As a tike, I was introduced to the world of movies by my father. My earliest recollections of film are of weekend “buddy days” spent with Dad and being enthralled by those over-the-top Irwin Allen disaster flicks of the ‘70s, like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Populated by B-list actors (either on the way up or on the way down their respective career ladders) who struggled to survive disasters natural and otherwise amidst paper-thin melodrama and never-moving hair, these earliest cinematic experiences could very easily explain my fondness for camp. Then, at the age of 8, my father took me to see Jaws. It took four successive attempts to get through the entire movie, each time getting slightly further into the narrative before pleading with my ever-patient father to leave. I had discovered controlled fear and I was in love—even if I was petrified.
Hooked on horror, I eagerly gobbled up episodes of The Night Stalker, cowered as I watched Kim Darby battle little green demons in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and damn near wet the bed after watching that spectacularly creepy Zuni doll pursue poor Karen Black as she ran, stumbled, and fell through that now-classic last segment of the Trilogy of Terror anthology
At the age of ten, my horror journey took a fateful turn as I sat in a darkened theater beside my devoted Dad, munching popcorn as stark piano notes heralded the arrival of John Carpenter’s Halloween. That movie-going experience was the cementing force of my devotion to all things horror and the beginning of my love affair with the slasher film (and Jamie Lee Curtis—but that’s another story for another book). Yes, I’ll openly admit it: I love slasher films—that often-cannibalized subgenre of horror that critics dismiss, actors renounce from their resumes, and the religious right once blamed for the collective ills of the world.
In articulating my worship of slasher movies and their lure, it’s difficult as a gay man of a certain age to refrain from in-depth analysis of the hidden subtext of such genre fare; after all, we’re living in an age where anyone and everyone with access to the Internet is an armchair critic. But several decades of experience, inquisitive study, and accidental pop culture reconnaissance does lend a certain level of unintentional expertise in matters such as these, no?
In terms of the simplest explanation, slasher films became for me what Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and the cavalcade of other Universal monsters were to my father’s generation. They’ve come to represent that magical time of imagination and self-discovery somewhere between childhood and adulthood, when grown-up uncertainties could be explored under the protective security of adolescence. As a nascent gay cub, the slasher took on an added relevance with its conflicting depiction of sexual excess struck down by a crushing morality.
Being a creature of habit, perhaps it’s the unvarying formula of the slasher film that agrees with my longstanding obsessive-compulsive tendencies and need for order. Riddled with more clichés than an old episode of Dynasty, the great slasher films of the ‘80s and beyond generally possess five basic elements. There are the stock characters—usually a stereotypical mix of teenagers that include cardboard cutout jocks, practical jokesters, bimbos, and nerds—who bumble through a formulaic plot that involves the hapless group traveling to an isolated location and being systematically picked off one-by-one by an unseen (or often glimpsed) killer. These films employ highly inventive killings that have elevated special make-up effects to an art form—creating bona fide celebrities out of the previously invisible special effects artist. The films all culminate in a prolonged chase scene in the third act between the killer and the solitary heroine, a preeminent character in slasher fare that author Carol J. Clover coins the “Final Girl” in her seminal gender exploration of the genre, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. This heroine is generally painted as more virtuous than the rest of the group. She refrains from all immoralities like recreational drug use and sexual exploration; she is usually the one who cautions the group not to go to the location they find themselves in; and she figures out that something wicked this way comes before anyone else. Finally, slasher movies usually include the false ending element, that final jump scare following the audience’s collective sigh of relief that the on-screen horror is seemingly over. Fans will remember these cinematic moments of pure jolt as the stuff of scary film memories; cynics will dismiss this once-unexpected moment as the brainchild of studio execs who forecasted sequel dollars.
Arguably, some film scholars will point to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as the first modern slasher film to combine thematic sexuality, (implied) gore, the mentally disturbed killer, and an isolated setting. I would counter that cinema’s first slasher film was actually the 1945 film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which served as a precursor to the modern slasher formula with its tale of ten people on an isolated island being manipulated and killed off one-by-one for the sins of their past by an unseen killer in inventive ways. Indeed, the best and most enduring slashers are the ones with an element of murder mystery at their core—films such as Black Christmas (1974), Friday the 13th (1980), Terror Train (1980), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), Curtains (1983), and April Fool’s Day (1986). But it was 1978’s Halloween that served as the catalyst for the slasher movement of the 1980s. Although preceded by the garishly technicolor works of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and the popular gialli that came out of Italy in the early to mid-1970s, Halloween holds the distinction of ushering in the golden age of slasher films. Together with Friday the 13th, Carpenter’s micro-budget masterpiece would go on to span countless sequels and inspire myriad knockoffs and serial killer icons.
