The Portico Library is delighted to welcome Laura Maws for a discussion of her chapter ‘Loving Annie Hayworth’ in The Birds and queer identity as part of the UK launch of It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.

The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.

Published in the UK by Manchester based indie Saraband, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror is edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.

LAURA MAW is a writer of essays and arts criticism. Her work has been published in Granta, the New Statesman, The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hazlitt, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among others.

ABBI PARCELL is a queer, butch, autistic writer and poet based in Manchester. She is leading research through her PhD work on queering and challenging the Portico collection via community engagement and a blog documenting creative process.

Part of the Portico Library’s horror season and queering the collection series.