Over the weekend, I was watching the PG-13 horror film Ghoulies from 1984 just for nostalgia's sake and I realized that two of the male characters seemed to have a very suggestive relationship. There is no nudity or actual touching, but one very tall and attractive young man seems to be extra-concerned about his, um, "friend" when his friend breakdances at the party and appears to have passed out.
Then they go searching for a friend who went missing after they all watched their newly possessed friend do a Satanic ritual. The two guys are together as they run upstairs to an empty bedroom to find her. She's not there and they revel in the idea that she isn't there. She must be "in the closet" they suggest with a bunch of giggles. When they open the closet, a scary doll falls out, but if the doll wasn't there then I think these two guys would have played Seven Minutes in Heaven!
That got me thinking: there are a few horror movies with homoerotic messages. Hellraiser, Interview with the Vampire, Fright Night, and even The Babadook. Those films don't have any skin, but these do:
Sleepaway Camp
The campy, strange Sleepaway Camp is one of those "so bad it's good" movies. I absolutely love it. The ending is memorable and probably problematic by today's standards, but the movie is worth watching for the 1980s men running around in short shorts. Oh, do I have your attention?
The film is definitely queer even if it twists its queerness for horror purposes. Again, the film is not GREAT. I'm not about to praise it for its progressive and academic approaches to queerness. I am saying, however, that the movie does not ignore gay themes and it also has hot men in it. So take what you can get! And you can get Paul DeAngelo in short shorts.
From an illicit homosexual affair between two men to our shy leading lady being called gay by another camper who questions why she never showers with the other girls. In her silence, she does not deny being queer, and that even normalizes the idea that this character is part of the LGBTQ community...and she is going to silently bring her bullies down.
Psycho
There have been so many arguments made about queer coding in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho and a lot of that might be helped by actor Anthony Perkins who plays Norman Bates. Anthony was gay or bisexual in real life. He never put a label on his sexuality and he did end up marrying a woman, but he was in a well-known relationship with openly gay actor Tab Hunter for a while.
Norman is a peculiar young man who loves his taxidermied birds and his overbearing mother. As he tells Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) when she has dinner in his office, "A boy's best friend is his mother." It is suggested that Norman's sexual and emotional development has been delayed due to his mother's interference...and that has had devastating consequences.
The film definitely played into some Freudian theories that surrounded the real crimes of Ed Gein, the real killer on whom the movie is very loosely based. The movie's queer coding is definitely dated as I think the movie is mostly about this man's mental illness.
While none of the men go nude in the shocking 1960 film that broke barriers, Vince Vaughn plays Norman in the 1999 shot-for-shot remake. Well, it's almost shot-for-shot because this version shows us Viggo Mortensen's ass right away!
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2
While the other films I'm talking about have "gay undertones", A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is all TONES, baby. This unique sequel came out only a year after the original and it also came out with some sexy young men struggling with their identities.
Screenwriter David Chaskin also fully acknowledges the subtext in this movie. He has admitted that the script is 100% a coming-out allegory and the film even stars a real gay actor, Mark Patton, playing our leading man, a character who suppresses his sexuality.
He and his best friend work up a sweat together. He goes to a leather bar. He has a sign on his door that says "no chicks". To quote the great Avril Lavigne, "can I make it any more obvious?"
At one point, our leading man who is struggling with "the monster inside of him" confesses this problem to his best friend who responds by adding "and you want to sleep with me?" Forget a Final girl, this film has a Final Boy as he tries to escape Freddy's wrath. Shirtless young men, de-pantsing each other, and "confessing" things to one another. This is as gay as a 1980s horror film can get!
We do get to see nudity in the movie! There is beautiful booty to behold when a butt-naked guy named Marshall Bell, his coach, meets an unfortunate end. You can watch his ass before the blood:
