Nos! Fer! Heckin! Atu!!!

 If I’m being honest, I thought Nosferatu was a little boring and not even slightly scary, but the time in which it was made makes that understandable, although no more entertaining. I really enjoyed Henry Bennshoff’s article though, and hadn’t really heard of grind houses before now so that was interesting to read about as well. I think one of the more interesting discussions Benschoff adds in The Monster And The Homosexual was when he asked the question, what makes something a queer horror film? He argues that there are many different ways that the queer and horror intersect, through: “identifiably gay and/or lesbian characters,... [being] written, produced, and/or directed by a gay man or lesbian,” and the arguablly most important way is “through subtextual or connotative avenues” (98, 99). I agree with him when he says that movies such as Nosferatu benefit from “active queer reading practices,” because not only are there queer coded aspects of the movie (the perversity and ‘otherness’ of the Count, especially in his apparent infatuation with Jonathon’s blood), but that the director of the film was queer as well. Funny enough, I am reading about gay vampires in another class as well-- one of the articles I read (by Richard Dyer) tried to understand why the lgbtq community was so drawn to vampires. He argues that vampirism mirrors in a lot of ways the life of a queer person. One of the most important aspects he cites is the simultaneous eroticism and stigma that follows both intimate queer relationships and the act of drinking blood. A film featuring a monster that is already easily read as queer can be even more easily interpreted as such when the subtext of Nosferatu is also pretty gay.