The Monster in the Closet
by J †Johnson
It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections of Horror,
ed. by Joe Vallese, Feminist Press, 2022
There’s some kind of truth to that role, and any attempt I could make to codify it is certain to become a complicated mess with disclaimers, footnotes, a song lyric, a collection of images sans context.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT? Tosha R. Taylor, in “The Wolf Man’s Daughter,” is writing about her teendom among “queer boys, who treated me as if there were no difference between us.” Things don’t have to be codified in a collection of coming out queer through horror narratives. It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror surveys a field of texts—or VHS tapes—ripe for the picking: films that help people see themselves. In many cases they see the monster in the funhouse mirror, or the rifle site—there aren’t many horror films that offer uncomplicated queer identification. That’s the world we live in, where queer youth grow up desperate for reference points, and filmmakers more or less consciously reflect that mess. If one dilemma in the horror film is the breach of the rational world, and the resistance many people feel to accepting a nonrational world of monsters and paranormal phenomena, the complicated politics of inherently queer monsters appearing in reactionary narratives is true to the world.
This moment in Taylor’s contribution tells on the anthology at large, while the essay is illustrative of what makes the collection work. There is a consistent approach to these essays: hybrid narratives that cut between queer analysis of particular films and candid coming out narratives from an array of experiences and identities. There are formal variations on these modular essayistic structures, but what we do not get is a complicated mess with disclaimers, footnotes, a song lyric, a collection of images sans context. That would be a different collection, an equally worthwhile one. Still, we get the impression these writers have plenty of experience queering form to make a text that can hold their lives. Meanwhile, the drama of fitting in plays out. This combination of varied experience and consistency of approach speaks to editorial focus and clarity of concept. (Many of these pieces were previously published, but the editorial hand is also a curational one.) A formally wild collection of restless texts could be a bag of surprises, but it would be baggy. What we have here is a highly functional scaffolding that good writers can use for diverse purposes, where the collection is architecturally sound and a pleasure to explore. It’s built for cherry picking favorite films and writers, organized in five themed sections that help the reader orient themselves, however they choose to proceed.
†††
I’M IN A HOTEL at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. One of my jobs is architectural drafting. It’s been a long day: woke up at 6 in Philadelphia, drove to Jersey City to park at the hotel, jumped on PATH, and made my way to Brooklyn to measure a (haunted) brownstone. Now I’m back at the hotel, eating delivery noodles and deciding what to watch. Wake in Fright (1971) has been winking at me for the past couple months, and recently went up on Shudder. My love and I have seen it mentioned on a couple horror anthology series, and we screened a trailer one night. I’d watch that some time, but not tonight, one or the other of us said. Tonight’s the night for me. I know it’s gonna be rough, but I have no idea. A bonded (indentured) school teacher in an Australian town consisting of a schoolhouse and a boardinghouse, separated by railroad tracks dividing the outback, is heading home for xmas break. He catches one last beer at the boardinghouse bar then boards a train, laying over one night in a town locals call the Yabba. He stops at a beer hall, finds a sausage party, and meets a relatively amiable cop he fails to brush off. The cop downs a beer in a few gulps and announces they’ll both have another. After an awkward pause, the teacher takes the cue and downs his beer. Repeat until inebriated, meet the town drunk in a town of drunks (Donald Pleasence, a few years before Halloween, showing he could do Loomis in his sleep: do you want to see something really scary?), get initiated into the local gambling racket (heads or tails with two coins, shiver), win big and then lose everything, get taken in by a series of permadrunk bros and messy father figures, then lose everything else. Everything else. End up a filthy, bloody mess stumbling down the road to Kafka’s castle, hopping a ride to town that takes you to the wrong town (back to the Yabba! I thought you said you wanted to go to town). Somewhere in there, a night of debauchery that makes the toxic joyride in Blue Velvet look urbane, complete with a kangaroo shootout that will fuck you up and outlaw kangaroo hunting, by design. Oboy oboy.
†††
THE ULTIMATE MONSTER MOVE is to be the fucking monster. Even if the townspeople are after you. Even if your lair has been reduced to a shed in someone’s backyard, or the limbs of the tree behind it, in that cramped space between aluminum and chain link fence, backed by a freeway onramp, from which the killer pulls off to unload a dead woman wrapped in a sheet. She was well built, your dad says when he tells the story.
The ultimate queer horror move is to be the monster even though the movie wants you dead, if it can’t make you disappear. Not because you want to die, but because the monster can’t be killed, and wasn’t made to disappear. You prove it, renting the most wicked looking films by hook or crook, watching them again and again. The monster destroyed is the monster revived, when you are kind enough to rewind.
