I’m sorry, homosexual horror film lovers. You are being lied to. The gayest horror film is not Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. That isn’t even the gayest horror sequel!
As it happens, the gayest horror film is Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II.
Yes, Freddy’s Revenge features a leather bar, a gym coach in a jockstrap being lashed by jump ropes, and an extremely homoerotic scene between the new boy at school and his very hot rival turned friend (they meet cute, then wrestle around during practice, jockstrapped asses out to the wind). But 1987’s Hello Mary Lou is suffused with such a pungent combination of sex, death, and religion that it might as well be porn.
A sequel to Prom Night in that both movies include proms, Hello Mary Lou opens in 1957, with bitchy, sexually voracious Mary Lou boasting about her sex life in confession and then scrawling her name and number on the confessional wall in lipstick. That’s just a quick pit stop on her way to the prom, where she wins prom queen—only to have her dress catch fire when a jilted boyfriend tosses a stink bomb at her. She dies in the blaze, poor girl, and then her spirit gets trapped in a trunk where her prom queen accessories are stored for safe keeping.
Mary Lou’s a trouper, though, and when the trunk gets opened decades later, her ghost wriggles free. She immediately forms a plan to become a flesh-and-blood, horny teenage girl again. Horny for dick, yes, but also for revenge!
Enter Wendy Lyon as Vicki Carpenter.
Vicki is one of those ethereal blondes with an overly religious mother that horror movies just love. She is vehemently opposed to sugar, desperately wants to buy a great dress for prom, and props up her two best gal pals. In other words, she’s a boring goody two-shoes… until Mary Lou takes over! Once the dead slut’s spirit enters her body, Vicki trails her friend into the locker room shower to kiss and menace her; rides her (now demonic) childhood rocking horse while idly letting it lick her hand with the most lascivious tongue this side of a rimming close-up; saunters through the halls like a truck driver ready to fuck; and in the strangest, most arousing scene, kisses her father, who makes no moves to pull away.
Intentionally or not, director Bruce Pittman suffuses the movie with a gay sensibility, delivering everything from gum-chomping bad girls to a priest who is killed by a crucifix that’s jammed down his throat. Plus, every woman in the movie is an actual character with defining traits, and all of the men are vaguely interchangeable hunky props.
Just as importantly, Pittman knowingly references horror classics from Carrie to The Exorcist to A Nightmare on Elm Street, and in Ron Oliver’s script, the characters boast names familiar to fans of the genre: Craven, King, Carpenter, Henenlotter.
In a month when we’re all hungry for new scary movies that won’t be a snooze fest (related: check out Spiral on Shudder for an actually gay horror movie), take the word of a dedicated homosexual and unrepentant horror buff: Give Freddy a rest. Say hello to Mary Lou this Spooky Season.
