🌈🪦 It Came From the Closet's Joe Vallese on Reading Ourselves into Horror

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Joe Vallese, the thoughtful editor behind It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.

I was browsing in my friend Sam’s bookstore, waiting for a customer to finish checking out so we could hang, when a book on the nonfiction table caught my eye. A rainbow arched over a headstone, and a hot pink hand thrust skyward out of the gravedirt, Carrie-style. If the hand’s limp wrist wasn’t enough of a hint, the title confirmed the book’s queerness: It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.

I didn’t buy it that day, but in the months that followed, the book came up in conversations with friends again and again. The vibe was more “Have you gotten this book yet?” than “Will you get this book?” It was a foregone conclusion that It Came From the Closet belonged in my library.

Other readers agreed with my tasteful pals: It Came From the Closet has earned rave reviews from readers, starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, and a spot on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Its 25 essays delve deeply into the writers’ personal ties to horror, “from Hitchcock to Halloween to Hereditary.” I love it, too.

The brilliant mind behind the anthology is Joe Vallese, whose own essay in the collection is a gut-wrenching recounting of he and his husband’s experiences navigating surrogacy, through the lens of Grace, a gory pregnancy horror from 2009. Joe recently joined me on a video call from New York City, where he is a Clinical Associate Professor and Precollege Coordinator at NYU.

Note: Joe is very easy to talk to—so much so that I forgot at times that I’d need to turn this transcript into a newsletter. With Joe’s permission, I’ve edited the order slightly, removed some digressions, and replaced my rambling questions with more concise ones.

Thanks for reading Scare Me! Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive a new edition every Thursday.

It’s been about three years since It Came From the Closet was first released. What was your journey to publication like?

It was a long process. From the idea to serious pursuit of the idea to publication, it was almost six years. 

The first essay that I took for the anthology was actually a reprint. It was Richard Larson's "Long Nights in the Dark," about the masking of Michael Myers being a coming out story. Richard Larson actually wrote a full length memoir called The Long Hallway that came out last summer and is the expansion of that essay. It was brilliant. I said, “This is exactly the kind of thing I want to read more of, and I don't see it anywhere.” I kept wondering if somebody else [would] suddenly come out with a book like this—and then finally, I had to be a good gay Virgo and do it myself. 

There were a lot of interested university presses that backed out or didn't really understand what I was doing. Or, an editor was supposed to take on the project, was excited about it, got reassigned, and then suddenly some white guy in the anthropology department is like, “Oh, I don't really understand this. I thought it was going to be film criticism.” The book had no home until Feminist Press—which really was a dream press for me—finally found it from the slush file, thanks to an amazing writer and friend of mine named Carly Moore. She contacted her editor and was like, "My friend Joey sent you this, are you guys sure that you don't want to look at it again?" And there was a young editor named Nick Whitney who was like, "Oh my God, how do we miss that?" [He] grabbed it, and then the rest is history.

[Editor’s Note: While putting together this newsletter, I discovered that Whitney is now leading Soho Press’ newly created horror imprint, Hell’s Hundred. Soho published Sara Gran’s Come Closer, which I wrote about in the first issue of this newsletter.] 

I toyed with writing my own book of essays, or a memoir about my relationship with horror and queerness. But that suddenly felt daunting and boring. I'm a cis, white, gay man; why would I be the authority on this? I wanted to make it a dialogue and represent this ever-evolving spectrum. 

Of course, no anthology could ever include every identity. I did my best to make it as varied and diverse as I could, and Feminist Press was really supportive in helping me to do that. I originally was contracted for a book of 12 essays, and shortly after, I was like, "I think we might need 45." The book became like a box from Hellraiser—I had to get the configuration right in order for there to be bloodletting and for us to get somewhere. 

Ironically, there is no Hellraiser essay in the book. I did get submissions for Hellraiser, but nothing that quite worked for the book. If I was doing it now, I'm sure we would get many more essays about it, because of the remake with Jamie Clayton, a trans woman, as Pinhead.

Because this book was coming from someone in academia, I kind of expected it to be a film studies book. I was so delighted to find that it’s so personal, so emotional, and so intimate. 

Full disclosure, I'm technically in academia. But I teach essay writing, and I love the essay as a form. 

There's plenty of literary theory and lots of important people doing important thinking about horror, queerness, queer culture, film. And that's not my wheelhouse—I wouldn't want to pretend that it was. 

I often describe the book as emotional film analysis. Some of the essays lean a little more deeply into scholarly stuff than others, but the one thing that binds all the text is personal narrative: the queer lens to help understand the tropes of horror, and the horror lens to help understand the tropes of queerness. They are doing this reciprocal thing. 

Were there any essays that particularly stand out in your memory of working on the book?

I spent a lot of time working with the writers—there was a real collaboration that happened, friendships were made. Everybody was so honest, so open, so vulnerable, and so forthright and gave us everything they had. I didn't want the book to be a bunch of coming out stories—I wanted diversity and story and narrative and experience. 

