GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Laura Riordan is a film culture writer who has written for websites like Daily Grindhouse and Hear Us Scream. She lives in Maine with her girlfriends and cat. You can find her on Twitter @ernst_lubitch and on Instagram @babey_yaga.

What does a queer family look like? How do you define one without capitulating to heteronormative ideas of the “nuclear family”? And how do those dynamics play out with families in the horror genre? In contemporary society, it can be hard to divorce the very idea of family from patriarchal, heterosexual, cisgender paradigms. It can be even harder when making a horror movie about a queer family. Knock at the Cabin, Skinamarink, Evil Dead Rise, and Attachment are all 2023 horror films centred around families, and all have queer characters or themes. What unites most of these families is that the horror comes from the belief that the family must be held together—and that it is horrific for this to not occur. Even when the source of the horror comes from inside the family as in Evil Dead Rise, it’s clear that this is because an interloper in the family dynamic is untrustworthy, positing that horror comes from outside the family, not within. Skinamarink is the one exception by making us question the very nature of the family as “safe,” especially toward queer children; in doing so, becomes the most honest film about queerness through the lens of horror. 

Let’s start in the other direction, with Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the fifth instalment in the long-running splatter series. This is the first film to feature an outright queer character in the Evil Dead world, although a trans character has been on the TV show. The family at the centre of this instalment is made up of a single mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her three children, daughters Bridget and Kassie (Gabrielle Echols and Nell Fisher) and a trans son, Danny (Morgan Davies), along with Ellie’s’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan). An earthquake reveals a hidden basement in their apartment building and, from there, an ancient evil is released that possesses the mother, turning her against those she loves. 

Danny is not textually trans. He is, however, played by actor Morgan Davies, who came out publically as a trans man in 2020. His dynamic within his family also suggests the character’s queerness is deeper than casting. Most writing I’ve seen that tackles the film’s depiction of trans men does so through a celebration of Danny as a classic horror himbo (“trans moron representation” is a phrase I heard often), but I see him as more tragic, a figure trying to hold his family together but ultimately tearing it apart. There was some hand-wringing when the film first came out about a possible conservative reading, with a single mother as the villain and a trans child as the catalyst. That feels fairly bad faith to me; you want this family unit to stay together, otherwise, there is no tension in the film. Both horror and dark comedy come from the perversion of the caring matriarch. Without us caring for the base version of the family unit, this wouldn’t work.

In some ways, this also makes the film the most simplistic about queer families of the four. It mainly argues for the family as a safe space for all, and horror comes from that safety being threatened. The greatest true queer fear in Evil Dead Rise is how quickly a parent can turn on a child, weaponizing their good memories together, claiming to have secretly always hated you. “I’m free now. Free from all you titty-sucking parasites,” Ellie screeches out in the trademark deadite gravel. She weaponizes her love as only the abusive parent of a trans child can. She’s not the only family member that highlights this dynamic. When Bridget, the older sister, screams at Danny saying it’s all his fault, it feels like when people blame trans kids for the hatred they and their families can face, turning the unit against each other.

But primarily, the film treats queerness as a secondary concern, leaving family its central theme. In doing so, it argues from a fairly baseline liberal perspective that the safest place for children, even queer children, is a quasi-nuclear family. As any queer person can tell you, this is a fairly dubious claim. The spaces assumed to be safe and nurturing for others can be intensely damaging for us. Although the inclusion of a single mother and a trans child does allow for this family to be non-conventional in a sense, it feels like respectability politics on some level—a “they’re just like us,” but for deadites. This is part and parcel of how Danny’s transness in never acknowledged in the film, through subtext or text. Evil Dead Rise so completely wants to be progressive it feels stilted by it, never allowing itself to be truly free of straight, cis conceptions of family or horror themes.

