Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Inside Popular Film)

Monster in the Closet is a history of the horrors film that explores the genre's relationship to the social and cultural history of homosexuality in America. Drawing on a wide variety of films and primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials, fanzines, men's magazines, and popular news weeklies, the book examines the historical figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious and social models of homosexuality. While recent work within gay and lesbian studies has explored how the genetic tropes of the horror film intersect with popular culture's understanding of queerness, this is the first book to examine how the concept of the monster queer has evolved from era to era. From the gay and lesbian sensibilities encoded into the form and content of the classical Hollywood horror film, to recent films which play upon AIDS-related fears. Monster in the Closet examines how the horror film started and continues, to demonize (or quite literally "monsterize") queer sexuality, and what the pleasures and "costs" of such representations might be both for individual spectators and culture at large.

They are half-human horrors, strange and scary aliens, the seemingly-normal-but-deadly danger that lurks around the corner: Hollywood monsters, or homosexuals? Horror fiction has always portrayed society's greatest fears as monstrous incarnations of "the other," so it should be no surprise that there has always been a clear homoerotic subtext in horror films--from Frankenstein to Interview with the Vampire. Harry M. Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet details how Hollywood monsters have not only been a reflection of homosexuals, but that changes in the horror film have actually mirrored changes in attitudes toward homosexuality in our society. Discussing hundreds of classic (and not so classic) movies, Benshoff provides new insight into horror and science fiction films and into how popular culture presents ideas about homosexuality to a broad audience.

This book is a wonderfully written "meditation" on gay coding in American and some British horror films, with the gay or lesbian "monster" as extended metaphor for an evolving social discomfort and then relative - very relative - ease with homosexuality. If the book has a problem, it sometimes "stretches" to make the case in the case of certain cinematic selections. For example, it sometimes shows a too-often heavy reliance on "pop" Freudianism, especially in the secton on "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," and I was never clear on whether or not the author espoused such theories himself, or was using them in the context of historical time to explain certain films made when Freudian analysis was a dominant socio-psychological force. But, in spite on a reliance on theoretical constructs that verge on the academically faddish, this does not cloud the fact the exhaustive survey undertaken clearly identifying what can only be characterized as gay "coding" in horror movies, almost always negative and a perfect mirror to the uglier side of American cultural hstory and social mores in the whipsaw twentieth century.

While writing cultural history may be "nailing jello to a wall," Benshoff has accumulated enough evidence of key tropes in horror cinema sufficient to make a compelling circumstantial case, namely that the gay "monster" of American cinema is not the monster at all, but the reflection of the real "monsters," the viewers entrapped in a society that, at times, would have had homosexuals served up no other way. Excellent book, excellent work, highly recommended.

This is an excellent book and the only full volume on the subject. Horror reveals our collective cultural fears, things we find threatening even if we cannot explain why, things we consciously or unconsciously identify as "Other." Much has been written about how horror films illustrate fears concerning race and gender, but our culture's obvious prejudices toward queer (non-hetero) sexuality and their representation in the genre have never been this directly and thoroughly addressed.

Benshoff moves through the material chronologically dealing not only with the films, but the evolving medical and social approaches to the subject. The chapters on classic horror are especially thorough and entertaining. Moving into the era of the Production Code, censorship forced audiences and filmmakers alike to read/write between the lines. Some changes forced by Code officials unintentionally made the material more lurid and suggestive than before. As Benshoff gets into our current postmodern era, things become much more complicated, and the author is not as elaborate as he might be, but by then we've already been through a substantial volume of material, not to mention the difficulty of writing about movements and trends still playing themselves out.

Reading this book will change how you watch movies. If you look at "The Lost Boys," for example, and substitute "queer" or "homosexual" for "vampire," you get a very different movie loaded high with innuendo. When you consider that director Joel Schumacher is openly gay, "The Lost Boys" becomes a subversive queer film made for straight people. Sure, the vampires die at the end, but Benshoff argues here that their attractive image of raw sexual power lingers with audiences more than their destruction.

Most of the negative reviews here cite problems with the author's lack of "proof." Benshoff clearly states in his introduction that this is a subjective analysis. He reads the films from the perspective of a queer audience. While directors like James Whale intentionally coded queer figures into their films, many did not. It is precisely the unawareness of these filmmakers that makes their representation of situations and figures that can be read as queer so telling about the attitudes and underlying feelings of the culture at large. Also, queer filmgoers, like everyone else, look for themselves in the films they see and are sensitive to such representations, regardless of intent.

Overall this is a highly intelligent, entertaining book that opens a dialogue we need to be having both inside and outside the academic community. If you're interested in horror, film analysis or queer theory, this is definitely a book to pick up. For myself it's up there with Carol J. Clover's "Men, Women, And Chainsaws" as a modern milestone in film theory.

the author keeps you interested, and mixes just the right amount of humor into the work. Unfortunately, pre-60s horror movies, he seldom backs up his arguments, instead claiming something to be obviously homosexual and then describing the plot. While I admit, it is very easy to interpret some of these works as homosexual, and I know it would be difficult to find much evidence outside a James Whale movie, he relys primarily on circumstantial evidence to defend himself. (References and evidence are two different things.) Throughout the work, he makes interesting points which are well thought out, I'm glad I purchased it...but as it is, the book doesn't amount to more than a great conversation with somebody.

This is the book that explains that CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is really about homosexuality because...well you see the Gill Man's head is really a phallus. Got It?? And even though the Creature pursues Julie Adams thoughout the picture, he is REALLY interested in Richard Carlson, Richard Denning and the rest of the male crew which is why he keeps attacking them. Got it?? Adams is just a beard. Even though the Gill Man goes after Adams again and again, he is only trying to lure those men in the bathing suits to his lair so he can have his way with them.

Got that?? And Denning and Carlson STAB the Creature with their knives and spearguns!!! Does one need go on?? Good. Thank God for tenure so we can have more works of SHEER genius..like this.

I find myself going back to this book over and over again, as it is so filled with insightful readings of many of my favorite old horror films. Fun, thought-provoking, and a real page-turner. I hope a 2nd edition comes out updated to the newest queerly inflected horror films.

By the way, ignore the "reviewer" who claims that by quoting Foucault, Benshoff "tips his hand" as a dreaded "deconstructionist" and thus invalidates his whole book. First, the book is hardly a headache inducing "theory book". Second, Foucault was NOT a deconstructionist at all!!! The reviewer is obviously confusing Michel Foucault with Jacques Derrida, which basically invalidates not the book, but that person's whole argument!