Hemophobes, move along! For Halloween, Têtu vous has whipped up a list of LGBT+ films where blood flows in torrents. Brace yourselves to tremble: it’s going to splatter!
By Tessa Laney and Florian Ques
Masked killers, demonic possessions, unconfessed desires and curses… At Halloween, LGBT cinema serves up our share of nightmares! From cult slashers to the wildest horror comedies, here are six films to shiver, fantasize and repaint the walls in red.
Bodies Bodies Bodies
A luxury villa, drugs, a hurricane, and a gang of insufferably privileged young adults—here is the recipe for a deadly evening. Accompanied by her new girlfriend Bee, Sophie, with her friends, finds herself swept into a murder party that spirals out of control. A paranoiac, smartphone-lit locked-room thriller, Bodies Bodies Bodies reinvents the slasher codes in Gen Z’s flavor. Behind the blood splatters, the director Halina Reijn dissects a youth obsessed with appearances, pseudo-psychological discourse, and power dynamics. A satire as biting as its characters are toxic.
>> Available on Prime Video, Canal VOD, YouTube, Apple TV
Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma
In slashers, sex often comes at the price of blood. An old rule that Jane Schoenbrun takes a sly pleasure in toying with. After I Saw the TV Glow, the filmmaker presents a young director tasked with resurrecting a horror franchise from the 1980s. Her encounter with the reclusive actress who embodied the first final girl, played by Gillian Anderson, rapidly tilts desire into nightmare. Unless it’s the other way around. Between lesbian eroticism, hemoglobin and deliberate grotesqueness, this meta-slaughter game twists the conventions of the genre to better attack the norms… of gender.
>> Available on MUBI
The Original Fear Street Trilogy
In Shadyside, the massacre of teens is a local tradition dating back more than three centuries. Adapted from R. L. Stine’s novels, director Leigh Janiak’s trilogy traces a bloody curse through three eras: the 1990s with masked killers in the Scream vein, a 1978 summer camp worthy of Friday the 13th, and back to 1666, during the witch-hunt. Three eras, corpses by the handful, and a lesbian love story at the heart of the carnage.
>> Available on Netflix
Jennifer’s Body
Jennifer already ruled the high school before she started devouring the boys. Literally. Since a Satanic sacrifice went awry, the plague incarnate as Megan Fox has become a particularly voracious succubus. Only her best friend Needy seems capable of stopping the carnage. Shunned at its 2009 release, this horror-comedy by Karyn Kusama has since become a queer classic. Behind the blood and the savage quips, Diablo Cody’s screenplay (Juno, Young Adult) inverts the fantasy of the sexy high-school girl to better explore the troubled relationship between the two teens, where desire blends with jealousy and power dynamics.
>> Available on Disney +, YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV
Freddy – Chapter 2: Freddy’s Revenge
This time, Freddy Krueger doesn’t just haunt the dreams of a teenager: he plans to possess his body. In this 1985 film, his new prey, Jesse Walsh, has just moved into the house where Nancy faced the knife-wielding killer five years earlier. Long considered one of the franchise’s underperformers, this second installment has since become a queer classic thanks to its barely veiled gay subtext. Behind Jesse’s nightmares lie the anxieties of a boy wrestling with a desire he dares not admit, Freddy embodying everything he tries to suppress. A deliciously ambiguous slasher, carried by Mark Patton, one of the earliest scream kings of horror cinema.
>> Available on YouTube, Apple TV, Prime Video, Canal VOD
Knife in the Heart
In 1979’s Paris underground, Anne (Vanessa Paradis) produces gay porn films and is poorly coping with her breakup from Loïs, her partner and editor. To win her back, she embarks on a new shoot. But when a masked killer begins massacring the actors in her troupe, her plans take a bloodier turn. With Knife in the Heart, Yann Gonzalez revisits the Italian giallo in a deluge of blood, inventive murders, and hypnotic imagery. Behind its deliciously grotesque excesses, this flamboyant slasher is also a love letter to exploitation cinema and to an entire queer culture long relegated to the margins.
>> Available on YouTube, Apple TV, Prime Video, Canal VOD
