Horror outed at gay film festival

By Caroline Westbrook
BBC News Online

Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is among the films being shown

The 2004 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival opened on Wednesday, shedding light on the homosexual influence in horror films.

Gay themes and characters have played a large part in the horror genre over the last few decades, creating some groundbreaking cinema, according to festival programmer Jonathan Keane.

Spine-chilling classics with seminal gay characters will be shown alongside new horror films by homosexual directors in the festival's Queer Gothic strand.

I've always been very aware that there's a strong gay undercurrent in a lot of horror films Jonathan Keane

"It was a personal interest really," says Mr Keane. "I've always been into horror myself and I've always been very aware that there's a strong gay undercurrent in a lot of horror films.

"I wanted to put together a selection of films which, for the most part, showed when that kind of sexuality outed itself."

It soon became clear that there were certain films that had strong or very obvious gay characters, he adds.

One of these was 1963 chiller The Haunting, which is among the six films being screened.

A cult favourite, it focuses on a group of people staying in a haunted house as part of a scientific experiment and is notable for the character of Theodora, played by Claire Bloom.

Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve play lovers in The Hunger

She is thought to be one of the first openly lesbian characters in a horror film.

Mr Keane describes it as a "60s film, very much about social change".

"That was about as far back as I went in terms of films with a gay character, but I decided I wanted a mix of different types of film."

That explains the inclusion of the 1971 film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, a Hammer horror film in which Ralph Bates - as Dr Jekyll - stumbles upon a formula that turns him into a woman, played by Martine Beswick.

"It's a very, very good film," Mr Keane explains. "At the time, it was quite radical, the idea of a man turning into a woman. Like The Haunting, it pushed the ideas of what could be seen on screen."

The older films pushed the boundaries of what had been shown before Jonathan Keane

Other films in the line-up include The Hunger, Tony Scott's 1983 vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

Meanwhile, two contemporary offerings from Europe show very different sides to the way in which gay film-makers approach horror movies.

Ballroom, from France, is a supernatural thriller, while German shocker Beloved Sister takes its cue from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, with shades of Misery and a ton of blood thrown in.

'Shifting'

"It doesn't have the sexuality points in it, but with this kind of film I wanted to show what a director with a knowledge of a gay audience would do with this kind of thing," Mr Keane says.

The diversity of the line-up, he points out, reflects just how the scene has changed over time.

"There's a strange shifting in what happens when the genre outs itself to a certain extent," Mr Keane says.

"The older films pushed the boundaries of what had been shown before, while the modern gay film-makers tend use the genre to talk about their own experiences."