I attended the Queer Fear film festival in Winston-Salem and thought it would be a neat idea to do a write-up of the films. Three blocks of shorts in the horror or weird genre, then one feature length film. My ratings system is as follows—

1 out of 4: Incompetently made.
2 out of 4: Well put together, but I didn’t enjoy it.
3 out of 4: I mostly enjoyed it.
4 out of 4: I loved it and I’m excited to see what the film-makers do next.

Disclaimer: The pronouns I use for characters are based firstly off the official summaries and if that wasn’t applicable, what they were coded as. Also, there’s going to be spoilers in here because it’s kind of hard to talk about a 10 minute film without them.

Block 1: Light Horror Shorts

The standout from the first block was “Poppy’s Saturn” by Nicole Tegelaar. We open with a red-haired woman in a green dress singing in what looks like an inter-war European nightclub. She’s frightened by the sight of an unsettling black-eyed man in the crowd. Seeing her distress, a friend gives her a business card for “Madame Rose” after the show. After visiting Madame Rose, who turns out to be a palm reader for feet, the film takes a distinctly trippy turn as the plot fades away and the visuals become kaleidoscopic.

This was a Belgian production that captures the feel of the time period very well. Some of the actors look like they stepped out of a Murnau production. Once the film starts it’s second half, it draws you in with a crooning tune sung by Madame Rose with the line “You are like the poppies of Saturn”. I initially thought the title was a reference to the car company. With it’s nightclub setting, ominous music and mysterious non-sequitur characters it was the most Lynchian short of this festival. The ending is ambiguous, but I think the imagery suggests our lead character symbolically becomes a rose. I give it a 4/4

Next we had a more straight forward comedy, “Stan Behavior” by Tyler C. Peterson. We open with Ginger Minj as Goldie Hon, doing her drag act to a very unappreciative audience. People cross her stage without permission, a drunken bachelorette pukes on her and patrons wave single bills in her face, making her clap like a seal to grasp them. Fed up with this shabby treatment, she tries to reach out to an attorney to help her form a drag queen union. However it turns out the attorney is a straight woman murderously obsessed with drag. I found this a riotously funny movie that touches on the issues the drag scene faces as it becomes a part of mainstream culture. Great performances from Ginger Minj and Yvonne Zima. 3 out of 4 rating.

“Strangers on a Train” directed by Rachel Kerry is an amusing riff on the gender gaps between podcasts. A man sitting on a train is listening to an Alpha-Bro podcast that urges him to seek out the nearest woman near him. The woman he sees is also listening to a podcast, this one a true crime podcast about a fictional killer. A dialogue-free performance from the leads alongside a flawless imitation of podcast voice make this a delight to watch. 3 out of 4 rating.

We enter into more real world terror with “Safety State” by Jeanette L. Buck. Set in a near future dystopia after a Donald Trump win in 2024, a lesbian couple in Ohio facing state sponsored discrimination hires the service of a gay couple to pose as their husbands as they journey to the safe zone of New England. Despite the dystopian setting the tone remains fairly light with an early joke about dildos and cute hand-drawn interludes. Perhaps too light a tone for some viewers, but the audience in attendance seemed to enjoy it. There’s also an intersectional wrinkle when the lesbian couple conflicts with the other couple over issues of misogyny. 3 out of 4 rating.

We get more psychological with “The Feeling Will Pass” by Neil Willoughby. After a dinner party a woman fears she may be experiencing psychosis. This one fell flat for me; after the setup it shifts a fairly routine series of “Woman hears noise, goes to look and nothing is there” with obnoxiously loud musical stings. The broad acting doesn’t help. 2 out of 4 rating.

“Buried” by Asleigh Becker is the first real mis-fire of the day. Completely dialogue free, we follow a woman with a shovel walking through the woods as we flashback to scenes of a failed relationship. A mysterious scar on her chest leads to an obvious conclusion where she digs up a buried heart in the woods, looks at it a bit, then reburies it. Without dialogue we’re left with a constant bluegrass soundtrack over the entire short that grates. In the credits there’s an entry for “Robot by” so I guess the heart prop was supposed to beat? 1 out of 4 rating.

We end the first block with “Sanguine” by Robin Careless. Two woman are walking home after a date. There’s a muted tension between the two that builds to one being stabbed in the neck with a needle. She awakens tied to a chair and after a series of tests is revealed to be a “Homo-Sanguine” captured by amateur vampire hunters. The effects were good but I found the acting, especially from the Sanguine herself, unconvincing¹. Fans of vampire horror-comedy might enjoy this more than I did. 2 out of 4 rating.

I missed most of “Close Friend” by Eleanor “Ellie” Prop as I was late to the screening. It looked intriguing, a young woman by a lake talking to some kind of inner demon rendered in penciled animation.

“Stan Behavior” seemed to be the audience favorite of the block while one person in attendance told me “Poppy’s Saturn” was their pick for best. Neil Willoughby did a Q&A afterwards but I didn’t stick around since I didn’t like his short very much.

