my best friend Kelsey was afraid of slugs. When she screamed at the sight of one, I did, too. In truth, I didn’t feel any type of way about slugs. In truth, I didn’t need to fake a fear, because I was already scared of so many others things. Large dogs. Snipers (growing up in Virginia in the early 2000s will do that to a child). Fireworks. Tornadoes, storms, clouds that moved too fast or were too big or too oddly shaped. Eventually, I packaged this fear up neatly and told people I was simply scared of the sky, a line I have delivered well into adulthood.

I’m only recently coming around on the sky.

Why the false slug fear then, if I already had enough fears to contend with? I thought it further tethered me to Kelsey, gave us a reason to scream together. I liked that. A shared fear is its own form of intimacy.

I haven’t changed Kelsey’s name throughout this essay, because I am certain she won’t read it. I’ve tried looking for traces of her through the years, but she isn’t really on social media, so the intel is scant. I know she’s alive, living her life somewhere with a child, not far from where we grew up. We fell out of each other’s lives so sharply, not just a veer to the left but a complete departure. I added her mother on Facebook a couple years ago, daydreamed a whole scenario where I asked her about Kelsey, about telling her what those years of my life meant to me, years when I felt close to her mother, too, the two of them and Kelsey’s younger brother suddenly reduced from a family of four to three when Kelsey’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. I never sent the message. It felt like I was after something impossible to actually grasp.

It is strange to be best friends with someone, to love them, and then to lose them, especially for boring, difficult to explain reasons. There was no fight, no one reason. It wasn’t life or death, even if it briefly felt like it.

So how can I compare us to Kinderman and Karras? Except that, before I lost her, I did feel as if something possessed Kelsey. (K names have a plot significance in The Exorcist III, by the way.) But who was I to judge? I was possessed, too.

Sixth grade was when things began shattering between us. I met another Kelsey. And then a Katie and a Katelyn. We called ourselves K to the fourth, not adding to but exponentiating each other. I suppose it makes sense The Exorcist III —in which all the murder victims have K names —is so alluring and terrifying to me.

The other members of K to the fourth could handle horror. I wanted to be like them, able to watch something terrifying and then hold each other and scream together. Yes, that part sounded quite interesting to me.

I guess screaming at slugs was the closest I could get. Even when Kelsey and I started spending less and less time together, we were tethered by fear. It didn’t matter that mine wasn’t actually mine but hers. A self-inflicted possession.

I started college thinking I was straight, and I started college having never seen a horror film. Not a single one. Not even the “funny” ones. The jokes didn’t outweigh the potential of fear, and I couldn’t trust myself to be afraid, not in the dark next to so many other bodies, not in the only place I loved more than the confines of my obsessive daydreams, where I still spent much of my waking life.

The daydreaming stopped when I came out. It was no longer useful to me. I used tumblr less, too.

And when I came out, something began. My authentic life, yes, sure, but also my love for horror. It was like a veil had been lifted. Everything I’d feared before became rapturously desirable, whether that was making out with girls or a horror movie marathon.

What do you feel when watching horror that actually frightens you? Tingling skin? A swirling gut? Fluttering heart? A pit in your stomach? For me, it’s not uncommon to experience a rush not unlike arousal.

What I mean to say is.

When I watch horror, I feel it in my cunt.

I hear the sound of your terror ticking like a clock.

***

People make horrible decisions in horror films, but they really make horrible decisions in threequels. Logic leaks out of the characters until none is left.

Friday the 13th Part III actually is a direct sequel to the franchise’s second film, but it still fucks with the formula, introducing a new set of characters along with Jason’s iconic hockey mask for the first time. It fucks with form, too. It was released in 3D, certain sequences —including one of two characters juggling fruit —clearly shot for the gimmick alone. Now, experience the horrors of Friday the 13th as if it’s coming for you directly.

In Friday the 13th Part III, new protagonist Chris returns to her family’s home in a remote area near Camp Crystal Lake. It’s an ill-advised homecoming, especially since rumors of random killing and even cannibalism reverberate throughout the tiny town. Later in the film, Chris reveals to her boyfriend Rick who she has recently reconnected with that she came back to prove something to herself, to prove she’s stronger than she thinks she is. She doesn’t say it, but she also is seemingly there to remember.

