Queertober Part 8: The Retreat

One thing that I find odd is, despite slasher and home invasion movies often being framed as a monster hunting innocent people, it’s very rarely framed as homophobic people hunting queer people. Maybe that’s a little too raw, but horror shouldn’t, hypothetically, be afraid to be raw. Especially when the subgenre of horror at question could allow for some intense catharsis on that front.

Since the mid-2010s, there’s been a mini-wave of horror films where in the 3rd act, one of the heroes reveals themselves to be unusually good at violence for a protagonist in a horror film. Maybe they have a backstory in hunting or are unusually strong, or maybe they just don’t give up, who knows. The core is that the third act is not devoted to survival or escape, but to turning the tables on the villain/s and killing them right back.

And I‘m totally in favor of this little mini-wave. The way they work allows the violence of the third act to ramp up, becoming openly and gleefully cruel, without the tone of the movie becoming too grim, basically letting the movie have its cake and eat it too. Most of them are pretty fun and a few of them, like You’re Next and Ready or Not completely slap.

So when the premise of this movie was sold to me as “Homophobic killers kidnap a lesbian couple who murder them right back” I was on board immediately. And if that’s what you’re in for, yeah, it’ll do just fine. There is indeed a cabal of cartoonishly awful homophobes who kidnap our leads, and their gay friends, and then they do indeed get completely mulched by the lesbian couple.

It’s honestly not an amazing example of the form; The script is solid, and the actors do a decent job, but it’s not shot with a lot of complexity (I think the low budget got in the way) and while the kills are fun, there’s nothing super imaginative. You’re Next ended with a dude getting a blender dropped on his skull and turned on, a TV being dropped on someone’s head isn’t gonna cut it. But it’s hard to get mad at any of these things, when the movie is just an 82 minute little novelty. The movie is, honestly, just fine.

Which is why I chose it, because I think one of the most exhausting things about being queer, and seeking out queer media in particular, is the expectation that everything is expected to be great, amazing even, or else it is without value. Every piece of media with a queer person must be a commercial smash and a critical darling, or else it is without value, if not calling the concept of even having queer people in media into question.

This question even came up recently, as multiple networks axed TV shows featuring queer people, especially queer women: Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, Motherland: Fort Salem, Gentleman Jack, First Kill, all of them were gone in the last 12 months. And when I make that point, someone will inevitably tell me that one, or all of them, weren’t very good anyway. And my response at this point is: Who gives a shit?

Horror is not a genre with a lot of critical respect. Yes, there are undeniable classics and critical darlings, but as a whole, the genre is generally considered low brow, less than, even to this day. The fact that, when there was a mini boom of horror of horror with critical respect, a bunch of people rallied around the term “Elevated Horror” kind of proves my point. But horror is still a genre with value, even at its lowest, for providing windows into what society is scared of or just for providing a strange form of catharsis to various fears we hold onto. I often fear what’ll happen if I piss off the wrong transphobe at the wrong time, so why not give me a movie that validates my fear, but also posits “Yeah, but you’ll fucking kill that guy if he tries anything.”

This is not to say that I don’t love deeper, more complex works of queer art, in and out of the horror genre, but simply to say that we don’t need to dismiss the value of those things just because they fail to meet some critical standard queer works are held to. Yes, I deserve my lesbian Get Out, but don’t I also deserve my lesbian Friday the 13th?