Everything stays at home. In this interview we speak with Javier Parra, whose name may be familiar to regular readers of eCartelera: he is one of our collaborators. AND As an expert critic on horror, Parra has written an essay entitled ‘Scream Queer’ that explores the LGTBIQ + representation in the genre.
The book, published on October 4 by the Dos Bigotes publishing house, is now in its second edition. But The origin of all this is found by chance on a trip that Parra made to Los Angeles to interview a film crew for eCartelera. There, as he tells in the prologue, he entered a bookstore where he began to reflect on his own queer references.
That seed ended up germinating in ‘Scream Queer’, a reflection on the presence and representation of the LGTBIQ + collective throughout the history of horror cinema. In the interview he tells us the importance of figures like Clive Barker, director of ‘Hellraiser’, or the presence of BDSM in terror. “Whenever more explicit representations of sex appear, there will be a BDSM component that has to do with leather aesthetics, bondage and there is a whole imaginary about the jockstrap fantasy”, Explain.
We also talked about the knife as a phallic element in titles such as ‘Knife + Heart’ or the allegory of the monster as an marginalized entity of society, with which so many people in the group have felt identified. “The fact of feeling marginalized, feeling different or a monster, because society has often labeled fags as monsters, until very recently and now also in different placesIt’s what queers, dykes, trans, people from the collective do, love terror in a way that many times they don’t even know how to explain “, resume.
Freddy Krueger as allegory of the closet
In the interview, which you can also see and youtube, Parra explains the importance of Mark Patton and his role in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge’. According to the critic, David Chaskin’s script was “A deliberately gay story about a high school boy who is in the closet and has to face Freddy Krueger., as if he did not have enough problems in his life. “The film has scenes in leather stores, in showers with a clear homoerotic element and presents the rare figure of the” final boy “, instead of the” final girl “that stars in these films Horror.
Chaskin denied the film’s subtext for years and did not come to admit it until recently, in a documentary titled ‘Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street ‘. “He was for many years denying that the film was a queer allegory, when things were very clear”, says Parra. “In the documentary there is a face-to-face conversation between him and Patton in which he apologizes to him and says that yes, he did a queer thing but that his intention was not to laugh”.
Before ‘Scream Queer’, Javier Parra has published the books ‘Serial Terror’ (Héroes de Papel, 2019) and ‘The terrible mother in horror movies’ (Hermenaute, 2020).
Reference-www.ecartelera.com