One example I like to give is Tucker Lieberman's essay, "The Trail of His Flames." I always get the question, where's the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 essay? [But] we don't need it because A, we know it's queer, and B, there's a fantastic documentary about Mark Patton, Scream, Queen! 

When I read the first version of Tucker Lieberman's draft, I was like, “What am I reading?” This is a re-dramatization of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but told through a hallucinatory mental health crisis from this writer. They’re writing about themselves as Nancy when they were presenting as female, through their transition and their friendships. It was just such a whirlwind. I was like, “This is confusing, but I cannot not publish this. I cannot look away from this.” It was such a trip.

It took so long to get it to the place where it both satisfied what I was looking for and also what Tucker wanted to say. It was so gratifying. I [couldn’t] wait for people to expect an Elm Street 2 essay, but instead, get an Elm Street essay and get this essay. 

I saw that Tucker was literally reckoning with identities and almost putting to words an experience that could not even be really expressed with language. And Tucker did it in language. To witness that was just so sensational and so beautiful. It's one of the pieces I'm most proud of in the anthology for that reason. 

The book's been out for almost three years, and I started working with the writers about two and a half years ago—so we're talking about a five year relationship. I've seen everybody changing: changing as writers, changing as people, changing in terms of self identification. And I think that that is pretty amazing.

You write about your own relationship to horror in the introduction, but could you share a little here?

My love of horror felt like the one last possibility that I could be straight. It felt like the one macho thing about me growing up with very macho cis-het Italian New Jersey brothers who were wild about girls and baseball. My father was like them—sports fanatic, girl fanatic—and he loved horror movies, so he brought horror into the house. 

I was probably way too young—I was maybe five or six when I started watching horror movies with my siblings—but in that respect, it was important, because I learned the difference between fiction and reality. I learned that something could be scary on TV, but it didn't mean that it existed in real life. There was a real education and a pleasure in horror.

For me, it felt like this thing that became incongruous with my queerness as I got older and didn't know that there was queer subculture attached to horror movies. 

Why do you believe horror and queer culture have this special relationship?

I have a theory about horror becoming super, super straight and misogynist in the aughts because we were finally starting to see the gap in queer artists, critics, filmmakers, and writers who had died in the AIDS epidemic. We didn't know how many queer people were behind the lens or in production—or, we didn't know until they were gone.

Then, suddenly, you get Saw. You get these remakes that were losing the spirit of what the original movie was supposed to be—losing the grit, making it shiny, making everything feel like a music video. There was something [that] was really catering to teenage boys in a post-Columbine world or something. I think it was the result of us finally feeling that loss of a missed generation of queer artists and critics.

Now we're swinging in a different direction, and we have queer filmmakers and queer characters. But it's a slow evolution, right? With any marginalized group, every piece of media becomes so infused with responsibility and expectation, and ultimately, fear of disappointment or failure. When you only have one or two, if they're not great, if they don't make money, [you might not get another].

The conversation is happening right now with Black cinema because of Sinners. The media conversation around it was absurd. It was like, “Whoa, this movie's making a ton of money and getting great reviews—but it's not really a hit because the director took such a big piece of the profit.” What a weird angle, you know? How can you not look at that and think, “Well, this is a supremely racist conversation,” because who would have said anything about that if a white male director got a big chunk of the pie? What a weird thing to focus on. 

In that respect, there's an alignment with queer cinema. But again, it feels almost disingenuous to talk about queer horror as a genre. Like I say in the introduction, most of the essays reaffirm that the responsibility falls on us to read ourselves into those films, to find characters that we identify with.

It's why it so often becomes the bad guy or the villain that we identify with, because they're complicated and they're often queer-coded. There was a long period where you got your Terror Trains, your Prom Nights, your Psycho. There's some revenge plot, and it's always popular cis, straight, white beauties who have done something terrible to someone. Even if [the victim] is not a queer person, it's queering and othering somebody in a way that leads to their tragedy. That was such a common way to go about a slasher movie in the ‘80s. 

That was part of the point of the book—I knew that very few of these pieces would be about explicitly queer horror, because it wouldn't be possible. There's just not enough of it. I wanted to see how writers and thinkers are infusing or reflecting their own experience through these movies in ways both comforting and complicated.  

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately—that so much of what we read is influenced by the experiences we're bringing to it. There are these layers of reflection and resonance: the relationship between the viewer and the movie, and the relationship between the reader and the essay.

I think horror will always persist, but the reason is also why Demi could not get that Best Actress win, and why Toni Collette could not get proper nominations for Hereditary. It's why [horror] is always going to be on the margins, no matter who's making it: Because horror is one of the few places where you can get away with really searing social commentary. 

One person can see it as just a horror movie—[but] another person can see it as something really compelling, life changing. They can identify with it. They can find it to be representative of how they feel on a cellular level, how they feel about themselves in society, or trying to understand themselves and where they fit in or don't. Horror is one of the few spaces where that can still happen. 

I think [horror] won't quite ever [become mainstream], and I think that's a good thing. I think it should remain sort of ours, if we can keep it that way. And by ours, I mean horror fans and queer people. And where the twain can meet, that's even better.