What was it about the genre that appealed to my budding gay sensibilities? Is there a connection between slasher movies and queer culture and experience? To the naked eye, these seeming cautionary morality tales almost appear to be—on their surface—advertisements for conservative values, the Republican Party of horror films, if you will. They celebrate virtue and condemn vice with barely concealed contempt that’s visualized in graphic throat slashings, disembowelments, and beheadings. So just what is the queer appeal of films permeated by senseless violence, misogyny, and poor fashion?
In retrospect, I think as a gay teen that I identified with the sense of isolation the characters in slasher films face—both literal and metaphorical. In a film like Happy Birthday to Me, for example, one can see an allegorical parallel between the mental isolation Melissa Sue Anderson’s heroine faces as she struggles to trust her unreliable memories of a past trauma amidst the carnage of her diminishing circle of friends and the social isolation LGBTQ individuals face as they grapple with the incongruence of contradictory societal views, draconian religious beliefs, and familial attitudes regarding their emerging sexual orientations and gender identities.
Slasher films serve as an outlet for the societal fears LGBTQ individuals face in their everyday lives. For the LGBTQ person who’s chosen to accept and embrace their sexual orientation or gender identity, navigating in a world fraught with bigotry, discrimination, and the threat of physical harm, the characters in slasher films provide a conduit through which those fears can be examined on a subconscious level. The characters who hesitantly stumble around the unfamiliar turf of their unseen enemy in the modern slasher yarn represent us as LGBTQ members of society who must also circumspectly traverse the dangers of life in a dissimilar heterosexual world. Slasher films often cast their characters as strangers in a strange land much in the same way queer culture thrusts their young into a landscape unfamiliar to the heteronormative terrain we’re used to navigating as we come of age and enter our adult LGBTQ lives. Take the teen cheerleader out of the comfort zone of her high school hallway surrounded by friends and thrust her into a scenario where she’s alone and being pursued by an axe-wielding masked figure across the uneven terrain of a dark forest at night…in the rain…in her bra and panties. What LGBTQ person can’t relate to the fear, disorientation, physical discomfort, and vulnerability of that cinematic depiction when applied to their own coming of age in the queer culture of their generation?
Even the overbearing mother trope probably held some subtextual weight in the early days of slasher film analysis in discussions of nature versus nurture—a theory often posited in research into the development of sexual orientation. Norma Bates in Psycho, Susan Tyrell’s Aunt Cheryl in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning), Ike and Addley’s titular mother from Mother’s Day, and even Laurie Metcalf’s Debbie Salt in Scream 2 are all so smothering and domineering that they “turn” their sons into serial killers. Likewise, some in the psychiatric profession once blamed overly close maternal relationships for causing the "disease" of male homosexuality. Even though research since the 1950s has debunked and discarded this theory, one can see the influences of this outdated hypothesis in the stereotype of the domineering, emasculating mother figure in some slasher films, drawing yet another parallel worthy of mention here.
There is also an interesting metaphorical comparison to draw between the transformation of the slasher film’s final girl and the coming out process. In the beginning of the slasher film, the heroine usually presents as weak, timid, uncertain of how to navigate through the situation she finds herself in; for the LGBTQ person, this uncertainty is the same in the coming out process. As the film progresses, the heroine transforms—she toughens and becomes confident in her abilities to overcome the malevolence stalking her. For LGBTQ people, the coming out process is similarly transformative; we develop a thicker skin and summon the necessary courage to confront the unseen enemy of homophobia waiting for us around every darkened corner.
On a pop cultural level, the final girl character also holds a special appeal for the gay male community in particular, coinciding with our longstanding predilection for strong female characters in the arts. Like Bette Davis survived the male-dominated studio system of old Hollywood and Tina Turner survived Ike, so too does Jamie Lee Curtis survive her Halloween night encounter with the boogeyman and Adrienne King survive the summer camp carnage of Crystal Lake. At the end of the slasher, the final girl can go on to reinvent herself—like Cher or Madonna or Gaga—and is positioned by film’s end for a comeback. And everyone loves a comeback. For gay men, the final girl is our slasher film fag hag. She may be maimed, bleeding, and psychologically torn to bits, but she’s still Judy, Bette, and Liza rolled into one spunky toughie who will live to fight another day (or at least until the sequel).
