If you talked to me ten years ago, there are two things I never thought I’d say. First, I never expected my longest relationship to be a sapphic one. As far I was concerned, I was only attracted to men. Luckily I saw the light! The spirits of Leslie Feinberg and Audre Lorde slapped enough sense into me to make a pansexual. Secondly, I never thought a horror movie would be the key to healing from my first lesbian breakup, but Love Lies Bleeding got your girl together.

Around the age of five or six, my older brother showed me the original It starring Tim Curry, and ever since then, I have been scarred. I swore off horror films. I was raised Baptist and believed all horror films were devil’s worship. As a preteen, I got adventurous, and I began to open myself up to horror films again. I also had a lot of friends who called me a wimp. I took those as fighting words! I rolled up my sleeves, asked my mom for popcorn money, and went around the corner to the theater. I saw Paranormal Activity, Prom Night, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the cult classic, Jennifer’s Body. Did I end up having terrible nightmares and waking up in the middle of night in a cold sweat? You already know. Was I better for it? Absolutely. As a teenager, we moved outside the city, so horror movies made life in St. Louis’ suburbia a bit more thrilling.

Since my teenage years, horror has slowly become a genre I have built up a stronger stomach for. Earlier this year, I was mourning the end of my first long-term relationship, but rewatching The L Word and She-Ra just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I love both of those shows more than most, but I needed something new. I needed something exciting. I needed something gritty. Maybe a lil bloody too. Like clockwork, a sponsored ad for Love Lies Bleeding appeared on my Instagram feed. Shoutout to Meta for being able to read my mind. This new film from A24 and director Rose Glass soon took over my entire social media feed, so I took my broken-hearted behind to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and got my life.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when watching Love Lies Bleeding, and that might be why I walked out of the theater feeling so healed. It shocked my system. It shocked a few other systems in the audience too. Within the first half hour, I watched several people rush out of the theater shielding their eyes. Yikes. For me, the blood and the gore were not the most chilling pieces of the film. At the film’s core, it is more than horror. It is a queer reimagining of the classic “guy saves the girl.” Beyond the film’s sapphic nature, two-time BAFTA nominee Glass queers the storytelling by twisting what it means to be a hero. I was most moved by the resilience of Lou, played by Kristen Stewart, in her pursuit to protect her darling Jackie (Katy O’Brien). Lou gave Jackie the steroids that turned her into a raging beast of a woman with little to no impulse control. Even after Jackie tried to kill her, Lou still loved her. Maybe it’s the toxic Gemini in me, but I was so moved by how tragically fucked this saga became throughout the film’s duration.

Supernatural tropes like a woman growing larger than life and the classic feminist themes of seeking out revenge on abusive men could easily veer into corny territory. But Glass navigates these unconventional waters with ease. She found a sublime balance between melodrama and camp while throwing in fantastical elements that flowed effortlessly into the narrative. I was just happy to be along for the ride.

I went back to see Love Lies Bleeding two more times while it was in theaters. I even took my college best friend with me. We laughed, we cried, and we screamed at the top of our lungs. I think that’s the point of horror as a genre. Film as a whole is meant to entertain and transport the audience into a world otherwise unknown, but horror is meant to do even more. Horror takes you outside of yourself. During the cold, wet months of the year when New York City cannot decide if it wants to be winter or spring, I must have shed more tears than rain fell from the sky. A breakup can leave a person questioning so many parts of themself, and I was fully in the throes of that internal discourse. Love Lies Bleeding shook me to my core and shook me out of it. Just like Lou at the beginning of the story, I had resigned myself to believing that actual love would not come again. By the end, like Lou and Jackie riding dirty through the dusty West Coast, I was looking forward to life’s next journey.

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