Queer for Fear Quotes

“Drag as an art form sort of captures the same anti-establishment, weirdo, politically incorrect, rebel mentality that all the best horror films do.”
― Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator

“Camp undoes the solemnity with which heterosexual society regards tragedy, but camp doesn't evade the reality of the suffering that gives rise to tragedy. If anything, camp is a tribute to its intensity. Camp returns to the scene of trauma and replays that trauma on a ludicrously amplified scale - so as to drain it of its pain and in doing so, to transform it.”
― Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator

“Camp is performative and camp is taking the piss out of society. Camp is Other. Camp is an otherness that holds a mirror up to the world at large and says, 'Look how you are. Look how you're acting. Isn't it kind of outrageous?' Who understands otherness better than queer people, because we've been othered our whole lives. So I think that we embrace camp because we understand the things that we were told growing up were so serious and so important - this is the word of law and this is how it is and how it shall always be - are kind of bullshit. Because all you have to do is take one step back to realize, 'Oh, this is really dumb.' And you're using this dumbness to subjugate and marginalize and push people down. So camp becomes both an element of fun and absurdity, but also a weapon to criticize all of those structures that have held us down.”
― Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator

“Queer folks seem to have an enhanced unconscious awareness of the uncanny, camp, and acts of transgressions.”
― Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator

“I think camp is queerness and horror is queerness. They're both tackling the same thing. They're both dismantling society. Camp is taking it and amplifying it and horror is taking it and throwing blood on it - but someone's laughing while throwing that bucket. It's all interwoven. (Davis, 2020, p. 31)”
― Heather Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator