Hollywood, Horror And The ‘Bury Your Gays’ Trope – The Queer Take Over Of The Horror Genre

Yellowjackets star, Jasmin Savoy Brown, made queer history by playing the first Queer character in the Scream slasher franchise. 

The openly queer actor recently opened up to Gay Times when asked about her experience representing the community as Mindy Meeks-Martin. 

‘It Means Everything To Me’

“It means everything to me,’ she responds. ‘To be one of the lucky few that gets to debut something and be the beginning of the wave is really exciting,” she said.

Brown reprises her role from Scream’s fifth instalment, where her queerness is heavily inferred, but the sixth film offered more opportunity for blatant queerness.

“I was delighted when I read in the script that Mindy has a girlfriend,” Brown confessed.

And, shockingly, her character lives to tell the tale, thwarting decades of horror movie tropes where queer and black characters never get to be the ‘Final girl.’

The Hays Code

Horror has always maintained an inherently queer subtext since the genre’s inception. Bram Stoker, the mind behind the horror, cult-classic Dracula, was a closeted gay man. He introduced vampires as inherently bisexual, mythical creatures that did not discriminate between men and women when it came time to bite their victim’s necks. 

Whilst early horror-themed media was birthed by queer creators, the Hays Code, implemented in 1934, transformed the genre with its homophobic rhetoric. The Code, which dictated Hollywood productions, decreed that any character with reference to queerness needed to be moralistically punished or villainised. Thus, the sordid history of homophobic tropes such as ‘bury your gays’ began. 

Whilst the Code was overturned in 1968, we are only now starting to see horror return to its queer origins. 

Up-and-coming, queer creators are now taking to the screen to reinterpret the history of the genre into explicitly queer, horror films. 

‘The Genre Has Always Been Inherently Queer’

Alice Maio Mackay, an 18-year-old, transgender, award-winning filmmaker from South Australia premiered her debut film So Vam at Salem Horror Fest in 2021. 

The film, which was picked up for online streaming by Shudder late last year, is a campy, queer vampire tale, featuring an LGBTQI cast, depicts its protagonist, Kurt, joining a mysterious of rebellious vampires who feed on bigots and abusers. 

Star Observer spoke to Alice about why she believes authentic, queer representation within the genre is so important. 

“The genre has always been inherently queer with classic films like Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein,” she says.

“It is also a genre that has been historically important to not only queer audiences but queer creators.”

In reference to her films’ focus on trans characters, she continues, “Authentic trans representation in the genre is particularly important and for trans people to be able to reclaim their own stories is critical – not only given the current political standpoint but also because of how the genre originally treated gender diversity in horror films especially the sub-genre of slashers.” 

When asked how she thinks the broader film industry is changing, Alice has some criticisms. 

“I personally don’t think it’s progressing fast enough to ensure the safety and protection of diverse creatives.”

Supporting queer creators is a crucial part of diversifying the horror genre as opposed to, as Alice puts it, “allowing some cis-het white men to continue writing shallow inauthentic characters and counting that as representation.”

Alice’s sophomore film, Bad Girl Boogey will be released later this year and her third feature, T Blockers is set to premiere at Salem Horror Fest in April.