Editor’s Notes: Horror Is So Gay 2

This edition of Editor’s Notes, where I give you a behind-the-scenes look at the helming of a themed package, is going to be a little more chaotic than my usual missives, which feels right, because putting together Horror Is So Gay 2: The Sequel (sequeer?) was admittedly a little chaotic. In a good way! So let’s delve into a little horror scrapbook of sorts documenting the past month of putting together this series celebrating queer and trans perspectives on horror for the second year. I can’t wait to make this an annual tradition! Hopefully the third version next year is better than third movies in horror franchises tend to be!

The Vibe

Here’s what I wrote in my notes for what I wanted the vibe of Horror Is So Gay 2 to be in terms of a visual aesthetic:

1980s slashercore mixed with nostalgic late-night sleepover vibes. Delivery pizza boxes, two liters of Dr. Pepper, stacks of VHS tapes, and maybe you’re in a basement with wood paneled walls. Someone suggests playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board and things get homoerotic.

Now, what did this word salad lead to in terms of actual aesthetics? Here were some of the Canva stickers I played around with I felt captured this, even though they didn’t all necessarily end up in the final visuals for the package:

Carmen made a color palette for us and also experimented with using a Stranger Things-inspired font for the header, which I then decided to animate.

I also played with a bunch of filters that evoked a retro camcorder look or staticky television look. That, along with the play/rewind/record stamps that made it into a lot of the final visuals, suggested I was subconsciously drawn to voyeurism while working on this project. A lot of the feature images evoke a sense of watching or being watched. That feels fitting for a series all about looking closer at horror.

Teamwork Makes the Scream Work

This year, Horror Is So Gay was a truly collaborative project between every single full-time member of editorial, which was cool! While I still ran point on things, everyone chipped in in some way, and every single editor wrote at least one piece for the package, which is especially fun since we don’t all necessarily identify as Horror Queers (though Drew, Nico, and I pretty solidly fall in that camp of horror-obsessed freaks).

Riese used her impeccable research skills to put together a version of her deep-dive column Obsessed going behind-the-scenes of the very queer Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Many months ago when Carmen and I were working on content for Undeadstraddle (our April Fool’s Day takeover), we had a casual conversation about Black zombies, and I made her promise we’d revisit this idea for HISG. She stayed true to her word, and even while balancing all of her Editor-in-Chiefly duties still managed to crank out an impressively researched and detailed breakdown of Blackness and zombie stories. Nico always has brilliant ideas for horror essays and this year did a comprehensive analysis of the class politics of The Haunting of Bly Manor and how the show fails to really reckon with its implications about class, power, and caretaking.

Our newest editor Drew and I updated our Scariest Queer Horror Movie Moments list we debuted last year, adding five more movies, and Drew also wrote about the work of queer filmmaker Jennifer Reeder. As sometimes happens at a small magazine though, everything didn’t always go perfectly as planned. Drew and I both got sick at different points of this month, and it unfortunately meant I made the executive decision to temporarily table a massively ambitious project the two of us wanted to collaborate on: Two Dykes Rank Every Stephen King Film Adaptation. Fear not! We genuinely decided to delay and not to kill the project entirely, and because we’ll now have more time to work with it, we’ll also likely expand beyond what our original constraints were going to be (our original rules were going to be no series, TV movies, or sequels).

The Soundtrack

Idk if this is interesting to anyone, but the music I listened to while doing a lot of the work for Horror Is So Gay 2 mainly came from this Spotify playlist called Autumnal Jazz:

But I also became obsessed with this mashup of “Pony” x “The Monster Mash” this month:

The Watchlist

As the lead editor of Horror Is So Gay 2, here’s every horror movie I watched over the course of working on the package (* indicates it was my first time watching the movie):

1. Scream 4
2. What Lies Beneath
3. Jurassic Park
4. The Shining
5. Doctor Sleep*
6. A Good Marriage*
7. Gerald’s Game
8. You’re Next
9. The Cabin in the Woods
10. Ready or Not*
11. The Babysitter
12. Bodies Bodies Bodies
13. Sissy*
14. Sleepy Hollow
15. Beetlejuice
16. A Nightmare on Elm Street
17. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge
18. House on Haunted Hill (1999)
19. The Haunting (1999)*
20. The Haunting (1963)
21. Train to Busan*
22. Prom Night
23. Prey (1977)*
24. The Faculty
25. Friday the 13th
26. Cujo
27. Halloween (2018)*
28. Rose Red
29. All My Friends Hate Me*
30. Midnight Kiss* (watched this one twice!)
31. No Exit*
32. Scream
33. Shudder’s 101 Scariest Movie Moments (all eight parts)
34. Get Out
35. The Conjuring

On any nights when I was not watching horror movies, it was because I was watching/rewatching The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House.

And then today, on Halloween, my plans are to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (not horror lol), Hellbent, Halloween (1978), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Trick ‘r Treat, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episodes.

Even though I usually focus on editing rather than writing things myself when it comes to HISG, some of the films I watched this month gave me ideas for things I might take on next year.

Thank YOU, and Happy Halloween!

As always, thank you to our A+ members, without whom we would not be able to do creative projects like Horror Is So Gay. Y’all make it possible for us to get freaky every October, and I am so grateful. I hope you’re having a very gay and spooktacular Halloween, and I hope you enjoyed Horror Is So Gay 2. See you for Horror Is So Gay 3: Queer We Go Again.

Horror Is So Gay is an annual Autostraddle series of queer and trans reflections on horror.