Queer Slashers: He Wrote the Book on It
An Interview with Dr. Peter Marra
By: Rylee Chacon
Masked killers, final girls, opening kills, red herrings: a slasher wouldn’t be a slasher without them. This horror subgenre has grown in popularity from its origins in the 60s and 70s—is Psycho the first slasher? Black Christmas? Halloween?—and the dedicated audience has grown with each new film. When we look at who has consistently shown up in time for the trailers with gas station snacks in their bags, we cannot ignore the presence of the queer community—right there, in their favorite seats.
Horror films have always had a reliable queer audience, but there is something about Ghostface and Sidney, or Freddy and Nancy, that bring the queer community to slashers specifically. Is it the presence of the slasher themself, carving their way through a small town as an act of revenge? Or is it the final girl, able to evade the killer and finally vanquish them in her rage? What draws queer people to this subgenre of horror? Set out to answer these questions, Dr. Peter Marra(he/they pronouns) has conducted research on exactly that: what makes the slasher queer, and why do we like it so much? Dr. Marra’s debut novel, Queer Slashers, is developed from their PhD dissertation, becoming the first book-length study of how and why the slasher subgenre appeals to queer audiences. His studies take an in-depth look at Queer theory, horror history as far back as the 1920s, and all of our favorite early slashers to analyze this appeal.
Dr. Marra’s expertise and love of all things horror and queer have led them to teach at Wayne State University, where they hold courses as captivating as “Horror and Otherness,” “Studies of Camp,” and “Queer Literature.” I have taken each of these classes and more with Dr. Marra, meaning that I am lucky enough to study under the person who wrote the book on queer slashers, which has quickly become one of my favorite areas of study. Because he is so passionate about imparting his knowledge, Dr. Marra was kind enough to grant me an interview, where I asked him about Queer Slashers and the publishing process as a first time novelist emerging from academia. Dr. Marra is proof that you don’t have to tamp down your interests or remove your personality in order to be successful within academia, and I hope you all love learning from him as much as I do.
Rylee Chacon: Thank you for meeting with me! First, I just wanted to ask, in order to provide some insight to our readers, can you introduce yourself and the kind of work that you do? As well as your history with slashers and the horror genre?
Peter Marra: Who am I? I ask this every morning. I am Dr. Peter Marra, I am Assistant Professor of Teaching in the English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies programs at Wayne State University. What is my history with slashers? Well that’s actually interesting and sort of silly, and I’ve anticipated having to answer this question but I guess I haven’t thought through the answer (laughs). I really love horror movies, and my history is more with horror movies in general, with slashers being a big part of that. The first horror movie I think I ever saw, truly, was Scream, which was 1996, and it was an unlikely decision by my family to rent it—we didn’t watch horror movies. I would have been eight or nine and that was a really influential movie to me, and I then, incidentally, grew up in the 90s, which was this slasher renaissance, and that was hugely influential. So you know, [I watched] both VHS rentals and also some theatrical opportunities when I could, if they weren’t R rated, meaning the few PG 13 movies.
I did grow up in this era that I have retroactively been really fascinated with as being a very queer time for horror. Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream is queer, but also the original writer of Final Destination, Jeffrey Reddick, is queer, the screenwriter of Urban Legend, Silvio Horta, was queer and he has since passed away. Jawbreaker Darren Stein, queer; Andrew Fleming [with] The Craft, queer. So it’s this thing I didn’t know was happening, but I do think, in hindsight, the slasher and late 90s horror were both my horror movie awakening and also my queer cinema awakening. I think it’s a really fascinating, strange collision, and probably explains why I’m writing a book called Queer Slashers 20 plus years later.
Questions About the Publishing Process
Chacon: In terms of the publishing process, I understand that this book is a result of your doctoral dissertation. Can you explain the type of research you did to have such a strong basis for something as niche as queer slashers?
