Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator by Heather O. Petrocelli (review)

In Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator, Heather O. Petrocelli sets out to “elevate queer horror spectators’ voices” and constructs a portrait of their “opinions, habits and tastes” by focusing attention on queer spectatorship of horror film and the relationship that queer people have with the genre (3). Petrocelli argues that while other scholars have established a “sense of queered horror history,” this book takes on the challenge of engaging with queer horror spectators, of whom “almost nothing is known” (2). The central argument of the book is that queer people “have a distinctive spectatorial relationship” with horror “unlike any other horror audience demographic” (234). To make this argument, Petrocelli utilizes a mixed-method approach rooted in what is referred to as a “scavenger methodology,” building off the scholarship of Brigid Cherry and the methodological strategies of Andrew Scahill, among others (3, 17). In this book, quantitative and qualitative data from queer survey participants and queer oral-history narrators are presented and briefly analyzed; the relationships between horror, camp, and queerness are examined; and the author's data set is situated in a “critical framework at the nexus of horror studies, queer theory, cultural studies, film studies, reception studies, live cinema studies, ethnography, history and social science” (17).In five chapters and an appendix, Petrocelli covers substantial ground. The first half of the book situates the study's methodological and ontological frameworks and provides a brief overview of the quantitative and qualitative data the author collected through online surveys and oral histories. In the second half of the book, the relationships between trauma and camp are explored, and Petrocelli takes a closer look at the intersections of live cinema, camp, and horror, before concluding with the final arguments, pointing the reader toward new questions generated by the research, and providing a brief overview of key design details for the study.In the first chapter, “Horror Is Queer: Theoretical and Ontological Foundations,” Petrocelli lays out the purpose of the study and the theoretical and ontological foundations of the work and argues in favor of prioritizing “queerness and the queer experience in horror studies” (27). Here, Petrocelli defines the parameters of the study, positioning it as a “form of activist research” and making a case for the importance of empirically grounded studies focusing on horror and queerness (38). The intersections of queer theory and horror studies also are explored here, providing a brief but useful history of queerness in horror studies.Petrocelli's second chapter, “Portrait of a Queer Horror Fan: The Opinions, Habits and Tastes of the Queer Spectator,” provides a brief overview of the survey data. This chapter briefly presents data on the gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, age, and educational attainment of the survey participants and their film preferences. The data is presented “without complete in-depth analysis” because the goal of the chapter is to “establish the first comprehensive empirical portrait of the queer spectator of horror film” rather than to explore the data at length (56). In this chapter, Petrocelli writes that “this study's empirical data emphatically evidences that queer spectators of horror film connect to the genre differently than cisheterosexual horror fans because the queer horror relationship is grounded in a non-normative embodiment” (57). Petrocelli argues that the data gathered in the study prove that “the connection queers have to horror transcends national borders, generations and intersectional subjectivities” (57). For Petrocelli, queerness “functions as a shared textual and subtextual language,” and this language “provides an analytical framework” useful in developing and understanding the “distinctive relationship that queer spectators have with the horror genre” (58).In the third chapter, “Trauma and Camp: Queer Connections to Horror,” Petrocelli investigates the “yet considered convergence between the fields of trauma studies, horror studies and queer studies,” arguing that the study's data is evidence “that queer trauma and camp are deeply entwined” in queer people's relationship to horror (122). Petrocelli utilizes the survey data and oral-history reviews to understand “why and how queer spectators connect with horror because [of] the trauma(s) experienced by queer people” (123), highlighting what the author names as a “specifically queer catharsis: the processing of insidious queer trauma” (124). While engaging with trauma studies, Petrocelli chooses not to engage with psychoanalysis, writing that the “harm that psychoanalysis has inflicted on marginalised people for decades, particularly its pathologisation of homosexuality,” is too great to justify including it in the bibliography (126). Instead, Petrocelli prefers to privilege “the understanding of trauma as ‘socioculturally constituted’ over the ‘psychological considerations’ that tend to dominate the field” and uses that to guide the understanding of trauma throughout this text (126).After the discussion of trauma and camp, Petrocelli shifts focus to queer live cinema, drag, and horror in the fourth chapter, “Drag Me to Hell: Queer Performance and Live Cinema.” This chapter is meant to provide an “extended illustration and interrogation of the camp relationship queer spectators have with horror” by examining “drag performers who present horror films to queer audiences” alongside live drag shows before the screening (176). Drawing somewhat on the survey data, this chapter is focused on arguing “for the significance of queer interventions for live cinema studies” (176). Instead of survey data, Petrocelli largely utilizes interviews with drag performers and recounts the experience of attending two live cinema events, Peaches Christ's “Midnight Mass” in San Francisco, California, and Carla Rossi's “Queer Horror” in Portland, Oregon, to inform the argument.In the conclusion and appendix of Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator, Petrocelli reasserts the research goals and findings and provides a brief overview of the research process for other scholars interested in doing similar work. This book, Petrocelli writes, is “deeply personal and a way to establish queer visibility” as horror spectators (234). The author's final, overarching argument is that “queers have a distinctive spectatorial relationship with the genre unlike any other horror audience demographic” (234). Petrocelli also argues that the book's “authoritative observations about the queer horror spectator” can be established because the mixed-method approach includes the voices of “4,107 survey participants and fifteen oral history narrators” (235).Unfortunately, though Petrocelli aims to “elevate queer horror spectators’ voices” through the inclusion of survey data and oral-history narratives, this effort is often unsuccessful (3). While the term queer is meant to privilege “the collective community of queer horror spectators over the individual queer horror fan,” in practice, it strips the survey participants and oral-history narrators of their embodied identities (6). By flattening all LGBTQ+ identity labels to queer, and prioritizing queerness to the exclusion of other identity markers, Petrocelli is unable to avoid “collaps[ing] the entire community of queer horror spectators into one simplified and commodifiable archetype” (238). Again, in the conclusion, Petrocelli states that the research shows that “queers have a distinctive spectatorial relationship with the genre unlike any other horror audience demographic” and that the book demonstrates this sui generis relationship (234). Although the book demonstrates that queer people engage with horror in a multitude of ways, it lacks convincing evidence for the author's claim that “a person's queerness is the most salient aspect of identity” or that “queers form a unique group of horror spectators” who relate to horror in ways that no other marginalized community does (235). Overall, Petrocelli's argument would have benefited from a narrower scope. Had this book focused more fully on exploring the data collected, it would have been easier to establish the “empirical portrait of the queer spectator of horror films,” as this project intended (56). The latter half of the book, focusing on trauma, camp, and live cinema studies, is a fascinating conversation that feels separate from the rest of the project and Petrocelli's stated argument and research goals. A narrowed focus also would have provided the space for Petrocelli to address the ways that this project is “consciously a Western project”—as is noted briefly at the end of the second chapter—and to more fully explore the role of other intersecting identities in the relationship between queer people and horror (113).However, Petrocelli hopes this study “inaugurates a new application of audience reception studies” (37) that focuses more on including empirical research methods and empowering the “active spectator” (36). The framework used in the study draws on multiple disciplines in ways that will be most interesting to beginning scholars of queer horror, audience, or film studies and those hoping to engage with queer audience studies more broadly. This book provides a useful bibliography and starting point for scholars unfamiliar with those disciplines, as Petrocelli draws on several queer theorists, horror scholars, and film scholars to inform the data set analysis. In the first chapter, Petrocelli offers a brief history of horror studies and draws clear lines connecting horror and queer studies. The mixed-methods approach used in this project, most clearly present in the first two chapters of the book, is a useful framework for scholars interested in pursuing this kind of audience or spectator studies. This book also will appeal to readers of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (2022), edited by Joe Vallese, who are interested in a more mixed-method or quantitative approach to queer spectatorship of horror.