Slashers films also held queer appeal on a purely visceral level. Although these films most often focused on the female form—adding to enduring claims of rampant misogyny from detractors of the genre—slasher films intermittently gave curious gay boys a tantalizing hint of forbidden adult pleasures. What gay man who grew up on a steady diet of slasher movies in the ‘80s doesn’t have memories of nights spent with their VCR and a finger on the rewind button to make sure Kevin Bacon never stopped running across that makeshift dock in his blue speedo in Friday the 13th? Who doesn’t remember the twinge of sexual excitement when Gary, the ill-fated Gamma Delta pledge, is tied to the tree in his tighty-whities in Final Exam? Or Vincent Van Patten running around Garth Manor in his heart-speckled boxers in Hell Night? Or Johnny Depp’s crop top and exposed midriff in A Nightmare on Elm Street? For gay men of a certain age, slasher films provided the visual stimulation when we discovered self-ecstasy behind the locked doors of our bedrooms while our parents and siblings slept in adjoining rooms, long before the immediate accessibility of Internet porn. Even sitting in a darkened theater during a sold-out viewing of some random splatter flick, the toxic masculinity of straight males cheering in support of the slasher villain as he sliced and diced his way through sorority houses and summer camps gave me twinges and tingles I was just beginning to understand.
Lastly, there is the recurrent theme of the duality of sexual expression in the slasher film in which acting upon one’s sexuality is seen as both emancipating and oppressive. In the world of slasher films, a suppression of natural sexual impulses—whether due to physical deformity that limits desirability, maternal emasculation, or religious admonishment—often results in the creation of a demented serial killer; yet that same suppression of sexual urges is a virtue in the final girl, one that signifies her survival. In queer culture, we refer to one who repudiates their sexual orientation as a closet case. So, logic withstanding, argument could be made that the slasher villain is also a byproduct of his repressed sexual self and a variation of a closet case. Just think about how many cinematic victims would have been spared if Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers had acted upon those teenage urges in their sleeping bags at Boy Scout camp.
Sexual exploration between characters in a slasher film is almost always a harbinger of death, and in the queer culture of the 1980s, the same held true as AIDS systematically stalked and killed its victims. Sex was inherently dangerous and yielded devastating effects in both the era’s slasher films and its queer culture. As a teenager who grew up during the plague, I visualized AIDS as the gross deformity beneath Jason’s hockey mask. In those early days of ignorance and spotty information, when I found myself torn between the primal need to open up to my own sexual awakening and to abstain to protect myself, the fates of countless slasher victims were never far from mind.
I recall one film scene that echoed this weird parallel that I saw between slasher films and the AIDS epidemic. In the 1981 slasher The Fan, which I saw on late-night cable a few years after it was released, Michael Biehn’s character—a record store clerk named Douglas who is obsessed with a famous stage and film actress played by the late Lauren Bacall—meets a man at a bar who cruises him for sex. The two go to the rooftop of Douglas's building, where the man begins to perform oral sex on him, but Douglas stabs him to death and burns his body. Sex equaled death—onscreen and in real life. Art reflected life. Game, set, match.
The slasher—that much-maligned violent bastard of the thriller and the giallo—holds quite an unexpectedly consequential place in both the sexual development and coming out process of many LGBTQ persons. Like that first adolescent crush that both titillates and discomfits, its charm isn’t always easy to articulate. Much like we’re taught to associate sex and guilt from an early age—at least as those of us raised in some semblance of a denominational religion are—we both revere and reject the slasher. Nostalgia may keep us coming back to the genre in all its comforting predictability, but it was something else—something queer indeed—that likely hooked us in the first place.
