Queertober Part 1: The Haunting (1963)
Queerness is one of those things that interacts with the broader culture in strange ways, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the realm of horror. In a lot of early media, queerness could be shorthand for expressing the monstrousness of its villain, a thing we haven’t fully untangled from our larger culture, much less from queer culture. More recently, queer creators have often used horror a method to unpack their feelings of being an outsider, or to enact symbolic revenge against the culture that forces them into that role.
As such, one thing I’ve always wanted to do is examine a bunch of queer horror movies, over the course of film history, an discuss how each of them approaches queerness. And so, I’m gonna do that, because I do what I want. I’ll be examining eight films, one film for each of the decades from the 60s onwards (and two for the 2010s, because otherwise it’d be only 7 movies, and also because half my list was from the 2010s). And so we’re kicking off what I call Queertober with our first film: 1963’s The Haunting.
One of my rules for being picked for Queertober was that the movies in question couldn’t just have queer subtext. We weren’t accepting Dawn of the Dead or Nightmare on Elm Street 2, we needed to have Explicit Queer Text. It could be the hero, it could be the villain (although I also did categorically dismiss movies without significant text; No, I’m sorry, two unnamed girls making out at a party doesn’t count) but it has to be Text.
The closest I got to violating that rule is this film, the 1963 film The Haunting. This is at least partly because my options for queer horror films of the 60s were pretty limited (and god, I didn’t want to be the 800th trans girl writing about Psycho) but also because the queer subtext, hell the queer text, of The Haunting, has had an odd afterlife. So to speak.
The franchise (and I use that term very loosely) of The Haunting now encompasses 2 films (this one and a 1999 remake, which sucks) and two seasons of television: The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. And between the plot rework of the remake, the massive reimagining and expansion of the first season and the completely new plot of the 2nd, the one recurring element (aside from ghosts) is queer women. Queer women are more central to the identity of a product with The Haunting slapped on it than any other element.
Which is why it’s so odd to go back and watch the original film, because Theo’s lesbianism is barely a footnote in the actual film. It is there, if you know what you’re looking at (according to director Robert Wise, early drafts of the script made it even more explicit), but it’s mostly just subtext, a quiet element that gives Eleanor a few opportunities to freak out.
That’s what the actual core of the movie is, all other things aside. I haven’t done much in the way of plot summary, because frankly, The Haunting is a well known classic, has been for decades. But also because, I’m here to talk about queerness in the context of horror, so over the course of this project, I doubt I’ll do much of direct plot summaries, except as absolutely necessary.. And here we have a prime example of how queerness could be deployed, and indeed was for much of film’s existence; As something to frighten you.
That’s not to say that Theo’s queerness is deployed in a cruel way. Indeed, for 1963 (6 years before the Stonewall Riots) The Haunting is quite fair. Theo is not predatory, she doesn’t try to force herself on Eleanor. She lightly flirts with her, and teases her a bit, but isn’t aggressive or intense. Honestly, Luke is more aggressive with Theo than Theo is with Eleanor, and Luke isn’t particularly aggressive with Theo.
But that’s one of the things that I don’t know if I can fully access at this point. The core of the story is Eleanor’s warped perception, the question of how much is real, and how much is the product of a guilt ridden and unwell mind. And from my perspective, Eleanor is awful to Theo; Needy when she wants comfort but intensely cruel the moment an invisible, ever shifting, line is crossed, and rarely (if ever) reciprocates the comfort or kindness she receives.
And there then is the question I have to ask, whether it is intentional, or whether the filmmakers intended Theo’s mere presence, her light teasing and flirting, to be intended as a stressor, one of the things driving Eleanor towards madness, as if interacting with a lesbian is something the film finds inherently stressful. The film is far fairer towards queerness than a lot of other films of its day, movies like Sleepaway Camp, where the queerness of the villain is used as an element of the horror, an extra thing for the heroes (and thus the audience) to be frightened of.
But that doesn’t mean it’s fair by any modern standards; Eleanor straight calls Theo an abomination to her face, and it’s treated rather casually, not like she has crossed a major line. I can’t access the mental state of 1963, a space where that was an acceptable thing to say to another person about their sexuality, and frankly, I don’t want to, but it does mean that the full context, at least the intended context, is a little lost on me.
Over the course of this month, we will see queer people in a variety of different roles in horror movies; From side characters, to violence dealers, to the sites of violence to, hopefully, complex subjects, heroes of their own stories. The Haunting’s Theo definitely lives in that first space, a side character, viewed but never understood. And distressingly, for 1963, that was the best we could really hope for.
Next: Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