Block 2: Horror Shorts

The standout for this block was “The Thaw” by Sarah Wisner and Sean Temple. It’s the first film of the day set in the 19th century, usually a common period for short films. A woman lives with her parents during a brutal Vermont winter. When they discover there’s not enough food to last, the parents dig out an old recipe for a tea that will put them in hibernation until spring. Naturally, something goes wrong. This was also the only live-action film of the festival filmed in black and white. Which is used tremendously here. It has a soft warmth to it, like the feeling of sepia tone without actually being sepia.

The parents awaken prematurely from their slumber which also seems to awaken a sublimated hatred in the father figure. He experiences a ravenous hunger that also manifests as anger towards his daughter for failing to find a husband. It’s not stated outright but it’s fairly obvious this is because she’s gay. Themes of familial obligations and the “usefulness” of people pervades the movie. It reminds me of the slur for gay people that used to be a term for elderly people that transferred since they were both considered useless things. 4 out of 4 rating.

The next block got off to a strong start with “Lady Parts” by Ariel McCleese. We open with two women lightly kissing while surrounded by a sea of balloon tubes embracing them like cilia. Our lead awakens from this dream and we learn that when she’s aroused she produces a substantial amount of a thick mucus. This leads to situations that I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be humorous or hilarious. Whatever substance they used for the mucus is convincingly gross and there’s some neat shots in this movie. This film begins a trend among the festival selections where any significant on-screen intimacy between characters is usually between two conventionally attractive cis women. 4 out of 4 rating.

We go back to Europe with the Spanish film “Hado” by Rubi Rock. A man driving home at night gets a message from his affair partner, a distraction that causes him to strike and kill a man who turns out to be his exact double. Then he wakes up. Clever viewers may be able to guess how the story proceeds. The story is a fairly simple morality play where the guilty are punished. Not really my kind of story but the acting from the lead was good considering he barely says a word. 2 out of 4 rating.

We enter the territory of the satirical “movie about making a movie” genre with “Casting Kill” by Mark J. Parker. A last-minute casting call is disrupted when one of the actors turns out to be a homicidal maniac with a grudge. The overly-meta self aware slasher has never really been my bag and the first half of the film seems more a series of in-jokes only familiar to those in the trenches of filmmaking. There was also not much of a noticeable difference between the awkward acting of the auditions and the acting of the “real” segments. Furthering my belief that bad performances should be laid at the feet of the director. 2 out of 4 rating.

Two women are driving on a dark backroad in the familiar setting of “Kindness of Strangers” by Stu Silverman. They come across an abandoned car and a woman in distress. This movie has a rather aggravating problem where one character exists simply to say “No” constantly in a futile attempt to keep the plot from happening. The pacing of this short is painfully slow as it takes nearly five minutes for a woman to walk to a car and open the door. I will say the sound design for the stabbing when it finally happens is pretty good and sells the brutality. 2 out of 4 rating.

“The Appraiser” by C.J. Arellano follows two men who’ve inherited a deceased relative’s old farm house. Almost all the story is told via voiceover which makes me wonder if they couldn’t afford a proper mic system. The rural setting and farm house make for some nice shots but the “descent into madness in isolation” storyline is weak and muddled because we don’t get to know the characters at all. 2 out of 4 rating.

We end the horror block with what feels like a divisive movie, “The Power of the Strike” by Dima Burch. Starting in a bowling alley dimly lit by neon, a man wearing a shock collar is given orders over a PA. We arrive at a classic Saw situation where he’s ordered to shoot a man tied to a chair who turns out to have raped him in high school. Static camera shots are used to good effect (except for some crotch shots) but there’s an audio issue where the voice over the PA has a very thick British accent that makes him hard to understand when distorted over a PA. There’s an abrupt tonal shift when the captive rapist is murdered and we switch to two men in a car outside. One of them is livestreaming and I think he’s supposed to be the Jigsaw of this film? He enters the bowling alley with his friend to kill the other captive for unclear reasons. A flashback revealing the dead rapist got his dick bit off by his victim does nothing to clear things up. The director had a Q&A afterwards but I thought it’d be rude to ask him to explain the movie to me.

Block 3: Feature Film

The feature presentation of the night was “The Rebrand” by Kaye Adelaide. A found footage horror-comedy about a lesbian influencer couple who hire an eight months pregnant Nicole to film a documentary about their rebranding after being canceled. Influencers are a relatively new archetype to the horror genre, usually as shallow victims in slasher movies. Other films like Ingrid Goes West or the TV show The Curse have explored different sides of the new form of celebrity. Here we have the influencer as the manipulative antagonist.