Hooked on horror, I eagerly gobbled up episodes of The Night Stalker, cowered as I watched Kim Darby battle little green demons in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and damn near wet the bed after watching that spectacularly creepy Zuni doll pursue poor Karen Black as she ran, stumbled, and fell through that now-classic last segment of the Trilogy of Terror anthology
At the age of ten, my horror journey took a fateful turn as I sat in a darkened theater beside my devoted Dad, munching popcorn as stark piano notes heralded the arrival of John Carpenter’s Halloween. That movie-going experience was the cementing force of my devotion to all things horror and the beginning of my love affair with the slasher film (and Jamie Lee Curtis—but that’s another story for another book). Yes, I’ll openly admit it: I love slasher films—that often-cannibalized subgenre of horror that critics dismiss, actors renounce from their resumes, and the religious right once blamed for the collective ills of the world.
In articulating my worship of slasher movies and their lure, it’s difficult as a gay man of a certain age to refrain from in-depth analysis of the hidden subtext of such genre fare; after all, we’re living in an age where anyone and everyone with access to the Internet is an armchair critic. But several decades of experience, inquisitive study, and accidental pop culture reconnaissance does lend a certain level of unintentional expertise in matters such as these, no?
In terms of the simplest explanation, slasher films became for me what Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and the cavalcade of other Universal monsters were to my father’s generation. They’ve come to represent that magical time of imagination and self-discovery somewhere between childhood and adulthood, when grown-up uncertainties could be explored under the protective security of adolescence. As a nascent gay cub, the slasher took on an added relevance with its conflicting depiction of sexual excess struck down by a crushing morality.
Being a creature of habit, perhaps it’s the unvarying formula of the slasher film that agrees with my longstanding obsessive-compulsive tendencies and need for order. Riddled with more clichés than an old episode of Dynasty, the great slasher films of the ‘80s and beyond generally possess five basic elements. There are the stock characters—usually a stereotypical mix of teenagers that include cardboard cutout jocks, practical jokesters, bimbos, and nerds—who bumble through a formulaic plot that involves the hapless group traveling to an isolated location and being systematically picked off one-by-one by an unseen (or often glimpsed) killer. These films employ highly inventive killings that have elevated special make-up effects to an art form—creating bona fide celebrities out of the previously invisible special effects artist. The films all culminate in a prolonged chase scene in the third act between the killer and the solitary heroine, a preeminent character in slasher fare that author Carol J. Clover coins the “Final Girl” in her seminal gender exploration of the genre, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. This heroine is generally painted as more virtuous than the rest of the group. She refrains from all immoralities like recreational drug use and sexual exploration; she is usually the one who cautions the group not to go to the location they find themselves in; and she figures out that something wicked this way comes before anyone else. Finally, slasher movies usually include the false ending element, that final jump scare following the audience’s collective sigh of relief that the on-screen horror is seemingly over. Fans will remember these cinematic moments of pure jolt as the stuff of scary film memories; cynics will dismiss this once-unexpected moment as the brainchild of studio execs who forecasted sequel dollars.
Arguably, some film scholars will point to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as the first modern slasher film to combine thematic sexuality, (implied) gore, the mentally disturbed killer, and an isolated setting. I would counter that cinema’s first slasher film was actually the 1945 film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which served as a precursor to the modern slasher formula with its tale of ten people on an isolated island being manipulated and killed off one-by-one for the sins of their past by an unseen killer in inventive ways. Indeed, the best and most enduring slashers are the ones with an element of murder mystery at their core—films such as Black Christmas (1974), Friday the 13th (1980), Terror Train (1980), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), Curtains (1983), and April Fool’s Day (1986). But it was 1978’s Halloween that served as the catalyst for the slasher movement of the 1980s. Although preceded by the garishly technicolor works of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and the popular gialli that came out of Italy in the early to mid-1970s, Halloween holds the distinction of ushering in the golden age of slasher films. Together with Friday the 13th, Carpenter’s micro-budget masterpiece would go on to span countless sequels and inspire myriad knockoffs and serial killer icons.
What was it about the genre that appealed to my budding gay sensibilities? Is there a connection between slasher movies and queer culture and experience? To the naked eye, these seeming cautionary morality tales almost appear to be—on their surface—advertisements for conservative values, the Republican Party of horror films, if you will. They celebrate virtue and condemn vice with barely concealed contempt that’s visualized in graphic throat slashings, disembowelments, and beheadings. So just what is the queer appeal of films permeated by senseless violence, misogyny, and poor fashion?
