There are spoilers for the movies but you don’t need to have seen all of them to gain something from the essays. I just made it a point to watch ALL of the films shared in this collection BEFORE reading the essays based on them. Not all essays hit the same, but I blame it on not having seen some of the movies being referenced, but overall it was really interesting the interpretation from a queer lens. like there’s really so much you can say along the lines of “the monster was demonized/had to be hidden…AND SO WAS/DID I” even if you’re saying it in different ways.

A really terrific collection of essays by a great selection and variety of different authors — both fiction authors, poets, and essayists — about the intersection between queer studies and queer identity and horror movies. i also wish we got more stories from trans women because i feel as though they’re particularly demonized when it comes to just general society but especially in horror. Others discuss how horror allowed them to escape from the real horrors of life, something I can definitely relate to.Themes in the ones I mentioned include transness and disability; bisexuality and "experimentation"; surrogacy and pregancy; puberty and gender/sexual expectations; historical sapphic relationships; Cuban masculinity and daughters; Blackness and whiteness in Utah; beauty standards, healing, and queer/trans identity; and self-harm and transness. Readers that do not know any or very few of the movies being discussed will likely struggle, because this is an unabashed passion project that never feels the need to explain itself. Like any collection it’s not without weaker entries but I thought an overwhelming majority were well worth my time - although that may be linked to far too many years spent devouring examples of every conceivable subgenre of horror cinema. First with Shudder's Queer for Fear series that aired in October, and now with this collection of horror movie analyses through a queer lens.

It Came from the Closet is a heterogeneous anthology and even though the essays are short, the authors dig deep into their personal life experiences while using horror to reflect on their queer identity, and vice versa. If you have a hard time understanding what people mean when they say, "horror is queer," then read this book, and you'll have your answer. THE RING really traumatized me as a kid and unlike many (if not most) queer people, I had a ~decent~ childhood. I couldn’t relate to the abuse story she was telling, but it was something deeper than that, I felt anxious, and so agitated that I had to stop reading it a few times. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.The insight from these memoirs is wide; in addition to tackling on queer subjects as: being gay or lesbian in a religious household, growing up trans and dealing with gender issues, how bisexual visibility and queerbaiting seem to go hand in hand; there is also discussions about class, race, disability, abuse, fertility treatments, proving once more that we can’t analyze these matters in an isolated environment, everything is connected, and the only way to deal with it is voicing our experiences. His work has appeared in the anthologies "Instant Classic (That No One Will Read)" (Night Beats / tRaum, 2023) and "It Came From the Closet" (Feminist Press, 2022), as well as in anthologies recognized by Lambda Literary: the 2021 finalist "Trans-Galactic Bike Ride," the 2012 finalist "Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect," and the 2011 winner "Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community.

It Came from the Closet is a fantastic collection of diverse queer perspectives—an accessible, provocative, and much-welcomed addition to the growing body of queer horror analysis of our favorite films, new and old.There are a couple essays in it that push past the line of pretentious academia enough to be mildly annoying.