The film is framed as being an episode of a YouTube video on a queer killer true crime channel. We’re introduced to the main couple, Blair and Thistle. Blair is the lunkhead with a sweet heart while Thistle is the domineering half with an arresting makeup style like an Instagram filter brought to life. They’re played by two comedians and much of the dialogue is ad-libbed. This style of filming can sometimes result in a shaggy mess, but the scenes stay on the rails here and the comedy is excellent. The audience was howling at some of Blair’s deadpans and non-sequiturs. The first half is a pitch black comedy as the influencer couple unwittingly reveals their deeply toxic relationship to the camera. Much comedy is derived from satirizing therapy speak and DARVO and overusing the term “gaslight”. Thistle is fascinating as someone extremely image focused while also being completely unaware of how she comes across.

The film shifts into folk horror by way of cottagecore as Nicole becomes trapped in the house and the threat is revealed. The gore effects are quite gnarly and the astonishingly low budget inspires some great creativity. Nicole sleeps in a “nursery” with plastic curtains for walls which is very creepy but came about because the filmmaker literally didn’t have a room to film those scenes and used a cheap partition to make an extra room. Most of the cast played double duty as crew members, including Nicole being the actual Director of Photography for the movie while also playing the person filming everything. The director expressed the hope this can make it to a streaming platform. Stick around for the post credits ASMR scene. 4 out of 4 rating.

Block 4: Weird and Wild Shorts

The last block of the festival is the “Weird and Wild” segments. The shorts tend to be more experimental and abstract with the queerness being subtextual or behind the camera. First up we have “Possum” by Daisy Rosato. An anarchist queer co-op is torn apart when one member kills a possum eating their vegetables. The possum itself is played very adorably by a stick puppet. Mostly a cringe comedy where the intersecting identities and micro-aggressions from the members bounce off each other. 3 out of 4 rating.

“Irregular Feminine Form” by Emma Underwood is a headscratcher. A man in a dimly lit room plastered with images from 90’s bands receives mysterious messages in voiceover and then fights a woman dressed similar to him and played by his sister? Maybe fighting their trans identity? 2 out of 4 rating.

Our first fully animated feature is “Maurice’s Bar” Tzor Edery. Based on the real life story of the second gay bar in Paris, a man on a train recalls his time at a bar owned by an Algerian-Jewish man before it was raided by the police. Really wonderful animation that’s very fluid and also filled with water motifs. Not much of a plot but that’s fine. 3 out of 4 rating.

“The Journey Home” by Noah Lei Underwood was also a bit of a puzzler. Extremely short at exactly three minutes, I think a person was eating themselves to transition? Interesting and well shot. 3 out of 4 rating.

“It’s a Match” by Michelle May Schaefer. A hearing woman matches with a deaf lesbian who goes by the name “Leatherface”. This was the first film of the fest to have the “Drone shot of a car driving on an isolated road” that used to be a neat Shining reference but is now something I associate with Tubi Originals. Didn’t care for the story too much, Leatherface kills the woman then in the last minute we see the woman waking up and the same scenes happen again until it’s implied that she’ll kill Leatherface. There was a funny editing moment where Leatherface drags her body to a campfire outside, mimes throwing her on it, and the body disappears like in a video game. 1 out of 4 rating.

Back to body horror, how I missed it, with “From My Rotting Body” by Sol Casimiro. A sex worker suffers from a rare disease where his skin will randomly split open and they can’t stop bleeding. Weirdly it’s less bloody than it sounds, most of the gore is implied through rotting bandages. There’s a nice Repulsion riff with some maggoty food, but there’s also a subplot about a burglar I couldn’t decipher the reason for and the dreaded voiceover. Ends with a nice scene where he sits on a park bench with a kid who I guess turns out to be his younger self. 2 out of 4 stars.

“Les Betes” by Michael Granberry is a stop-motion masterpiece. A rabbit looking meastro with magic keys assembles a group of insects, sentient vegetables, and bits of trash to play a show before a sneering royal audience. The affair gets a bit Hop Frog when the royals start attacking the performers and they retaliate in a Superjail-esque orgy of violence before a purging fire ends things. Still ends on a happy note. 4 out of 4 rating.

We end the festival with my favorite from this block, “Secret Menu Beauty Pageant” by Frankie Campisano and SG Egan. The only one with a voiceover I didn’t dislike, a worker at a shoe factory tells about how he got sucked into a surreal world underneath his favorite burger chain when he tries to order off the secret menu. It’s got the vibe of an Adult Swim infomercial with a bizarrely shaggy dog story and imagery that cribs from 90’s McDonalds commercials and the kind of mixed media animation that classic Spongebob or Smiling Friends does. 4 out of 4 rating.

Overall I was pleased with the selections this year. It’s often said that Horror is an inherently conservative genre; relying on fear of the outsider or the unknown. Some of its most popular icons being brutal enforcers of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. But horror is also by nature transgressive, creating a space where boundaries are blurred. Queer voices in horror can break the genre out of its familiar straight groove and into some truly weird and transgressive territory. There were many talented filmmakers on display here and I hope they continue to make some great art.

1. In general I think whatever on screen looks like bad acting is the fault of the director or editor. It takes a huge amount of skill to even get cast in the first place. ↩︎