In the other Friday the 13th films, characters aren’t looking for danger. For sex and games and unbridled, youthful shenanigans, sure, but they aren’t looking for the real kind of trouble, just the fun kind. The counselors at the original Camp Crystal Lake thought they were just signing up for a chill summer job. The camp counselors in the sequel are all assured Jason and his mother are long dead, Camp Crystal Lake condemned. But in Friday the 13th Part III, Chris is running toward danger. Years before, after she lost her virginity to Rick, she came home to angry, worried parents and a mother who slapped her. So she ran into the woods to punish them. But while alone in the night, she was attacked by who we know to be Jason. Her memories are hazy. She says she came home to prove something to herself, but I think she came home to find him, the monster who still haunts her. It is definitely a horrible decision, the kind horror hinges on. By doing so, she puts not only herself at risk but everyone she cares about, too.

This is just like Friday the 13th Part III, I might have said, when I chose to make my wounds deeper instead of letting them heal.

I made all my worst decisions when I was closeted. Mean, selfish, destructive decisions. I was soft and sensitive on the inside but outwardly hard. I liked arguing with people, could talk a person to death if I thought they were wrong. I feared a lot of things, but confrontation wasn’t one of them. I hated hugs or excessive affection. My best guy friend in college, who would become one of the first people I came out to, got a mini cactus for his dorm room and named it Lil Kayla, “because if you hug her, you’ll be sorry.”

At the end of my sophomore year, I made a friend at the college newspaper where we both worked. I’ll call her Chris, actually, not because the Chris of Friday the 13th Part III reminds me of her but because her real name does feel energetically close to Chris, and I’ve got a thing about names. I’ve written a version of this story before, but it wasn’t the threequel version. I edited all the worst parts out.

Chris had a boyfriend, a serious boyfriend, both in that their relationship seemed very adult and because he was a very self-serious guy, laughably so now that I think back on it. They had bonded over their shared love of grammar. Chris’ boyfriend was older, had already graduated, lived in a different state entirely. It was easy to forget about him. For me, at least. But I think for her, too.

I spent the summer after my sophomore year living in the city where Chris grew up. Her boyfriend lived there, too, with his best friend, another guy who worked at the paper. Chris’ boyfriend’s best friend and I became briefly entangled, which basically amounted to occasionally making out and playing tennis. He liked me more than I liked him, mainly because I liked Chris, even if I was lying to myself about it to hide my true desires. He invited me to the Hamptons one weekend, and I went, and it wasn’t a horrible decision, but it wasn’t a great one either. When he tried to initiate sex, I said no, he asked why, and I said I just didn’t want to, and he cried. He asked if I was a virgin. I said no. I wasn’t lying, but I thought I was, because at the time, I’d only ever had sex with women, and I thought that didn’t count. Those feral and frantic hookups with women were always a secret, always something I explained away as not entirely real, like it’d happened only in a daydream.

By the time junior year came around, Chris and I were obsessed with each other. We didn’t hide it. We just threw a mask on it, called it friendship. We went out of our way to spend more and more time together. She was in a sorority, so outside our shared lives in the newsroom, our social circles didn’t overlap much. People joked about us dating. Sometimes, when Chris was drunk, she told me she had a secret, but then refused to tell it.

I didn’t know what to do about this Chris situation. I’d tried getting with her boyfriend’s best friend as some sort of solution. It hadn’t worked. I didn’t want to have sex with him, and then we couldn’t even be friends anymore because he lied and told everyone we had. So I tried something else. Around the same time I became friends with Chris, I became friends with one of her close friends, another guy who worked with us. I’ll call him Rick, why not.

Rick had a girlfriend. At the time, I was still convinced I was the victim of a curse that only made me interested in guys with girlfriends. It was a creative way of transfiguring lesbianism into something else.

I didn’t know what to do about this Chris situation. Nothing had happened; nothing could happen. I have a memory of practically straddling her at a party, but it’s hazy. I wonder how she remembers it.

Suddenly, Rick was single. And then I slept with Rick. In my distorted mind, I thought I was losing my virginity, because I thought it only counted as real now that it was with a man. I didn’t tell Rick this though. I wanted him to think I was experienced, nubile. I was trying on a new mask, one I’d wear for quite a while longer.

Chris was very upset when I told her what happened with Rick. We fought. We fought with an intensity that confused me. She told me I’d changed everything, said we’d been a trio and now I’d ruined it. I was already going off the rails. Chris deleted all of our texts. When she told me she did this at brunch, I wanted to run away.

