Deadlights: From the Gutter

By its nature horror most interface with subversive acts and ideas. The genre has a long history of casting queer characters as monsters and murderers, from Psycho's Norman Bates donning his mother's wig and clothing to prey on unsuspecting women to the transgender vampire Eli in Let the Right One In. Sometimes these presentations of queerness are sympathetic and nuanced. At others they plumb the depths of trashy exploitation. Sometimes the two approaches come together into something at once uniquely insightful and viciously homophobic, a look at the people society leaves to rot in its gutters and at the ways in which being discarded and living unwanted shapes their personalities.

Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female dives deep enough into its exploitative premise to uncover just that kind of ugliness, locating within the unstable, possessive violence of Hedra's desire to be with her straight roommate Allie a sounding by echo of the cavernous isolation of queer life without community. The closeted conservatism into which the movie premiered in 1992 was ripe for a story of predatory lesbianism, eager to view homosexuals as titillating monsters held back from full humanity by some missing element, some absent thing in their own character. Schroeder begins his story in a similar place, but the solid craftsmanship with which he shoots his film and the bitter-edged empathy of screenwriter Don Roos' script complicates that tangle of knee-jerk prejudices by injecting real humanity into their monstrous object.

At the film's climax as Hedra stalks Allie through the basement of their apartment building her impassioned ranting gradually trails off into a kind of angry, childish whimper. "I'm scared," she pleads. "Where are you?" It's hard not to read into those vulnerable lines, to guess at the life of rejection and damage behind them. The film's closing sentiments of regret and empathy from Allie may be slightly mawkish, a little condescending, but they're also an attempt to shift the blame for Hedra's psychological dysfunction away from her and toward the society around her. The things she longs for are, in the end, understandable and fairly typical. A home. A family. To be loved. That she's incapable of finding these things through genuine connection is just another layer of tragedy.

The difficult mess of queer exploitation horror is one of the richest places in fiction to examine the intersection of homosexuality, social norms, and the shifting of morality both through reactionary sentiment and social reform. It's a place where queerness is allowed to exist as an unvarnished thing, viscerally and confusingly sexual in the way it is for so many of us who come to our homosexuality in isolation. It's a fiction of sharp edges and hidden barbs, of splinters and broken glass, but held with care and examined with an open mind it can show us the best and worst of ourselves in the shattered mosaics of its stories.