†††
EVERY YEAR I RESURRECT the doomed sisters of Ginger Snaps. Werewolves have become my signal monsters and I’m still trying to figure out why. In my “I Was a Teenage Monster” class at Penn, a student writes about how it sucks to be jumped by a werewolf. It’s a traumatic moment from which the character cannot recover, even as they leave behind their humanity. The dramatic transformation scene steals our attention, but transformation isn’t possible without that act of penultimate violence. That scar across the screen. We talk in class about becoming-monsters, how the werewolf is neither wolf nor person, has strayed from the pack. It’s a serial transformation that is also gradual—once the person has become a werewolf, the transition back to human form is incomplete. Now they are forever, for the rest of their short lives, becoming-werewolf. In Ginger Snaps, An American Werewolf in London, and the original Universal Monsters version of The Wolfman, we are led to sympathize with the monster just to watch them die, and we mourn them along with their companion: sister, lover, father. Sometimes the werewolf is put down by family who does not recognize them, or sees them all too well. Or the lover fails to pull the monster back toward their lost humanity, where they never fit. There is no redemption. Tragedy distends with the body. We linger on the kill, having lost ourselves. And we replay the whole thing.
†††
THE VARIOUS GENDER IDENTITIES run through horror films provide the necessary tension between pieces in the anthology, even if the film/memoir/film form threatens to become formula. Anyway, we’re talking about horror films, mostly if not exclusively monster movies, which are all about doing things with a formula. Thrill me. And these essays do. But we can’t ignore the fact that they form a procession—film/memoir/film—just as queer theory tends to formulate itself, in certain formulations, in an established discourse format. The call to make space is tempered by the call to legibility and recognition. Something is lost, and something perhaps is gained. We could say the same for any writing endeavor that puts thought into words, but when we are also making space for ourselves, the stakes are particularly high.
†††
MACREADY HAS HAD ENOUGH. And he’s not alone. Who knows how long they’ve been in this Antarctic lab, playing computer chess, smoking weed, tilting the bottle, and waiting for the internet. But they have another thing coming. Dogs turn into horrible orchids, fake quakers pretend to be human, and defibrillation goes way past wrong. Pretty soon it’s MacReady and Childs, giving each other the side-eye and thinking about the ultimate strange.
The End?
The monster is unknown and unknowable, a function of the future read as the past, essentially unfamiliar. To know the monster is to domesticate them, and make them no longer monstrous. There is a monster etymologically embedded in demonstrate, as Derrida and others point out, and if the monster is showing themself, to represent the monster is to show the monster away. We can’t see the monster, which is why we can imagine they don’t exist while also relying on the monster to constitute the non-monstrous human. In the horror film that is also a monster movie, which is essentially post-rational, there is no subject position that is not monster adjacent, relative to monstrosity, becoming-monster; and this condition extends to the audience, which can either accept the fiction or deny their own position.
On the Blank Check podcast episode about John Carpenter’s The Thing, Emily VanDerWerff reads the film as a trans text. You don’t know what you are, or what anyone else is. You pass, until you don’t. You are becoming something else. It’s nothing but men and the thing.
†††
I KNOW WHAT THAT’S LIKE, from the locker rooms and living rooms of my life. Among men, I tried to blend. Among men I loved, and who loved me, I leaned left, shifted away from masculinity, went fey. Among women, I was at home, suspicious of myself. Among queers, I was almost myself, not quite arrived. Among trans people, I saw another world in this one, a place I liked to be. In a mixed crowd, I cowered. Never did I belong.
I’m married, living in South Philadelphia, about to turn 50. I published a couple books, one of poetry, one of prose. I teach at the university, measure buildings, get by. I watch horror movies almost every night, when basketball isn‘t on. I even watch the men’s leagues.
I’m queer, nonbinary, not a man, though I tried to be a better one my whole life. I tried to belong.
I’m not trying anymore. Always I felt inauthentic, costumed, failed. An incorrect man, an inadequate queer.
No more.
I haven’t arrived anywhere. I’m still circling the lab. Still looking for cues. Still dragging the trap. Still trying to get out of the Yabba. But I know what I’m not.
We want to bring everything in. We want to make a monster text. We want to be whole. And we want to write well, even if we can’t write ourselves well.
We need to see each other transform into ourselves, even as we have the option to keep our transformation scenes to ourselves.
It Came From the Closet shows us as we are, without making the monster disappear.
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. Most recently, they completed a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. They live in Philadelphia.