I kept sleeping with Rick. Even after the initial fights, after the deleted texts. My gay friend Andrew jokingly asked Chris and I if we were breaking up one of these nights when we were fighting about it. I thought Andrew was being ridiculous. But when I play the scene back in my mind, there we were, Chris and I, standing apart from everyone at the party, my hand grasping her shoulder, like I was holding her in place while she swayed from alcohol and anger.

Sleeping with Rick was a horrible decision. Perhaps not one that prompted horror movie consequences, but a horrible decision nonetheless. One that hurt us all: me, Rick, Chris.

Years later, five to be exact, Chris wanted me to explain. We found ourselves in the same city again. I was in the middle of a bad breakup. She wanted to know why I’d done it, why I’d fucked Rick if I was really gay. I could sense the hurt in her voice, the accusation, too. She was mad at me, still, years later. She felt tricked. You had a boyfriend, I wanted to say. You were wearing a mask, too.

I tried to explain, but the words, again, weren’t coming out right. It should have been simple to just say it: I fucked him because I couldn’t fuck you. But the words tumbled out of me clumsily, like I was stabbing at something wildly when really I just needed to aim for the heart.

Months passed. My breakup finally finalized. Chris and I went our separate ways, and then we reconnected again, for just one night in the city where I grew up. She still wanted answers about Rick. I had none to give.

We went to one of the country’s longest running dyke bars. We talked. We danced. She wanted something other than answers from me: assurance that if we did anything, it would be real. I imagine she didn’t trust me, thought I might betray her, hurt her. She’d known me at my worst, at my most selfish. I assured her it would be real. I assured her it didn’t have to mean anything beyond the confines of the night.

So, it happened. We slept together. Finally. It felt like a beginning and an ending, a release and a repression. It needed to happen, even if it wasn’t rom-com perfection. It wasn’t a horror movie either. It only happened the one time. I’ve barely spoken to her since, another friendship snuffed out. We’d shared a fear too, this one more real than the slugs.

She may have wanted to rehash the past, but that night, it was like we were reintroducing ourselves to each other, and I wanted to wipe the past clean. The masks were off, couldn’t we leave it that way?

I’m here with you. Can’t that be enough for now?

***

In Poltergeist III, Carol Anne is rather inexplicably sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago. Or, I guess, the subtextual explanation is that she and her trauma were too much for her parents to contend with. Or a more generous reading is that they thought she’d be better off the farther away she was from what had haunted her before.

But trouble follows Carol Anne wherever she goes.

It’s not difficult to read queerness onto Carol Anne. She’s reminded, often, that she’s different from the other kids around her, that she doesn’t slot easily into her new family structure, which includes an older step-cousin. She attends a school for the gifted (different, nerdy), where a child psychologist is supposedly helping her heal, chocking up her experiences of the supernatural to a form of group hypnosis (doubtful adults in Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors similarly attribute the paranormal effects of trauma on group psychosis). He punishes Carol Anne for being haunted.

Mirrors play a significant role in the visual horror of Poltergeist III. Reflections depart from their real life counterparts. Mirrors distort, transport. None of the rules of reflection apply.

There aren’t necessarily rules for coming out, but I still found a way to break them.

I gave the regular formula for coming out the old college try. It was my senior year of college, and I’d already slept with women, but I’d convinced myself that was more fluke than sign. I was better with guys, which is to say, I was more outside of my body, giving the performance I thought others wanted to see. I wore my masks. I erected my daydreams. I was in great need of an exorcism.

I was back in my parents’ home during a college break when I tried telling someone I was gay for the first time, my friend Raine, the only person I’d meaningfully kept in touch with from high school. It felt a lot like the time I told Kelsey about the daydreams. It was in the same room, Raine on the same trundle bed Kelsey had been on. It went just alright, no fault of Raine’s but my own. I still wasn’t good at finding the right words.

To my dismay, it wasn’t like breaking a seal. I struggled to tell anyone back at school the truth. I had to get very, very drunk to do it. Even for my college best friend Emily, my roommate of two years, whose bed I still crawled into sometimes even though we had separate rooms in the same rundown house because I felt like I slept best with my body pressed against hers. I had to drink two bottles of fucking Andre before I could tell her, and even then, all I could manage was “I was dating a girl at one point.” All that prologue for a vague confession.

