Ten Imaginary Lesbian Horror Films

Halloween. A time for costumes and parties and mobilising entire nations of children as some kind of candy bailiff army.

But it’s also a time for horror films — films that are invariably not as good as they would be if they had more queer ladies in them. Yet imagine, dear reader, if there was a canon of movies filled with as many soft butches as stray werewolves; as many polyamorous pansexuals as pent-up poltergeists.

And so I present to you a listicle of made-up movies, the kind that might be filmed if a demon puppeteer raised the cadaver of every queer and horror trope and screen-tested them for the ultimate selection of spine-tingling sapphic shockers.

Remember children, these movies are imaginary, but the horror is real.

The Portland Chainsaw Massacre

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A group of lesbians go camping in the woods. The local chainsaw-wielding serial killer is frustrated he can’t murder them because he is honour-bound not to attack virgins, and he assumes that none of them have had “real” sex according to his cis-phallocentric view of intercourse.

The Woman in High-Waisted Jeans

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For flimsy reasons, a woman moves into a house that has lain abandoned for decades, rumoured to be haunted. She starts seeing apparitions of a woman wearing high-waisted jeans. It turns out the apparition is the trapped soul of a lesbian from an 80s film, forced by the studio to die in a fire after an out-of-character bout of psychosis. The woman and the ghost fall in love. At least one of them cries during ghost-sex.

I Know Who You Did Last Summer

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A group of queer women all receive creepy texts reading “I Know Who You Did Last Summer.” Through flashbacks, it’s revealed that Alex did Leticia who did Janice who did Emily but only because she thought she was Alice who did Fiona to get back at Dani who did Veronica who was convinced she did Genevieve, but it was actually her best friend, Ruby. Everyone dies.

Biospecies

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A killer alien seductress attempts to mate with unsuspecting human lesbians, breaking their hearts and putting them at high risk of STDs. It turns out she’s neither a killer nor an infectious alien, but a luckless bisexual botanist who eventually realises the local supply of organic kale has been infected with a neurotoxin that makes everyone who eats it paranoid, delusional and biphobic. While developing an antidote, the paranoid lesbian horde breaks into her lab and hunts her down. She cures everyone just in time for brunch.

Multi-Tool

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Two lesbians awaken chained to the walls of a bathroom, with a dead body lying on the floor holding a tape player. They play the tape which is some twisted white dude going on about poison gas or something. The lesbians use the assortment of multi-tools they always carry around to escape the chains, then realise the body is alive and it’s the twisted white dude that put them there. They tie up the dude with carabiner clips and leave him to slowly die from the poison gas he released. The film ends with the lesbians driving off to their second date at Home Depot.

Single White Cis Straight Female

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A queer trans girl of colour gets a new roommate, who is a straight white cis hipster girl that appropriates literally every aspect of her style and culture. Things come to a head at a Halloween party, where the room-mate’s costume backfires and she chokes to death on the feathers of a dollar-store Pocahontas headband. The trans woman lives happily ever after until her neighbourhood gets gentrified and she realises she’s living a recurring nightmare.

Lesbian Bed Death

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An evil goblin from Germanic folklore sneaks into the bedrooms of lesbians and casts malicious spells to destroy their sex lives. Eventually one brave couple banishes the goblin using the ancient magic of “Processing.”

The Craft Circle

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A group of queer teens accidentally summon a supernatural demon during their weekly craft meet. They must fight to destroy it and save the world, using their combined powers of macrame, feminist zine-making, glass-etching, vegan cosmetic manufacture and kale.

Rosemaries’ Baby

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Two lesbians, both called Rosemary, move to a new apartment next door to an eccentric old couple. The couple pressure the Rosemaries into having a baby, insisting this must be done via sex with a man. It turns out the couple are agents of a satanic cult called the Writers Guild of America. The couple force the Rosemaries to agree to fiendish terms in order to keep their baby, including: more affairs with men, dying their hair contrasting colours and only being allowed to kiss each other once a year while a demographic of affluent 16-24 year olds are watching.

I Still Know Who You Did Last Summer

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Direct-to-video sequel. Several people who you thought died last time didn’t. It’s revealed that really it was Genevieve who did Alex who did Dani who didn’t do Emily because she was pining for Leticia who did Fiona who almost did Janice but fell asleep at the crucial moment, which was kind of embarrassing. Everyone dies. Or do they..?

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Sally

Sally lives in the UK. Her work has been featured in a Korean magazine about queer people and their pets, and a book about haunted prisons. She never intended for any of this to happen.

Sally has written 81 articles for us.

47 Comments

  1. “Inconstantine”
    A straight woman sees Tilda Swinton in a suit and goes back and forth on whether she’s in love with her. Finally she decides that it was “just a phase” and she banishes Swinton back to lesbian…wherever.

