Richard Scott Larson

"Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter's 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter's inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael's potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet."

Through the lens of horror-from Halloween to Hereditary-queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo-and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes-such as the circumspect and resilient "final girl," body possession,...