Opinion: It’s time more horror films push back against queer stereotypes

Opinion by Noah Berlatsky

(CNN) — Horror tradition often links murder and monstrosity to gender disruption. The hetero nuclear family represents safety and good, while alternatives to it — including queer families or single working women — represent the opposite.

At first, Oz Perkins’ stylish occult horror film “Longlegs” seems set to overturn or subvert this default, in the tradition of other recent queer horror like Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” or John Logan’s “They/Them.” But “Longlegs” ultimately bows to older tropes of queer monstrosity, underlining the extent to which horror, and Hollywood, have misled their audiences about where danger comes from, and about who is a threat to whom.

Set in 1993, “Longlegs” features FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) — an angular, awkward, emotionally removed woman, who appears to have a psychic connection to a series of brutal family murders.

The 1990s setting, and the female FBI agent protagonist, both evoke (intentionally, Perkins says) the hugely influential 1991 film, “The Silence of the Lambs.” And Perkins himself is the son of Anthony Perkins, the actor who starred as villain Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely influential 1960 film “Psycho.”

Hitchcock infamously portrays Norman Bates as an invidious stereotype of a trans woman. Bates is insane and believes he’s his own dead mother, who he murdered. When Norman is sexually attracted to someone, he dresses up as his mother and murders them.

Homicidal, overly independent and masculine femme fatales were already a Hollywood staple in noirs like 1944’s “Double Indemnity” (which Hitchcock much admired). But the portrayal of trans women as predators was a new innovation that had a huge impact on the horror genre.

“Psycho” influenced highbrow homages like Brian DePalma’s 1980 “Dressed to Kill,” in which a therapist dresses in women’s clothes to kill clients. It influenced lowbrow knock offs like the 1980 original “Friday the 13^th,” in which the villain is not Jason, but Jason’s mother.  It influenced more distant variations on the theme like James Wan’s 2011 “Insidious” where men are possessed by the spirit of an evil female witch. Andit had a big impact on Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” in which the terrifying serial killer, Buffalo Bill, is a predatory trans woman (or more precisely, as Jos Truitt has explained, Bill is a transphobic caricature of a trans woman).

At first, Perkins seems opposed to this history of queerphobic horror. The murders that Harker is investigating in “Longlegs” are all committed by fathers, who kill their wives and daughters and then themselves. The danger isn’t from trans women — it’s from heterosexual cis patriarchs — a reality much truer to life than Hitchcock’s fever dream.

There is no evidence that trans women commit violence at a high rate — and, to focus on the most prevalent current myth about trans people, there is no evidence that trans women who use women’s bathrooms are a danger to anyone. Rather, trans women are four times more likely than cisgender people to be a target of violence, according to a 2021 UCLA survey.

Statistically, the major danger to women is not trans strangers, but cis male husbands or boyfriends. According to the DOJ, in 2021 34% of female murder victims were killed by intimate partners. In all, 76% of female murder victims were killed by someone they know; only a quarter were killed by strangers.

When individuals — largely men — murder their families and themselves, researchers refer to it as familicide. Agent Harker’s “mystery” isn’t really a mystery; it’s an ugly act sometimes committed by abusive men. The best predictor of it is previous incidents of domestic violence. If the FBI wants to stop this rash of killings, they should be tracking down men with a history of threatening or striking their partners.

There have been some horror movies about domestic abuse, such as “Night of the Hunter” (1955) and “The Shining” (1980). Perkins doesn’t go that route, though. Instead, he defaults to his most obvious sources. The killer fathers here are not the ultimate culprits. Instead, they are acting under the (possibly occult) influence of a man who leaves notes in code at each crime scene. He calls himself Longlegs and is played by a manically scene-chewing but otherwise unrecognizable Nicholas Cage in bulbous prosthetics and white pancake make-up.

Oz Perkins has said “Longlegs” was influenced by the secrets in his own family; his father, Anthony Perkins, was gay and deeply in the closet; he died of AIDs in 1992. His mother, model Berry Berenson, kept Perkins’ sexuality a secret from the children. Perhaps in part for that reason, the director is careful not to make Longlegs trans or gay.

But, whatever one’s intentions, the genre tropes are hard to escape. Longlegs is not openly queer, but he is associated with queerness via his musical taste — he’s a fan of Marc Bolan/T.Rex, the bisexual British glam icon responsible for hits like “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” The (mostly incomprehensible) plot machinations also end up with a twist that implicates a woman, who Longlegs seems to have possessed, in his schemes. He is thus both man and woman, like Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill before him.

The film is an elaborate, bizarre deflection. Cisgender men commit horrific patriarchal violence against their families — but, the movie assures us, they are not to blame. Instead, the horror is stranger danger in the form of a queer-coded, gender-ambiguous villain. It’s as if Perkins started out with a script that engaged with a real, ugly truth about a terror at the center of many “normal” families, and then, panicked, rushed back to the safety of genre tropes.

That’s a failure — but an illuminating one. It’s not just “Longlegs” which displaces violence onto queer people: Movies like “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” are often acts of aggression aimed by male directors at queer people (and especially at queer women). They stereotype queer people and target them for damaging prejudice. And they do this by reversing aggressor and victim, claiming that it’s queer or trans people who are a danger, or who are attacking “normal” individuals and “normal” families.

Longlegs, the evil serial killer, directs straight men to perform heinous deeds for his pleasure — a mirror image of the ways in which male horror directors have created violent, invidious queer stereotypes for their audience’s amusement. “Longlegs” the movie doesn’t push back against that history. But it’s time more horror films did.

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