  3. A U-Haul on Elm Street; alternate title: The Ring [self explanatory; targeted towards certain audiences only]

    Psych-Kea: you go to Ikea with a cute girl who also happens to be a therapist. She starts analyzing you by the type of furniture you would pick out for your future home. It’s not going well, but because it’s IKEA, you’re trapped and lost with little hope of getting out any time soon.

    • Be honest: did Psych-Kea happen to you in real life?

      Also, if it was a film, I feel like halfway through there would be a plot twist and it would turn out that you are the real therapist who has hypnotised the cute girl into thinking it’s her, when really she’s a tortured photographer from an unspecified urban locale, or a schoolteacher.

  5. World War Lez –
    The world is under threat from a virus that turns every female it infects into
    raging militant feminist lesbians who are intent on destroying the patriarchy by
    aggressively attacking discrimination, campaigning against violence against women,
    campaigning for equal rights, pay, and healthcare. The UN calls in some white man with
    a fashion scarf to seek out a cure to end this heinous plague and save humanity from
    this unholy tide of birkenstock wearing cat lovers who seek to destroy society as we know
    it. Can he mansplain them into submission?

  9. “Things come to a head at a Halloween party, where the room-mate’s costume backfires and she chokes to death on the feathers of a dollar-store Pocahontas headband. The trans woman lives happily ever after until her neighbourhood gets gentrified and she realises she’s living a recurring nightmare.:

    This is the best set of sentences I have ever read in my life.

    10/10, would watch all of them.

  12. Darn it I can’t think of a title, but imagine a film like “Sinister” where the lesbian couple move into a house where the previous queer owners died under mysterious circumstances. One day they find a box of old Super 8 films in the attic and on them are TV episodes where queer and trans women are mocked and made to do increasingly humiliating and ridiculous things. The couple flee the house and think they’re safe only to have Ryan Murphy jump out and troll them to death.

  14. I keep thinking of a House of Wax parody where queer women are haunted by patriarchal beauty standards but then I realised that’s just a thing that happens to every woman every day

  16. Oh c’mon, when will high waists get back into fashion? Not all of us have stomachs we like to expose!

  17. The Othered

    A Christian family moves to an old house in a conservative town to escape the terrors of religious persecution at the hands of newly-engaged same-sex couples. But as soon as they move in, bizarre and ominous happenings begin to haunt them. Rainbow-themed wedding invitations appear on the coffee table in the middle of the night. Doors slam, windows are found wide open, and dark-clad figures disappear into the shadows. Strains of Brandi Carlile fill the air, seemingly coming from nowhere. Then one night, they learn the awful truth: the queer entity disrupting their peaceful life is no stranger, but their own daughter… and she’s marrying another woman!

  19. Sally, thanks for the laughs…Especially liked Multi Tool
    Prequel…”Billy Jack – Knife”… A parody of a,1970’s American film set ‘somewhere in the Appalachians’ wherein our soft butch hero (Billy Jack – Knife) single handedly leads a fanatical group of radical dyke feminists to a secret woymns land commune in the hills of West Virginia.
    Horrors!! Young grrrls begin disappearing by the dozens…Let the recruitment begin…
    Or maybe this was a documentary.

  20. A writer uncovers a series of cold cases in which young women disappear in pairs under mysterious circumstances. After seeking the unauthorized medical services of a local veterinarian, they team up to find out what happened in… “The L Files”

  22. In a series of small towns across America, every time the straight white cis protagonists try to go to the bathroom, they are hauled out by masked vigilantes and forced to go in public, whilst everyone mocks them.

    Oh wait, wrong genre, that’s a superhero movie.

  25. This was fucking brilliant. I would watch every single one of these.
    I laughed so hard I woke the dog up.
    “the couple are agents of a satanic cult called the Writers Guild of America” is one of the many highlights

  26. I feel the intense need to point out that, while it is a novella rather than a film, “The Cage” by A.M. Dellamonica actually does feature “as many soft butches as stray werewolves”.

    It is also for free on the internet so… I’m just going to go reread it now.

  27. Does any body else’s inner pyromaniac get itchy when they see appropriated feather head-dresses? Be they a single feather on a headband or a full bonnet they’re just something you need see to fire over take like water over takes a stone.

  28. ‘A queer trans girl of colour gets a new roommate, who is a straight white cis hipster girl that appropriates literally every aspect of her style and culture’

    this post is actual genius

  32. When I saw the picture for Portland Chainsaw Massacre, I thought I was being served a days old ad for a brunch event that happened this past weekend.

  33. Brokedyke Mountain–they stayed together, they’re still together, running a dudette ranch in Montana. k.d.’s a regular guest.

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