It’s a trio of queer themed flicks in different horror subgenres, including a glory hole killer, a gay ghost, and lesbian-hating home invaders, giving me a few more titles to add to the complete homo horror movies page. Let’s see how this triple feature worked out for me.
ANAPIDAE (CALL ME) (2024)
This 45-minute short French film is actually too short to make much sense. It needed more time to indulge in the morbid, messed up, and tragic themes it is exploring.
It’s about grief, loneliness, deception, secrets, living a lie, and living in the closet.
That’s why the whole aspect of a giant spider as a metaphor, which gives the movie its name, is the one element that totally distracted me from everything else going on. See, there’s this dude that works as a caretaker at a cemetery, and the opening scene really captures the look and music of a late 1960s/early 1970s horror movie, which grabbed me immediately.
But that spider. That damn silly looking, giant spider that hangs around the cemetery. The movie does its best to have the caretaker explain how its life parallels his, but for me it wasn’t essential to the story at all. There are numerous clips of bugs interspersed in the film, and the way the imagery is edited into scenes reminded me of the creepy Samara/Sadako video, which adds to the sense that something quite freaky is going to happen at some point.
A widow shows up regularly at the cemetery to visit her husband’s grave. She bonds with the caretaker, who knew her husband. She says the husband told her the caretaker might be gay, but it doesn’t matter to her, and she keeps pushing him to either meet a woman or a man so he’s not alone.
He is alone. He’s totally alone. He lost his love. He cries in pain for his lover at night. In a very cheesy, very Euro horror moment, he digs up the corpse of his lover and makes love to it. But here’s the thing—the lover is a total skeleton (talk about getting boned). This caretaker looks like he’s maybe 21 at the most. How long has his lover been dead? I think in reality the caretaker is supposed to be around the age of the widow, but I’m not sure.
This macabre plot point was the hook for me, but it doesn’t even really have any impact on the rest of the story…because of that damn spider. Is the spider real? I wish. The widow and her two creepy daughters who are right out of The Shining, even see it. However, if the arachnid is a metaphor, that must mean it’s reflective of their grief as well, so naturally they can see it…right?
Don’t hold your breath if you’re hoping for the spider to do something gruesome in the final frame, because it doesn’t. There is some sort of horrific reveal the widow stumbles upon at the end, and it does involve the spider, however, I think what she is seeing is actually…metaphorical. And for viewers, it’s not very horrific at all. Argh. Made me wish they had just stuck to the skeleton fucker fun. Or, perhaps, in a full-length feature, made the bereft caretaker crazy enough to enlist his metaphorical grief spider to kill anyone who discovered his dirty—or dirt covered—little sex secret. Oh, how I wanted the metaphorical spider to literally devour the creepy girls.
I really loved the horror atmosphere and the gay angle of the movie. I also got a chuckle whenever this cheesy love song—a staple of Euro horror—played, because the subtitles literally say “cheesy music” every time. I just wish the movie had delivered more on the emotional aspects and the character development. Well, all that and, you know, the skeleton fucker fun.
THE MORNING AFTER (2023)
This is a queer movie with an agenda. For real. The dialogue is overloaded with unapologetic commentary on the state of woke culture, queerphobia, racism, feminism, gay rights, politics, conservatism, incels, law enforcement, and so on and so on. I’m not sure anyone really wants to experience it on screen as entertainment since it’s a war being waged in reality, yet as you are drawn into a sort of home invasion flick, you have nothing else to focus on other than the social statements.
Two girls wake up the morning after they have a big party and a sexual interaction. They find the cute ex-boyfriend of one of the girls in the bathroom. They learn he announced the party on social media. And now…
There are three strangers in masks standing outside the house. One of them calls himself the big gay bunny and says he is there to teach them that men will not be replaced. He also intends to drill it into the head of the ex-boyfriend that he has been completely emasculated by being an ally to the poison of liberalism.
As the trio inside tries to figure out who is behind the masks, what the strangers want, how to get away, and why the police won’t help them, they are constantly taunted. There are also signs each of them might be hiding something, because they are a sketchy group of victims.
The social messages predominantly overshadow any horror or suspense, but be warned—the big gay bunny cuts off a dog’s ear before killing it, and there is a gory eye removal scene, but it’s a of a human, so no big deal.
Eventually, there appears to be a prank at play, but also…not actually a prank at play. Loads of motive exposition is presented, there’s forced sexual intercourse, some people die, and the big gay bunny removes the mask to reveal his face, but only to the main characters. That’s right. We don’t get to see the identity of the instigator, and the main trio apparently knows who it is. We can’t share in their shock, making everything that happens in the film feel somewhat pointless to us since there’s not much of a chance of piecing together anything that happened either through the course of the movie or the night before.
SCISSORS (2025)
You know how the tagline of my site is “if you’re looking for a safe space, you’ve come to the wrong place”? Well, the same applies to this gay serial killer flick. It doesn’t give a fuck about your feelings. Gay men are absolutely tortured, and all of them are painted as only caring about one thing—anonymous sex.
That’s right. There is no balance here. There are no fully realized gay characters to connect with, only sex fiends that are blamed for their own demise.
The two main characters are the detectives on the case, and one of them has a straight sex scene in which he’s sporting nipple rings, so that gave me a chuckle. He also happens to be a co-writer and co-director of the movie.
The whole point of the film is that a serial killer is targeting men at glory holes and then either doing gruesome things to them through the hole or taking them back to his lair, so the intent isn’t to portray all sides of the gay spectrum. Think the preamble to Cruising.
This is balls-to-the-wall torture porn right from the start…literally.
The Leatherface-sized killer is freaky awesome, with a part gimp/part blowup doll mask, and the kills are fricking brutal. I’m warning you, the torture scenes go on for quite some time, and the guys playing the victims are more convincing in their screaming agony than any of the female bimbos in any 80s slasher I’ve ever seen.
Eric Roberts has a minor role as the mayor, who is concerned the open case will negatively impact his reelection campaign, so that is part of the motivation for the two main cops to solve the case. What we get is part sleazy sex torture and part police procedural. What we don’t get is any characters we really care about. The detectives seem somewhat sympathetic to the situation, but they still use gay slurs.
The ending for me was a highlight. Nothing is tied up neatly, but there’s a dark reveal of the killer that gives this movie more depth than it ever hints at during the entire course of events leading up to the finale.
