My teenage self grew up hiding in a closet, convinced that Clive Barker was the only openly gay person dedicated to my favorite genre: horror. Fortunately, I was wrong: the presence of LGTBIQ+ characters in fantasy cinema has been a constant throughout its history and has only increased in recent decades. Besides being part of the collective imagination, cinematic monsters from gothic literature—like Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, or Mr. Hyde—were among the first examples of queer representations on the big screen, always linked to the different, the strange, and everything that challenged heteronormativity.

From the predominance of negative clichés—psychopathic lesbians, bloodthirsty bisexual vampires, cross-dressing killers, and many more—to the progressive acceptance of diversity, Scream Queer offers a broad overview of the evolution of LGTBIQ+ representation in the fantasy genre through the analysis of hundreds of films. Along the way, it exorcises traumas and shares the personal experiences that have shaped the author: a gay man obsessed with horror cinema.