In recent years we have witnessed a rise in queer representation in literature. This has primarily been focused around the Romance and Contemporary genres, with books such as Red, White and Royal Blue and Heartstopper providing important depictions of both the joys and hardships of queerness. Yet little attention has been given to Horror, a genre that has historically given space to those who are othered within society. In honour of this month’s Pride edition, let’s dive into queer Horror, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

Since Wallpole’s The Castle of Otranto, widely regarded as the first Gothic novel in the Western world, these genres have allowed space for exploration of transgressions of desire and of social boundaries. Queerness within horror has a complicated history – these very same spaces often eventually reinforce the ‘norm’, in turn reinstating the queer ‘other’ as monstrous. Nevertheless, a genre that works entirely in divulging forbidden and deviant experiences has – since the Eighteenth Century – offered a representation of identities that were not explored elsewhere. Horror has, and will, continue to offer a place for authors to push the bounds of realism and portray experiences that are demonised or rarely talked about.

The figure of the vampire has been associated with queerness for as long as it has existed. In Dracula, their propensity to hide in the shadows, habit of mixing bodily fluids, and their general disparity echoed for many people the fears of homosexuality that were strong at the time. 

Otherness and queerness go hand in hand in Dracula. One of the main moments of fear in the novel occurs when Count Dracula appears to drink Jonathon’s blood. The terror of this scene for the audience of the time comes from the extreme taboo of a man dominating another man - they are engaging in an act which is certainly marked as sexual. 

The threat to social norms demonstrated through Count Dracula produced a real sense of fear, as did the predatory female vampires, who shift typical Victorian gender roles to prey on Jonathon. These female vampires followed in the footsteps of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the titular character who acted as a model to later lesbian vampire stories. Carmilla’s persecution of primarily female victims, some of which she becomes emotionally involved with, played heavily on the religious fears of the time; this kind of love was viewed as perverse and unnatural.

Vampires are not the only queer-coded horror characters. As the genre is a space of otherness and isolation, queerness can be easily read into the experiences of several Gothic characters. Shelley’s Frankenstein offers a portrayal of the monstrous ‘other’, a creature whose body is deviant, who has been created outside of natural means and who is unable to properly engage in a heterosexual relationship. When Frankenstein’s monster is unable to attain a female partner, he kills Victor’s own partner, and then appears at the foot of his bed. This perverse monster, given life only to be shunned by the man who created him, is disowned when he approaches him at this moment.

Frankenstein’s monster was understood as unnatural; queer identities have similarly been viewed as such. The creature embodies the experience of isolation that many queer people face, especially when approaching the very person who has created him.

Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, though still exploring queer desire through innuendos and subtle actions, offers a much more nuanced representation of queerness as something aside from monstrous.

Set amongst the ghostly trappings of a haunted house, the main character Eleanor loses herself to the madness of the house and to the isolation that her queer experience causes. Steadily forming a relationship with the free-spirited Theodora, Eleanor does not have any references for the kind of queerness she experiences. Her understanding of queer desire is marked by alterity, and she endeavours throughout the text to disguise it. She experiences the kind of loneliness that regularly accompanies queer desire, eventually removing herself completely from the outside world, with which she can find no connection.

Jackson chooses to express Eleanor’s experience through the Horror genre precisely because it allows her to push beyond the boundaries of realism to portray an experience that she knows exists. In this same way, texts such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Carmilla leave space for an interpretation of queerness in their characters. 

However, the reality for the writers who did not stick to the societal boundaries of the time was vastly different. Oscar Wilde’s trial serves as an important reminder that even within the Horror genre, there were boundaries in place that one could not overstep without danger. Explorations of queerness were therefore regularly bound to veiled descriptions and an eventual restoration of ‘order’.

Today, the Horror genre offers increasing freedom to portray queer feelings of otherness, whilst reversing the marks of monstrosity onto society itself. The genre enables writers to welcome – rather than demonise – those who understand themselves through otherness and to explore the factors of society that isolate and alienate queer people.