What has it been like for you to see people’s responses to It Came From the Closet? 

It's been really gratifying. A wonderful coup is that we got Carmen Maria Machado to write about Jennifer's Body. That was a very big deal, because with her comes a real legion of followers who hang on her every word. Rightfully so! They sort of came for Carmen, then stayed for everybody else. And that's been really wonderful. With Jennifer's Body in particular, the book has really validated a lot of people's feelings about the reassessment of that film and that reclamation of it as a misunderstood queer masterpiece.

That's been a wonderful push and pull, where I get responses from people who say, “Yes, I've always felt like there was something queer about Father Karras in The Exorcist, in the way S. Trimble writes about it.” It's just such a wonderful, surprising, and subversive queer reparative reading. Or somebody says, “I never thought of that.” It's both at once. 

When the book was republished in the UK, I went to London for its launch and visited bookstores. It’s out on Saraband Books with a forward from Kirsty Logan, who is this really wonderful witchy [Scottish writer]. Everything is kind of Gothic and feminist and queer and cool, and she has a devoted fan base. She's very prolific, and she's really amazing. We did a screening of Jennifer's Body and did a talk back after, to a full theater. Afterwards, I had all of these just lovely people coming up to me, and I realized through conversation, they were following me on Instagram. Suddenly, I was internationally putting faces to names. It was such a wonderful, warm experience. This queer, horror-loving subculture community that I had been referring to was suddenly manifested in front of me, and that was just so beautiful to see. 

We've had so many events, virtual and in person, and I'm just always touched by the ways in which people see something of themselves in a text, or don't see something of themselves. I'm actually really enamored of those who don't see themselves in a text but feel thankful that they've been exposed to that experience. 

I've gotten a few messages about my essay, thanking me for talking about queer parenthood and family building, and the joys and the horrors of that process, because it's not something people know much about. And also, people who messaged me who had never seen Grace. It created this opening for people to discover this little-known film that's serious and gut wrenching, but also super schlocky and silly. 

I never would have found Grace if you hadn’t introduced me to it. I loved that movie—I'm going to be thinking about it for the rest of my life, probably. 

When I decided that I was writing about our experience, it just was the only thing that I could think of. It just kept occupying my mind. I'd seen it once many years ago, probably in 2009 when it came out. 

When we had our experience of our loss, I could not get that scene out of my mind. It's so realistically depicted and so painful—but then when she breastfeeds that baby back to life, and that look on her face, there was such a dividing line between the reality and the absurdity.

I felt like I needed to play with a film that was true, but also campy. Even though my essay is not campy and it's deadly serious, it sort of helped to do that. 

Before I let you go, can I ask what you’re working on now and what might be next?

You can say I’m working on an undisclosed project for an independent press—maybe it'll be a 2027 release, if we're lucky.

And I'll give you one little bit of trivia: Before I could write the essay, I had really hard time writing it, for obvious reasons. I gave up on it and instead wrote a horror screenplay. It’s essentially a queer Rosemary's Baby, and it's true to life until it diverts. Then it becomes like an Omen or Hereditary. It was really healing to turn it into a horror script. I've been advised that I should novelize it and make it a commercial horror novel so I have the IP, and then revisit it as a film. Easier said than done, but it's on my mind and I’m setting some writing goals for myself. We'll see what happens.

People also ask about a sequel, and part of me thinks it might be kind of fun, in ten years, to get every single writer to write again. Instead of new writers, what if everybody just wrote again? They don't have to revisit the same essay or the same film, but what would it look like? What would it sound like? 

I would love to read it. I'll be wishing you a really good summer of writing and horror!

When Life Is Horror

I feel deeply disturbed by the genocide in Palestine, the rise of fascism in America, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing attacks on immigrant communities, trans people, and reproductive rights. These violent movements are, or are enabling, profound human rights violations, and they’re happening in plain view. I hope my values are somewhat obvious, but these days you never know, so I wanted to let you all know where I stand.

This weekend, Jack and I contributed to a few organizations:

• Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

• Community Justice Exchange (specifically the immigration bail fund)

• Trans Lifeline

To be honest, it feels so inadequate. But people wiser than I am have emphasized that this is a time when action matters, whether it’s big and small: helping a neighbor, volunteering your time, contacting your representatives, joining a protest, contributing a few dollars if you can spare them.

Are there any other organizations or causes you’re supporting? Anything you’re working on that needs our support? Let me know and I’ll include them in next week’s newsletter.

Up Next

Next week, we’ll finally conclude our It read along series! We’ve had quite a few new subscribers join us recently, so for the newcomers: I’ve been writing a series of posts about Stephen King’s It, broken up into groupings of 250-300ish pages. If you find doorstopper novels intimidating, I hope that it might give you some safe way stations along the road into Derry. You can find the series on my archive.

We’ll conclude next week with a double issue covering the second half of the novel. I’ll let you know which scene I found scariest and what I think about the book’s controversial ending, plus some fun trivia about the 1990 adaptation.

After that, we’ll be back with a brand new interview! But I’m keeping exactly who a secret until next week.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.