Marra: When you’re writing a dissertation, it’s supposed to be a thing that’s allegedly new. I don’t even know if mine was entirely new, but I like to think that I tried to articulate something that all queer people knew but was not quite documented exactly in those terms before: that slashers are very queer, and that the killers in slashers have somehow met in history with the idea of the queer as an outsider figure, a masked figure. There’s a whole part of the book which is all about a lineage in early queer literature about masks, and masking being sort of a secret you have in public. The dissertation tried to say a thing that I think was well known among queer people, but that not everyone knew, and especially maybe straight people didn’t know, which is that slashers are queer. Gosh, as I went to write the book and I was theorizing about what could come from the dissertation, I was fatigued by the idea that I was writing about so many movies that were made by straight people that predominantly exploited queer people and trans people, and treat us like a spectacle, right? So with Sleepaway Camp, for example, which has a very famous trans killer, I just thought: what if? What if I didn’t spend all my time on these movies, but what if I really thought about the movies that queer people make, and why? And actually try to elevate the knowledge and awareness about queer people as filmmakers of horror.
I ended up becoming sort of, well, incredibly well informed on the wide range of mostly niche slasher movies that were directed and written by queer people, of which there are many. I just started keeping a list on my phone, and there were so many that I felt were not known and were not celebrated, even within queer communities. I thought I would write the thing that I already wrote in the dissertation, which was that slashers are queer, and then also think about why that matters to us still and why queer people relate to the slasher, but also why they make them, and what happens differently when they are made by queer people. So John Waters’ Serial Mom or Peaches Christ’s All About Evil, where it’s a queer filmmaker making their version of the thing, not just seeing themselves in the thing from the past. And then that became the book, and the book—thankfully for me and my short attention span—is really a different project from the dissertation, even though they’re obviously very connected.
Chacon: That leads into my next question! What was the transition like, going from your dissertation, which is something so formally academic, to your book?
Marra: It’s similar in that I wrote a bit of an academic book and I published with a university press, and that means I didn’t have to do a ton of work to make it less academic. Although I will say that one of the goals of this series, which is called Icons of Horror with Indiana University Press, which is a new series, is that it’s designed to be for a mixed audience, so they wanted something that was academic but would perhaps be interesting to a not-academic audience. If anything, I wrote the book imagining and hoping it would be read by more non-academic readers than the dissertation, and I hoped that it would be interesting for them to read. So I kind of rewrote it for the communities that it’s written about, and I think that was in mind, and that does influence some of how it’s written, even with word choice and sentence structure with trying to keep things clear rather than falling into sort of a word jumble.
I tried, and I don’t know if it works, but I also think that I write academic things in a way that is not traditional, so the dissertation is probably similar in that way on accident. I wanted to have humanity, so it includes personal narratives and anecdotes, and things that you don’t usually put in academic books, so it probably includes more of that than the dissertation did. It was my hope to write an academic book that would also be a book that makes sense to anyone who’s a queer person that likes horror movies. So I hope it is!
Chacon: My last question about the publishing process is for our readers who may be working toward being published themselves one day: do you have any dos or don’ts when it comes to working on a manuscript and then getting through the editing process?
Marra: Oh my gosh. (Laughs) I am the worst editor. I have, you know, ADHD and I really like new things and I really hate old things, and once I’m done with it, I’m done with it and I never want to see it again. So, I mean, the hardest part for me was the duration of working with the same project. I don’t think all books are like this but maybe they are, but it’s the having to sit with something for so long. I signed the book contract and wrote most of the book, the first manuscript, in 2021 and it didn’t come out until 2025, so I endured it for four years and it feels so old now. I guess my advice would be that it has to be worth it. There’s a quote I try to live by that Cher says her mother told her once, which is, “If it doesn’t matter in five years, it just doesn’t matter.” The meaning of that is like, if someone bumps into you and they’re rude, you’re not going to think about it in five years, you don’t have to fight with them about it, right? Because it’s not really going to matter. But I also think about it this way, which is that if you’re not going to still want to be writing the book in five years, or if you won’t care about it in five years, rethink it. Consider what you would still like to be thinking about, or working on, five years later. The reality is, whether it takes five years to write it or just five years to get it published, someone will circle back to you and say, “we have these notes,” and you have to go back and read the thing you wrote four years ago and not be furious. After four years, I know I could write it better now! But you’re not allowed to do that, to completely redo the book.
That’s one thing I would say, the other is: go where people want you. For me, the editor of the Icons of Horror series reached out to me and they wanted to do it, which was really motivating for me to actually sit down and write the proposal. Go where people are interested, answer them, answer their emails. If there is a positive response, go there, follow it. Don’t try to force yourself where they don’t have an interest in you or your work, because even if you get somewhere in the door, you wouldn’t be a priority. Because, weirdly enough, I had several publishers who were talking about the book, and I just kind of thought: well, when they see my proposal, they'll never accept it. It wasn’t as motivating, to me, as someone saying that they have sat through my talk about this subject and they know exactly how I present information, and this is exactly what they want; rather than second guessing everything because I’m trying to imagine who the publisher would rather say yes to.