In retrospect, I think as a gay teen that I identified with the sense of isolation the characters in slasher films face—both literal and metaphorical. In a film like Happy Birthday to Me, for example, one can see an allegorical parallel between the mental isolation Melissa Sue Anderson’s heroine faces as she struggles to trust her unreliable memories of a past trauma amidst the carnage of her diminishing circle of friends and the social isolation LGBTQ individuals face as they grapple with the incongruence of contradictory societal views, draconian religious beliefs, and familial attitudes regarding their emerging sexual orientations and gender identities.
Slasher films serve as an outlet for the societal fears LGBTQ individuals face in their everyday lives. For the LGBTQ person who’s chosen to accept and embrace their sexual orientation or gender identity, navigating in a world fraught with bigotry, discrimination, and the threat of physical harm, the characters in slasher films provide a conduit through which those fears can be examined on a subconscious level. The characters who hesitantly stumble around the unfamiliar turf of their unseen enemy in the modern slasher yarn represent us as LGBTQ members of society who must also circumspectly traverse the dangers of life in a dissimilar heterosexual world. Slasher films often cast their characters as strangers in a strange land much in the same way queer culture thrusts their young into a landscape unfamiliar to the heteronormative terrain we’re used to navigating as we come of age and enter our adult LGBTQ lives. Take the teen cheerleader out of the comfort zone of her high school hallway surrounded by friends and thrust her into a scenario where she’s alone and being pursued by an axe-wielding masked figure across the uneven terrain of a dark forest at night…in the rain…in her bra and panties. What LGBTQ person can’t relate to the fear, disorientation, physical discomfort, and vulnerability of that cinematic depiction when applied to their own coming of age in the queer culture of their generation?
Even the overbearing mother trope probably held some subtextual weight in the early days of slasher film analysis in discussions of nature versus nurture—a theory often posited in research into the development of sexual orientation. Norma Bates in Psycho, Susan Tyrell’s Aunt Cheryl in Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning), Ike and Addley’s titular mother from Mother’s Day, and even Laurie Metcalf’s Debbie Salt in Scream 2 are all so smothering and domineering that they “turn” their sons into serial killers. Likewise, some in the psychiatric profession once blamed overly close maternal relationships for causing the "disease" of male homosexuality. Even though research since the 1950s has debunked and discarded this theory, one can see the influences of this outdated hypothesis in the stereotype of the domineering, emasculating mother figure in some slasher films, drawing yet another parallel worthy of mention here.
There is also an interesting metaphorical comparison to draw between the transformation of the slasher film’s final girl and the coming out process. In the beginning of the slasher film, the heroine usually presents as weak, timid, uncertain of how to navigate through the situation she finds herself in; for the LGBTQ person, this uncertainty is the same in the coming out process. As the film progresses, the heroine transforms—she toughens and becomes confident in her abilities to overcome the malevolence stalking her. For LGBTQ people, the coming out process is similarly transformative; we develop a thicker skin and summon the necessary courage to confront the unseen enemy of homophobia waiting for us around every darkened corner.
On a pop cultural level, the final girl character also holds a special appeal for the gay male community in particular, coinciding with our longstanding predilection for strong female characters in the arts. Like Bette Davis survived the male-dominated studio system of old Hollywood and Tina Turner survived Ike, so too does Jamie Lee Curtis survive her Halloween night encounter with the boogeyman and Adrienne King survive the summer camp carnage of Crystal Lake. At the end of the slasher, the final girl can go on to reinvent herself—like Cher or Madonna or Gaga—and is positioned by film’s end for a comeback. And everyone loves a comeback. For gay men, the final girl is our slasher film fag hag. She may be maimed, bleeding, and psychologically torn to bits, but she’s still Judy, Bette, and Liza rolled into one spunky toughie who will live to fight another day (or at least until the sequel).
