Queer Monster Good: Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands

Abstract

The ‘Queer Monster’ has been studied extensively by cinema scholar and critical theorist Harry Benshoff, notably in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997). The archetypal cinematic monster is an outsider figure opposed to a requisite heterosexual romance embedded in the horror film; the monster can be understood as a racial, ethnic, sexual, political, or ideological Other. Benshoff based his work upon essays by Robin Wood, who suggested that the horror film was thematically based upon three variables: normality, represented by heterosexual patriarchal capitalism; the Other, embodied by a ‘monster’; and the relationship between them (Benshoff 1997: 4).