Summary
- Scream is for the gays. It’s a classic online meme at this point that every gay person loves Scream, but it’s more than just an inside joke – it has a lot of weight behind it. From drag cabarets to the recent Vegas musical adaptation, it has thrived in gay media.
- The first Scream leans into subtext that is traditionally queer, namely the unspoken agreement that Stu is in love with Billy Loomis (confirmed time and again by the cast and writer). It’s also unapologetically sexual and protective of its final girls, eschewing the one-dimensional tropes for flawed, complicated female leads that survive the sequels again and again.
- Subsequent Screams also lean into another classic queer trope: campiness, with Scream 3 in particular being filled with universal gay icons such as Laurie Metcalf, Parker Posey, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Carrie Fisher, while still staying true to its main final girls, Sidney & Gale.
Horror has long been a uniquely queer space as it is, with themes of being “othered” from society and the “acceptance of the unknown” used as classic gay allegories. From scary possessed dolls like Chucky and Annabelle to slashers like Freddy Krueger and psychological hauntings, horror has often been a more accepting genre. But the Scream series is arguably one of the most beloved horror franchises — both by and for the queer community. “Scream is for the gays” is a classic online meme at this point that every gay person loves Scream, but it’s more than just an inside joke – it has a lot of weight behind it. From drag cabaret homages to the recent Vegas-based musical parody, it has thrived in gay media.
Looking back at horror, from the early days of the Hays Code through an evolving society, queerness in stories has existed in metaphors and allegories. With horror in particular, exploring fear of the unknown, it became an easy genre to load up with subtext. And while many horror films have captivated LGBTQ+ audiences, like A Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, the Scream franchise has earned — and kept — its queer crown.
A Brief History Of Horror And Queerness
From way back in the silent era through to the modern day, horror maintains a history of being queer-coded. The majority of the plots involve some sort of othered being, person, or group juxtaposed against a traditional so-called “normal” society, which reacts with predictable fear. Historically, many villains in horror were queer-coded, whether it was through over-the-top stereotypical flamboyance or a hint at a clichéd lisp. These constant depictions, then, fed into the growing “gay panic.”
If it wasn’t intentional stereotyping, it was often unclaimed queer subtext. Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, an out gay man in 1930s Hollywood, was riddled with allegories as Dr. Frankenstein happily abandoned his wife on his wedding night to quite literally build a better man. The Wolf Man, in not so many words, is a metaphor for the suppression of “the beast within,” a workable metaphor for repressed homosexuality on top of the already deep themes the movie possessed.
But it’s because of that long history that queerness and horror have become sisters. The “othering” that happens also creates found family, something the LGBTQ+ community is very familiar with. And as the years go on, newer horror is more self-aware, reclaiming and flipping old tropes. Deviance from societal norms isn’t always portrayed as inherently evil. Scary villains become icons. As more writers and directors are able to create as openly queer individuals, horror gets proudly gayer.
How Scream Takes The Gay Horror Crown
Scream 6
In the next installment, the survivors of the Ghostface killings leave Woodsboro behind and start a fresh chapter in New York City.
- Release Date
- March 10, 2023
- Director
- Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
- Cast
- Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Hayden Panettiere
- Rating
- R
- Runtime
- 123 minutes
- Main Genre
- Horror
- Genres
- Horror, Mystery, Thriller
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It’s a long-running meme online that Scream “is for the gays.” And it turns out there’s a lot of truth behind that! In 1996, when the first Scream was released, queerness still had to be conveyed through subtext. But it was undeniably there, and that struck a chord with queer audiences, with subsequent Scream films leaning further into campiness and openly gay characters, like Jasmin Savoy Brown’s Mindy Meeks-Martin in Scream (2022).
The first Scream leans into the subtext that is traditionally queer, namely the unspoken agreement that Stu is in love with Billy Loomis, an angle that’s been confirmed by the writer and creator of the movie, Kevin Williamson. As quoted in Pride Source: “Williamson admits that when he wrote the original Scream, which was released in 1996, he was “very hesitant to present the gay side of me in my work,” resulting in the queerness of characters Billy and Stu being “a little coded and maybe accidental.”
Scream is also unapologetically sexual and protective of its final girls, eschewing the one-dimensional tropes for flawed, complicated female leads that survive the sequels again and again. As Williamson says in an Independent interview: “The Scream movies are coded in gay survival.” From that initial drive of gay survival, subsequent Screams also lean into another classic queer trope: campiness, with Scream 3 in particular being filled with universal gay icons such as Laurie Metcalf, Parker Posey, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Carrie Fisher, while still staying true to its main final girls, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott and Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers. So it’s both a meme and a truth: Scream is for the gays. Horror always has been. And with Scream 7 already greenlit by Paramount following the SAG-AFTRA strike, there are many more undeniably queer scary stories ahead.
The Scream movies are available to stream on Paramount Plus.