Slashers films also held queer appeal on a purely visceral level. Although these films most often focused on the female form—adding to enduring claims of rampant misogyny from detractors of the genre—slasher films intermittently gave curious gay boys a tantalizing hint of forbidden adult pleasures. What gay man who grew up on a steady diet of slasher movies in the ‘80s doesn’t have memories of nights spent with their VCR and a finger on the rewind button to make sure Kevin Bacon never stopped running across that makeshift dock in his blue speedo in Friday the 13th? Who doesn’t remember the twinge of sexual excitement when Gary, the ill-fated Gamma Delta pledge, is tied to the tree in his tighty-whities in Final Exam? Or Vincent Van Patten running around Garth Manor in his heart-speckled boxers in Hell Night? Or Johnny Depp’s crop top and exposed midriff in A Nightmare on Elm Street? For gay men of a certain age, slasher films provided the visual stimulation when we discovered self-ecstasy behind the locked doors of our bedrooms while our parents and siblings slept in adjoining rooms, long before the immediate accessibility of Internet porn. Even sitting in a darkened theater during a sold-out viewing of some random splatter flick, the toxic masculinity of straight males cheering in support of the slasher villain as he sliced and diced his way through sorority houses and summer camps gave me twinges and tingles I was just beginning to understand.
Lastly, there is the recurrent theme of the duality of sexual expression in the slasher film in which acting upon one’s sexuality is seen as both emancipating and oppressive. In the world of slasher films, a suppression of natural sexual impulses—whether due to physical deformity that limits desirability, maternal emasculation, or religious admonishment—often results in the creation of a demented serial killer; yet that same suppression of sexual urges is a virtue in the final girl, one that signifies her survival. In queer culture, we refer to one who repudiates their sexual orientation as a closet case. So, logic withstanding, argument could be made that the slasher villain is also a byproduct of his repressed sexual self and a variation of a closet case. Just think about how many cinematic victims would have been spared if Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers had acted upon those teenage urges in their sleeping bags at Boy Scout camp.
Sexual exploration between characters in a slasher film is almost always a harbinger of death, and in the queer culture of the 1980s, the same held true as AIDS systematically stalked and killed its victims. Sex was inherently dangerous and yielded devastating effects in both the era’s slasher films and its queer culture. As a teenager who grew up during the plague, I visualized AIDS as the gross deformity beneath Jason’s hockey mask. In those early days of ignorance and spotty information, when I found myself torn between the primal need to open up to my own sexual awakening and to abstain to protect myself, the fates of countless slasher victims were never far from mind.
I recall one film scene that echoed this weird parallel that I saw between slasher films and the AIDS epidemic. In the 1981 slasher The Fan, which I saw on late-night cable a few years after it was released, Michael Biehn’s character—a record store clerk named Douglas who is obsessed with a famous stage and film actress played by the late Lauren Bacall—meets a man at a bar who cruises him for sex. The two go to the rooftop of Douglas's building, where the man begins to perform oral sex on him, but Douglas stabs him to death and burns his body. Sex equaled death—onscreen and in real life. Art reflected life. Game, set, match.
The slasher—that much-maligned violent bastard of the thriller and the giallo—holds quite an unexpectedly consequential place in both the sexual development and coming out process of many LGBTQ persons. Like that first adolescent crush that both titillates and discomfits, its charm isn’t always easy to articulate. Much like we’re taught to associate sex and guilt from an early age—at least as those of us raised in some semblance of a denominational religion are—we both revere and reject the slasher. Nostalgia may keep us coming back to the genre in all its comforting predictability, but it was something else—something queer indeed—that likely hooked us in the first place.
Vince Liaguno is the Bram Stoker Award-winning editor of UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET (Dark Scribe Press 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder. His debut novel, 2006’s THE LITERARY SIX, was a tribute to the slasher films of the 80’s and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) for Horror and was named a finalist in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category.
More recently, he edited BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS (Dark Scribe Press, 2011)—a collection of essays on the formula, frights, and fun of the slasher film—as well as the second volume in the UNSPEAKABLE HORROR series, subtitled ABOMINATIONS OF DESIRE (Evil Jester Press, 2017). He’s currently at work on his second novel.
He currently resides on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, where he is a licensed nursing home administrator by day and a writer, anthologist, and pop culture enthusiast by night. He is a member (and former Secretary) of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).
More recently, he edited BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS (Dark Scribe Press, 2011)—a collection of essays on the formula, frights, and fun of the slasher film—as well as the second volume in the UNSPEAKABLE HORROR series, subtitled ABOMINATIONS OF DESIRE (Evil Jester Press, 2017). He’s currently at work on his second novel.
He currently resides on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, where he is a licensed nursing home administrator by day and a writer, anthologist, and pop culture enthusiast by night. He is a member (and former Secretary) of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).
For more information on Vince please follow the links below
www.VinceLiaguno.com
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www.VinceLiaguno.com
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