Queer for Fear by Heather O. Petrocelli

Author:Heather O. Petrocelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Evidentiary Data on Queerness, Camp and Horror

This study demonstrates with data that the vast majority of queer horror fans connect camp with their enjoyment of horror films, enjoying both deliberately camp horror films and horror films decoded as camp by the queer gaze. Specifically, the mixed-method data evidences that queer spectators have a camp relationship with horror and recognise the queer camp-horror nexus.24 This study’s data stands in sharp contrast to Alexander Dhoest and Nele Simons’s findings that ‘the gay sensibility and camp as reading strategies’ have ‘largely disappeared’ due to increased mainstream visibility and assimilation (2012, p. 274). The data, in fact, serves to establish camp as a critical facet in queer spectators’ relationship with horror film. As noted by Brigid Cherry, empirical audience research can evidence the ‘variation in the way different groups interpret or respond to different kinds of cinematic horror’ (2009, p. 155). My mixed-method data, both the survey’s single explicit question about camp in horror and the hundreds of related comments survey participants elected to write, reveals the importance of camp in the queer spectator’s relationship to horror.25 My data emphatically demonstrates, in fact, that the overwhelming majority of survey participants, and thus horror-loving queers in the world according to statistical extrapolation, report a camp relationship to horror regardless of sexual orientation, gender, age or nationality.26 As already noted, it can be stated with 99 per cent confidence that 78.7 per cent to 81.9 per cent of all horror-loving queers enjoy ‘camp-y’ horror films (see Figure 3.3). As a survey participant observes: ‘As a queer person, I think I enjoy camp so much more than a cishet person. And enjoying and understanding camp usually means that I’ll like more horror movies than other viewers’ (48126762). My data further affirms Elly-Jean Nielsen’s call for ‘a radical reconceptualization of camp as a queer counter-praxis, one that is inclusive’ of all queer people (2016, p. 123).

This study employs qualitative and quantitative data from a survey of queer horror spectators to situate ‘camp within a queer rather than exclusively gay male discourse’ (Taylor, 2012, p. 67). In all, the survey data dispels the notion that camp is the provenance of the gay cisgender man, instead affirming camp is a decidedly queer relationship created through the wholly queer experience. Even though, as Andrew Ross states, ‘camp works to destabilize, reshape, and transform the existing balance of accepted sexual roles and sexual identities’ (2008, p. 62), numerous scholars theorise camp primarily in relation to gay cis men (see, e.g., Sontag, Ross, Dyer and Humphrey). Richard Dyer goes as far as to argue that camp:

I enjoy ‘camp-y’ horror films

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