Attachment, directed by Gabriel Bier Gislason, follows two lesbians from their meeting up in Denmark through the beginning of their relationship. The two women, Maja (Josephine Park), a Danish actress, and Leah (Ellie Kendrick), a young British academic, quickly fall in love, but intense seizures require Leah to go back home to the U.K. There, Maja learns that she lives with her Orthodox Jewish mother and that perhaps the seizures have a more supernatural origin. The film wisely opens much like a rom-com, with an inciting meet-cute between our romantic leads. Maja and Leah have great chemistry in these opening scenes, teasing each other awkwardly but sweetly into going on a date. The film wants us to care deeply about the women’s relationship and it puts in the work to ensure this result. The horror element of the plot ties in with Leah’s Jewish identity. Her seizures stem from being possessed by a Dybbuk, a restless spirit. As the film ends, Leah’s mother, Chana (Sofie Gråbøl), and her uncle, Lev (David Dencik), along with some other religious members of the community, stage an exorcism in an attempt to rid Leah of her burden once and for all.

The tension between Leah’s mother and Maja is the film’s most effective bit of queer horror. An already tense situation, meeting the parents of your new lover, is magnified when the couple is queer and the family is religious. Chana is cold towards Maja, rarely allowing her guard down around her daughter’s girlfriend, and often refers to them as “friends.” Lev is a little more accepting, though he says he “could care, perhaps should care,” but doesn’t—hardly the most gracious of acceptance speeches. But Leah’s family does grant her the bare minimum of acceptance it seems, and at least some of Chana’s harshness is unrelated to homophobia.

Similar to Evil Dead Rise, the queerness and horror elements of Attachment don’t come together quite right. By having us care about the family unit inherently, Attachment again pulls its queer horror punches. A straight version of this movie could easily exist, though Chana’s behaviour would certainly be seen as odder, and, in this way, it feels limited in how it can discuss queerness in the context of horror. Director Gabriel Bier Gislason, a straight man, seems not comfortable enough to really twist the knife into the hearts of his queer viewers. The film’s happy ending is its greatest weakness: just at the moment where the ritual seems to be going catastrophically wrong, Chana steps in and sacrifices herself so her daughter can have a future. This is a powerful emotional moment, to be sure, but one that feels more at home with the film’s initial rom-com worldview than the supernatural tale we’ve transitioned into. You don’t have to bury your gays, but the ending beats of this story play more like a fairy tale than a horror film.

In Knock at the Cabin, queerness is under fire from the outside world. A gay couple, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Alridge), are on vacation with their daughter (Kristen Cui) when a group of strangers shows up with makeshift weapons. These are doomsday prophets who only know of one way to stop the coming apocalypse: one of the members of the family must die, and it must be decided by the other members. To the assembled crew, led by a gym teacher named Leonard (Dave Bautista), a family with gay dads is enough to cause the end of the world. Queer people living a life beyond misery is simply unacceptable to some people.

Director/writer M. Night Shyamalan’s trademark dialogue is perhaps best used in this film, as it firmly plants us in the world of the child protagonist, Wen. All dialogue revolves around her; even when she isn’t an active participant in the conversation, you can hear the characters edit themselves, especially in the beginning of the film, trying their best not to scare her too much. This is expected from her fathers, of course. It’s the attitude of the home invaders, our crusading quadrant, that is unique to this film. The film opens with Leonard approaching Wen as she catches bugs outside the titular cabin. He talks to her at her level, trying his best not to alarm her while setting the groundwork for what he believes must be done. Paired with the film’s intense close-ups on the two characters, we begin the film intimately, feeling at home with the characters.

Shyamalan similarly feels quite comfortable with the queerness at the centre of his film. The flashbacks into Eric’s and Andrew’s past show them as fully fleshed-out entities, not stereotypes or a straight parody/fantasy of gay men. It isn’t all heartbreak, but it isn’t all queer joy either. And how the director/writer pitches the villains of the film is not to humanize them in the traditional sense, making them characters to understand or sympathize with, but to make them feel real, reflecting how “normal” people can go down alt-right rabbit holes or fall prey to other cult-like groups. Leonard and the two women in the group (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn) are very firm in their belief that they are not hateful people. The odd man out of the group disagrees. Redmond (Rupert Grint) is aggressively homophobic and is the only assailant who has a past with the victims, having been jailed for assaulting Andrew several years back.

