Do you have a taste for the macabre? Then you’ve come to the right place. Every Halloween here at Them, when we share our guide to horror movies for wimpy queers, die-hard fans of the genre say they’d prefer to watch the goriest, bloodiest, most violent horror movies ever made instead. To which we can only say: Dear reader, How do you think we’d be able to select the handful of titles that are safe for gay scaredy cats if we weren’t experts on the entire catalog of horror cinema? Of course we watch the disturbing stuff, too — well, some of us do anyway. A small but vocal contingent of staffers at this website inhale everything from Saw to the Terrifier movies, and we barely blink at even the most brutal kills.
In other words, you asked, and we delivered. Fellow gore enthusiast Juan Velasquez and I put our heads together to come up with this list of remarkably disturbing horror movies, all of them featuring queer themes or characters. (And yes, like many viewers, we see plenty of homoerotic subtext in the first Saw movie.) If you don’t have the stomach for it, I’ll give you one last chance to go cuddle up with our cozy list of horror movies for the Steven Universe crowd instead. There’s no shame in admitting a PG rating is as much as you can handle.
For everyone else, read on for some of the most visceral queer horror fare ever made, in addition to a few gateway films for those looking to make the transition from Scooby-Doo to stronger stuff. — Samantha Allen
Climax (2018)
French bad boy Gaspar Noé does it again with this literal LSD trip of a horror film, 2018’s Climax. The movie follows a French dance troupe on the final night of a grueling week of rehearsals as they throw a party in an empty school. Don’t be fooled by the extended and highly stylized dance number that opens the film, or the bumping soundtrack that features two original songs by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, because things only go south from there. The sexy and nimble dancers all drink from the same sangria punch bowl, unaware that it has been secretly spiked with psychedelics. Soon, everyone begins to act confused, and then downright erratic. All hell breaks loose as the dancers writhe, urinate on themselves, hook up, and get into physical altercations. Let’s just say things do not end well for these voguing hopefuls.
The goriest thing that happens: A pregnant dancer gets punched in the stomach, then slashes her own face while a crowd encourages her to kill herself. — Juan Velasquez
Titane (2021)
A body horror masterpiece, a trans allegory, and a twisted comedy, Julia Ducournau’s Titane is one of the most boldly original films of the decade so far. Even the elevator pitch — inasmuch as this film can be summarized — sounds completely unhinged: A stripper with a titanium implant in her skull who has sex with cars and kills people (Agathe Rousselle) goes on the run from the police only to fall in with a fire chief who believes her to be his long-lost son (Vincent Lindon). Somehow it only gets more outrageous from there! But beneath all the blood and guts, Titane is a surprisingly tender story about alternate forms of kinship and family-building, ultimately challenging us to consider the limits of humanity itself.
The goriest thing that happens: Someone very painfully gives birth to a metal sphere. — Samantha Allen
Raw (2017)
If you like Titane, you should also check out Julia Ducournau’s debut film about a vegetarian-turned-cannibal as she comes of age. The film’s lead Justine (Garance Marillier) is forced to eat rabbit kidneys during a veterinary school hazing, which kickstarts her hunger for raw meat. Justine starts with uncooked chicken but soon levels up to gnawing on her sister’s severed finger, blaming it on the dog when caught. Ducournau doesn’t shy away from unflinching gore, but the real horror here is about the way our bodies can betray us. Raw shows how our bodily functions often feel beyond our control, demonstrating that we are all animals to some degree. The film’s twist — which I shan’t give away — adds a poignant, and dare I say hopeful, end to this feast of a film.
The goriest thing that happens: A severed finger is eaten with delight like it’s the last buffalo wing in the basket. In this case, the gross-out factor is just as much about what we hear as it is about what we see on screen. — Juan Velasquez
The Perfection (2018)
Sandwiched between Get Out and M3GAN in Allison Williams’ impressive horror filmography, this 2018 Netflix thriller is nowhere near as good as the more widely known Park Chan-wook film The Handmaiden that may have inspired it, but it’s worth a watch nonetheless. Following cellist Charlotte Willmore (Williams) who takes her old music teacher Anton’s (Steven Weber) protégé Lizzie Wells (Logan Browning) under her wing, The Perfection opens with some hot lesbian sex before a meat cleaver shows up the next morning. I’m being intentionally coy about plot details because this one is full of twists and turns you don’t want to know in advance. Let’s just say this film shows how cutting the competitive world of elite music academies can really be and leave it at that!