Questions About Queer Slashers
Chacon: Now getting more towards questions about the book itself, for readers who may not have made the connection between queerness and slashers, can you give a description of what is so queer about horror, but specifically the slasher subgenre?
Marra: You know, the book goes back in film to roughly the 1920s and 30s, and I think a simple thing is that in the U.S. specifically—since most of the early films were from Hollywood Film Production Code contexts—you’re talking about a time in which homosexuality, and what we would now call trans identities, were criminal and were also considered mental illness. So if you can imagine that you’re creating a horror movie and you want to suggest to the audience that this character is dangerous, or criminal, or mentally ill, one way of doing that was making a man very feminine or juvenile, or giving them characteristics associated with queerness because we telegraph into the audience, “This is one of those people, this is a dangerous person. This is a person who’s unstable or something is wrong with their brain.” There is a quote, this little line in The Leopard Man, and it’s about strange pleasure in men who have “kinks in their brains.” There’s this idea that if you were queer sexually, you were probably also, in some way, violent or dangerous. This is a cultural presumption that we had, and it was presented over and over in film. So, in the sort of lineage of film killers, that’s a common thread.
Interestingly, it continues into Psycho in 1960, and then the many imitators of Psycho, like Homicidal, and then it, I think, does trickle into the stuff we see that becomes the most canonical wave of slasher in the 70s and 80s. Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, in some ways with these movies, it has flattened out and it’s not really about psychology anymore, but sort of just about the inherited legacy of a man in a dress as a killer, or that someone who’s sexually queer is also dangerous, and these kind of just end up being repeated. They become tropes, and the series Icons of Horror is supposed to be about these iconic elements of horror, like these tropes, and the queer slasher is one. It has this long history, and it manifests in the canonical slasher, but then since so much of film is reiterative, it manifests in many movies after, including the 90s movies I grew up in—(pause). With, not in (laughs), that’s probably a Freudian thing because I probably did grow up inside of them.
Anyway, Scream very famously has this thing with Stu and Billy where they are very close, almost too close, and Kevin Williamson has said that they’re based on Leopold and Loeb, who were men who we understood to have had sex with each other, who were also murderers. So what the book does is it says that queer people see themselves in the slasher and then, interestingly, we don’t necessarily reject it.
We kind of take it on. My connection has to do with the idea of, for example, drag or other types of queer performance, where they’re often the hyperbolic representation of what Judith Butler calls “terms of injury.” It’s the idea that you don’t reject the negative, you actually hyperbolize it. So I think the book attributes that to the reason for queer slashers, which is that queer people see themselves in the slasher. They see the slasher as a thing that makes them into killers and murderers and they say, “Now what? Hold my beer,” or, “Watch this. I’m going to do the biggest version of that; the queerest slasher,” rather than rejecting them wholeheartedly. It then becomes this queer art form; it’s a community building activity where they film each other, they make a movie about killing each other, and that seems a little weird, but what I have seen is that there’s evidence that queer people still do identify with the slasher, and they see making a slasher for a queer audience as something communal. It has a long history, but it’s also still happening in the present.
Chacon: Do you have a film that you analyze in the book that you feel exemplifies the origins of queer slashers, and how they interact with each other, the most?
Marra: I really think The Leopard Man is great for this, or The Spiral Staircase in terms of the classic kind of queer killer: the suggestively queer, feminine killer. They both have killers who are mysteriously disowned professors who have some sense of impropriety, but it’s unclear why. The character in The Leopard Man loves theater, and there’s all these sort of allusions to they’re not “real men” and then they’re also murderers. There’s so many, but those are the two that I like to bring up and—I was supposed to say one wasn’t I? Just anything with Laird Cregar, I really love Laird Cregar, he’s a gay classical Hollywood actor who played a lot of killers, including in the 40s version of The Lodger, and also Hangover Square. He plays a lot of killers that are supposed to be read as queer, so those ones too.
Chacon: Would you suggest those ones as beginner films for people who are trying to build their queer slasher chops? Or do you have others that are beginner friendly that you might recommend to someone who’s trying to get into it?
