Shudder’s Queer for Fear Looks Thoughtful and Wildly Entertaining

You can’t be too shocked, contemplating the truth that Shudder beforehand made the superb Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, however the streamer’s newest documentary collection appears prefer it’ll be a must-watch. Executive produced by Bryan Fuller (Hannibal), Queer for Fear examines the horror style by an LGBTQ+ lens. After the collection’ San Diego Comic-Con panel, Shudder launched a prolonged clip from the primary episode, which you’ll be able to watch right here!

“The documentary, when it was initiated, was a movie,” Fuller advised the SDCC viewers. “As we got further into the interviews and all of these different people’s points of view on horror stories and how they saw themselves in different ways represented by monsters and psychopaths, we realized that 90 minutes was just not enough to cover all of the material. So Shudder, in support of us, said that we should become a [multi-episode] series. Every episode has a thematic unifying idea. The first episode is about queer storytellers… the foundational queer storytellers that created the horror genre,” together with the screenwriters who penned Hitchcock movies and Frankenstein director James Whale, in addition to figures in literature like Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. “The second episode is exploring the queer thematics that we all relate to, whether it’s werewolves, or cat people, or body snatchers, or zombies … it starts to build a vocabulary for the audience of, yes we’ve all looked at these movies as scary films, but there’s something much deeper and personal and queer about the impact they’ve had.”

Beyond that, the four-part collection will dig into “the ‘lavender scare’ alien invasion films of the mid-20th century to the AIDS obsessed bloodletting of 80s vampire films; through genre-bending horrors from a new generation of queer creators; Queer for Fear re-examines genre stories through a queer lens, seeing them not as violent, murderous narratives, but as tales of survival that resonate thematically with queer audiences everywhere,” in accordance with a Shudder press launch.

Fuller is nicely conscious, now and whereas it was being made, that Queer for Fear is treading new territory within the documentary world. “I think we all took it very seriously,” he mentioned. “I recognized that if there was a version of this documentary that wasn’t up to snuff, it would hurt future documentaries, or it would limit perception because that’s where we are with any sort of story that’s marginalized. You don’t get the chances that perhaps more normative storytellers do if you fail … Shudder knew they had to back this project in a way that allowed greater access and a higher caliber of story being told, because if you tell this story right, it helps other queer storytellers … So everybody was cognizant of ‘We have to do this right.’ And that’s why it’s been taking so long!”

The wait’s virtually over: Queer for Fear arrives September 29 on Shudder.

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