The goriest thing that happens: It’s hard to pick just one moment, but there’s a particularly brutal shot of a stabbing that doesn’t pull away until someone’s arm has been completely maimed. — Samantha Allen
Saw (2004)
With 10 films in the franchise and an untitled 11th to be released next year, it appears audiences can’t get enough of that little spiral-cheeked, tricycle-riding puppet. When the original Saw was released in 2004 only to be quickly followed by Eli Roth’s Hostel in 2005, a new genre of horror movie was coined: “torture porn,” an apt name for the agonizingly brutal yet creative kills featured in these movies. In this James Wan-directed first entry, an anonymous killer by the name of Jigsaw creates elaborate and gruesome puzzles that force his victims to inflict extreme pain on themselves to escape with their lives. These traps get much more elaborate in subsequent sequels — think of the most vile Rube Goldberg machine you can imagine — and the victims have usually committed some sort of wrongdoing that Jigsaw is attempting to correct. The plots of these films attempt to have a deeper meaning — most notably Spiral, with its commentary on police violence — and many fans have read queer themes into the series. But at its core, Saw is mainly a vehicle for some of cinema’s most harrowing death scenes.
The goriest thing that happens: A woman with a “reverse bear trap” strapped to her head has to slice open a man’s stomach to retrieve a key inside that will release her. — Juan Velasquez
The Fear Street Trilogy
Don’t let the R.L. Stine association fool you: Fear Street is more adult than Goosebumps but still mild enough to serve as an introduction to slashers for those who have only watched bloodless PG-13 horror movies so far. If you’re too skittish to watch some of the other entries on this list, these movies could be a great place to start. Set in 1994, 1978, and 1666 respectively, this adaptation of Stine’s YA book series focuses on lesbian couple Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) as they grapple with the ancient curse hanging over their town, tracing that evil back generations as the trilogy progresses. But the real fun here are the creative kills, especially in the first film, a pitch-perfect tribute to Scream and the mid-90s mini slasher revival.
The goriest thing that happens: Something horrendous happens with a grocery store bread slicer. Beware of spoilers, but it’s the first movie’s best sequence. — Samantha Allen
Hellraiser (1987)
The first three films in the Hellraiser franchise are among my favorite of all time, which is a big statement from a real sick horror fan. There is something deeply unsettling about the Cenobites, writer-director Clive Barker’s horny demons from another dimension, that really shook me at the tender age of 12 when I first saw this 1987 film. The Cenobites are first summoned by solving a puzzle box — which looks like an art-deco Rubik’s Cube — unleashing their sadomasochistic marvels on whoever clicks the pieces into position. Headed by “Pinhead,” the crew of leather-clad monsters describe themselves as “explorers in the further regions of experience,” which basically translates to ripping humans apart with chains in sexually charged BDSM scenarios. What makes Hellraiser stand out from so many other supernatural horror films — and perhaps why it impacted me so strongly as a burgeoning horror fanatic — is its distinct lack of humor. This is totally austere barbaric cruelty presented without any winks or nudges at the audience, and that only makes it more terrifying.
The goriest thing that happens: A man’s face is pulled apart by hooked chains. — Juan Velasquez
Knife + Heart (2018)
French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez pays tribute to the Italian giallo in 2018’s Knife + Heart, a ’70s-set slasher about a killer targeting the actors of a gay porn production house run by a lovesick lesbian filmmaker (Vanessa Paradis). As dreamlike as it is violent, Knife + Heart is both an homage to the color-drenched subgenre popularized by Dario Argento and also something entirely contemporary, with its own unique visual sensibility. If it were made in a different era, it might read as a moralistic tale about gay men being punished for pre-AIDS sexual excess, but cinematographer Simon Beaufils’ (Anatomy of a Fall) lens is yearning, lustful, and languorous, humanizing the victims even as the bodies pile up. And there is quite a lot of murder to be found here, mostly of the stabbing variety.
The goriest thing that happens: Someone gets stabbed in the rectum. I told you there was a lot of stabbing. — Samantha Allen
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