Marra: A starter pack? Oh, that’s fun. I would say, if you wanted to cover the expanse of the book, you could do something from classical Hollywood that I listed. You could do Psycho, which is the 1960s real solidification of the queer and crossdressing killer. And then I would say something from the 90s, Don Mancini, who wrote and directed all of the Chucky movies, is an interesting queer figure, so maybe Bride of Chucky from the 90s. And then in modern queer slashers, I would say one that is very community based is a movie called Killer Unicorn, and that would give you the sense of the DIY contemporary slasher that queer people make for themselves in their own spaces.
Chacon: Queer Slashers mentions other authors who have studied queerness and horror in a capacity that is a little different from yours, was there anyone specific who you modeled your research after?
Marra: That’s interesting. No, because I’m not good enough? (Laughs) I’m not sophisticated enough to emulate anyone? I was certainly influenced by people’s research, like Harry Benshoff’s book Monsters in the Closet and Jack Helberstam’s book Skin Shows—those are two books I cite often. I’m really influenced by queer theory generally, and Queer Slashers, to me, is a book that bridges horror studies and queer studies. Maybe writing-wise I was more inspired by queer theory writers because queer theory has always had an anecdotal quality. It’s always recognized that there is value in queer people putting themselves into the work, because the work is about trying to understand yourself and people you know, so it makes very little sense to alienate yourself in that way. If there was a stylistic reference, it would probably be Eve Sedgwick, because so much of her work is so personal, so anecdotal, and it involves so much humanity in a really inspiring way.
Chacon: You talk a little bit in your book about final girls. Do you think there is a queerness surrounding them and their tropes as well?
Marra: Yes, Heather Petrocelli’s book Queer for Fear talks about the idea that survival is very queer, and I agree. I think the idea that queer people would identify with a survivor makes sense. There’s also, within the classic conception of the final girl, the idea that the final girl is very androgynous, and I think it makes sense that queer people would especially identify with androgyny in some way. So for both of those reasons, androgyny and survivor instincts, I feel like it makes a lot of sense to me that queer people would identify with that figure.
Chacon: Do you think that the inclusion of confirmed queer characters in more contemporary horror has changed anything about how we analyze the genre?
Marra: Yeah, it’s added a new thing that didn’t really exist before, right? In classical Hollywood, you only have sort of queerish characters. Really interestingly, even when we have properly named queer characters in 60s and 70s films, horror is not really doing that. It’s more of a melodrama thing. So there’s Norman Bates, but then there’s “serious” queer movies like with the victim in The Children’s Hour, and there’s Psycho and Homicidal. They’re not naming queer feelings or presenting queer or trans identities seriously, but they’re certainly drawing on them. It takes a while for horror to say, “There’s a gay character here, there’s a trans character.” It simply doesn’t happen that often, so it’s definitely added something new.
The thing I’ve written about a bit in the book and elsewhere is really the idea that it, interestingly, hasn’t replaced the other things. So I think there is still this kind of queer connection to the killer, to the survivor. This “ambient queerness” has not gone away just because there are gay characters, so it’s that there is still this thing that has existed for 100 years, and now there are gay people and trans people there, but they don’t do the same thing. One does not replace the other, which I think is interesting, because people still crave and covet the ambient queerness, even if there is a gay or trans character in the movie.
Chacon: My final question for you: who is the gayest slasher?
Marra: I have to say it’s Chucky, because as I said about Don Mancini, he is the only single architect of an entire slasher franchise, and he’s gay. So I don’t know that any other slasher franchise, particularly lasting as long as Chucky, has had one real central author, and he’s been writing Chucky since the 80s. It’s kind of wild and impressive. I could have done a whole section in the book on looking at the evolution of queerness in Chucky movies, because it starts off not transparently queer at all, and gets increasingly more queer with Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, and then to the point where we have the Chucky TV series with gay characters and gay boyfriends who are the horror heroes. So you can really follow the whole evolution of the queer slasher by watching all of the Child’s Play movies and the Chucky TV series. So for that reason, it has to be Chucky. It’s also the output of one gay author who wrote all of the scripts and directed many of the movies, so that’s a pretty wild instance, and I don’t know of anything that parallels it.
Dr. Marra’s book Queer Slashers is out now! It is available for purchase from Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org, and Books-A-Million as both a hard copy and an ebook.