Taken from a logical standpoint, it seems clear that Redmond created this group through an online messaging board, where he tied together their shared paranoias to fulfil his homophobic revenge. That’s what Eric thinks, refusing to believe that by killing one of the members of their family, they could save the world. But, unfortunately, Leonard and his crew are not sharing a paranoia. The apocalypse is coming, almost certainly, as we see from television broadcasts, as disaster after disaster strikes while the family refuses to make a choice. This led some to criticize the film as homophobic, suggesting Shyamalan believes in the rhetoric of the apocalypse prophets a little too much. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s a horror film, a genre designed to create scenarios where evil runs rampant. What could be more terrifying than the people advocating for your destruction being right, that maybe God does hate us? But it is also key to the film working that Shymalan himself disagrees with this notion. He is upset by the concept that this family has to choose, perhaps most so by the part of him that is a father and a husband. He’s almost squeamish about the violence in the film, often positioning the moment of impact just out of frame. M. Night being a family man has been a core concept of his films for a while now, but he hasn’t worn his heart on his sleeve as flagrantly before this film. By making the queer family at the centre of this film so clearly an emotional connection point for him to his own life, it removes a lot of the hang-ups one can feel from a film depicting queerness from a straight author. 

Shymalan distances himself from a  “they’re just like us” perspective with plenty of material evidence that these gay men have gone through things that no straight couple has had to, especially in order to have a family. The film argues not for the family as safe inherently for queer people, but that work must be done to make it so. It knows that part of what makes what this group is asking from Eric, Andrew, or Wen so impossible to consider is that they have already suffered in order to become a family, already gone through more than enough trials to be happy. The fact that God or the universe seems to think this is not enough is the ultimate tragedy of Knock at the Cabin.

Skinmarink, written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball, is certainly the most unique of these films in both form and queer themes. Two young siblings, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and Kevin (Lucas Paul), wake up to notice that all of the windows and doors in their house have been removed. Their parents are gone for the most part, what remains are odd, ghostly presences that haunt our child protagonists. Their only comfort is a glowing television screen, playing vintage cartoons on a loop. It’s the only film without outright queer characters, but it is also the only film made by a gay filmmaker. The world of his film is hostile toward the child protagonists, it feels hard to understand the rules or how to be safe. It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who was once a child that struggled with understanding why things came harder for them than others, especially things that were supposed to be “natural”. 

The film explores the home as being inherently unsafe and difficult to navigate. It’s interesting that the film starts before the entity begins to terrorize the kids and yet it’s easy to mistake the beginning as existing in this same space. The house without windows and doors feels like a more extreme version of what Kaylee and Kevin were experiencing before: a place without safety. We’re told that Kevin hurt his arm sleepwalking, but it’s hard to put much faith in that. From the tone of their father, this feels more like parental abuse. The rest of the film exists in that world, with Kaylee and Kevin’s lack of confidence in the safety of their parents extending beyond the human elements of the household. Everything begins to torment the children, from the walls, to the television, to their toys. Nothing familiar is safe.

Nothing familiar is safe—that notion is something that comes up often in the world of queerness, especially before you have the language to understand yourself. I know before I knew how to describe my transness, many basic concepts seemed alien and terrifying to me. You don’t like how you move through the world, but you can’t articulate why. You know that things are unsafe for you even if, again, you are unsure of the source of this danger. The entity, whatever it is, in Skinamarink remains practically unseen. It could be a figment of the children’s imaginations, if not for the lack of any other kind of reality to contrast it with. In doing so, it becomes a monster of the mind, something similar to the villains in films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), where you as the viewer seek out the unseen monster in every dark shadow or quick shot of the surroundings. 

But unlike that ‘90s found-footage classic, this film doesn’t take place in the woods. It takes place in a house with no way to look out at anything other than this basic, suburban American home. That is where the true evil lies for queer people, queer children especially. It isn’t lurking in the woods, it isn’t sealed up away from us, it isn’t an outside force. It’s in our homes, where the people who should love and protect us don’t, where we are left to fend for ourselves. Skinamarink reflects this back at us, asking, “Why has no one come yet?”.