I came out to a few other friends one-on-one. I didn’t use labels. I kept it vague. I was still trying to figure out the words. Things got complicated when I got a boyfriend. Well, they actually got easier, depending on how you look at it. Once again, I was able to pretend that everything that had happened before was a fluke. I could put the mask back on, let the possession in.

He had another K name, if you can believe. We were fresh off of breakups, me with a woman who I was never actually dating, him with his long-term long-distance girlfriend. A fresh start, just like Carol Anne’s. The intimacy was built in; we were already good friends. It helped that he drank too much and I was so good at pretending.

When I came out for real, it was in front of a literal audience. I wrote it into a standup comedy set I performed in the basement of my rundown college house. Again, I fear I’m sounding silly. But the pre-coming out anxiety I got every time I sat a friend down to tell them didn’t seem worth all the trouble. A performance I could do. I never got stage fright, not even in my theater kid days. The words, finally, flowed out of me. Talking about my queerness before that show made me feel at odds with my own reflection, fractured, like I was watching someone else talk for me. I had trouble saying it out loud, until I had the protection of a literal script, one I’d written for myself.

I’ve written this story about the standup show before, but I left out the part where I had a boyfriend at the time. In my standup set, I didn’t come out as bisexual or queer; I came out as gay, as a lesbian, used the word homosexual even. My boyfriend was in the audience. We hadn’t talked about any of this before. After the show, there was an after party, and then he and I went to bed together. I’d changed everything, and yet nothing changed. We stayed together, and when we did break up the first time, it wasn’t because I was a lesbian but because he was moving back to Texas. We got back together. I even lived with him for three weeks in Texas on my way to live in Los Angeles, where we did break up again —maybe, finally, because I was a lesbian, but that wasn’t the reason he gave at the time.

Yes, he broke up with me.

Coming out as a lesbian with a boyfriend certainly fucked with the formula. I still don’t know how to explain it fully. Something about mutually destructive horrible decisions. Something about not being able to take off a mask. Something about becoming my own poltergeist, making my life unnecessarily complicated and fraught.

If you talk about things, they happen.

***

I have a soft spot for Scream 3 because of its use of doppelgängers. I love doppelgänger horror for the same reason I love cannibalism horror: Both conceits feel distinctly queer.

In Scream 3, familiar characters return: Sidney, Gale, Dewey. But they’re also joined by characters who are actors playing versions of them in Stab, the in-universe horror franchise inspired by the events of the film. Parker Posey gives a scene-stealing performance as an actor playing a version of Gale Weathers. In Scream 3, Ghostface kills people off using the script for Stab 3.

The characters come into contact with their Hollywoodified counterparts, body doubles who are beautiful and bad. It’s perplexing, especially for Gale, who hates the idea of someone else pretending to be her. It’s perplexing, too, that the killer has given everyone a roadmap for his kills, an actual script. They keep trying to break free of the script they’ve been given, but it’s hard. It’s hard to break rules.

This is just like Scream 3, I might have said, when I felt forced to follow a script I hadn’t written for myself.

It was hard, and there were many false starts, many regressions back to what was known and comfortable, the formula, but I broke free of the script eventually.

There are so many people I write about in this essay who I don’t talk to anymore. They knew a different version of me —not better or worse, just different, my doppelgängers. There are so many stories in here I’ve technically written before but with softer edges, tighter punchlines. I was afraid of seeming off the rails.

I’m still leaving so much out.

Maybe that’s what a reboot is for.

The past is not at rest.

Author’s Note: Originally, this piece was just supposed to be an introduction to this year’s iteration of HORROR IS SO GAY, with teasers for what’s to come. Ever since I started the series three years ago, I’ve always written a breezy little intro post. Instead, this year I wrote a 6,000+ word personal essay. I guess you could indeed call it a threequel plot twist; I certainly didn’t plan this, but here we are! But I wanted to take a moment to say you’re in for a treat (and, of course, some tricks) this year, because we have more pieces than ever before running as part of this annual series, from some writers you already know and love and from some making their Autostraddle debut. Check back all month long for the hottest horror takes from a crew of brilliant queer and trans writers. Drew Burnett Gregory and I will once again be teaming up for some collaborative projects, too, including an update on our Scariest Queer Movie Moments list and a brand new list that had us logging nearly 100 hours of horror movie viewing. You don’t want to miss it! 👀 And be sure to revisit Horror Is So Gay pieces from past years, too!

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