“In my dreams, I’m beautiful and bad.”
– A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

“Put on your masks and watch.”
– Halloween III: Season of the Witch

“I hear the sound of your terror ticking like a clock.”
– The Exorcist III

“I’m here with you. Can’t that be enough for now?”
– Friday the 13th Part III

“If you talk about things, they happen.”
– Poltergeist III

“The past is not at rest.”
– Scream 3

***

I love horror threequels. And shouldn’t I, if I call myself a queer horror fan? The weirdos, the freaks, the misfits of their series, the threequel is the closeted gay cousin at Christmas, the one no one really knows how to slot into things, perhaps including themself.

I’m doing the thing I tend to do, projecting myself onto something abstract in order to understand myself more concretely.

Yes, I can relate to a threequel.

A threequel is the point in a horror franchise where things go off the rails. Threequels overwrite rules, add new mythology or even undermine the old one, replace characters, generally fuck shit up. By the time you get to a threequel, a formula has been established. The first movie writes the world, makes the rules. The second continues or heightens the story. Direct sequels are common in horror, picking up shortly after where the first left off. If you watch Halloween and Halloween II back-to-back, there’s barely time to breathe.

If you create a formula in the first, then perfect it in the second, well, in the third is when you fuck it up. The formula works, so now throw it away. Write a new one. Just because something technically works doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reinventing. Many threequels are considered the worst installment of a franchise’s original trilogy. I count myself among the few fans of Scream 3, and still, knife to throat, I’m going to concede the first two are better, they just are.

But there’s something intoxicating about Scream 3’s weirdness, its willingness to push its meta framework to the most absurd limits, to go gleefully off the rails. The more recent Scream films attempt and ultimately fail to run wild. For all their big kills, they’re still playing it too safe. Threequels never play it safe. I used to, until I didn’t.

***

In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the teen descendants of Freddy Krueger’s original murderers are haunted by the monster their parents unknowingly immortalized the night they decided to kill him for his crimes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is easily the gayest film in the Nightmare franchise, dripping with homoerotic horror, oozing an allegory for repressed (queer) sexual desire. But A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is queer in the threequel sense, in its refusal to follow the rules. It takes place six years after the first and sees the return of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy, a still traumatized but at least now medicated young adult, her alcoholic mother dead and her father taking up the alcoholic mantle. Dream Warriors is more connected to the first film than Freddy’s Revenge, but it still rewrites the rules. Here, the teens don’t just dream of the same monster. They can have the same dreams. Patricia Arquette’s Kristen can pull the others into her dream so that they all share dreamspace together, a collective world where they collectively fight to undo the trauma they’ve inherited.

The Nightmare films are some of the scariest of the popular slasher franchises, but they’re also occasionally very silly, and that’s true of Dream Warriors, which includes a sequence where the shapeshifting Freddy —disguised as a hot nurse —seduces Joey and then enlarges his tongue in Joey’s throat before spitting out a series of detachable tongues that bind him to the bed. Tongue bondage. Very silly (not to mention, homoerotic).

This is just like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, I might have said, when trying to pull others into my (day)dreams.

I daydreamed obsessively for a very long time. Maybe I daydreamed a normal amount. I wouldn’t know because I rarely talk about it, these daydreams. Maybe what I’m calling daydreams are just regular thoughts, interiority, but I don’t think so.

I constructed an entire alternate version of myself for these daydreams, a character really. Her name was Carmen, because I began to build out this daydream world when I was a couple months shy of my ninth birthday and had just seen the movie Spy Kids, in which the preteen protagonist is named Carmen. This is already sounding silly which I guess is why I didn’t really talk about it.

I tried out loud only once. At a sleepover at my house, my best friend Kelsey asked me to tell her a secret. She did it as an excuse to tell a secret of her own, which she did, which was that she’d made out with a particular boy on school grounds. I had only a vague understanding of what constituted making out and how it differed from just kissing, but as I often did with her, I pretended. A year before, I pretended to know why when she told me maybe I should stop spelling “come” like “cum” over AIM. I was too scared to Google it.

The thing is, I was itching to tell this secret, to let someone into my daydream world, the world of Carmen, who I imagined storylines for in a never-ending novel of sorts — or, more like a set of serialized fanfiction. The world was populated not with characters I made up but with existing ones, pulled from all my favorite shows, movies, and books. Don’t make me list them; this already feels unbearably vulnerable. It’s one thing to recap a dream for someone, another entirely to let you actually see the ugly, strange, naked mess of it.

I tried to tell Kelsey about this daydream world, but it wasn’t cuming out right. She asked if I was talking about playing pretend, asked it in a way that implied we were too old to still be doing that, even though she had vague ambitions of becoming a model-actor-dancer, which surely involved some level of pretending. She said her mind wandered sometimes, too.

No, no, no, no, she wasn’t getting it.

My mind wasn’t wandering when I daydreamed. My thoughts felt sharp when I slipped away, my mental focus like a single light beam from a flashlight. All my desires, everything I wanted to be or do, I could do in these daydreams, and it almost felt realer than real life. I could rewrite the rules over and over. In real life, I obsessed over following the rules given to me, to the extent I had a reputation as a good girl, a nerd. It was already causing a rift in my relationship with Kelsey, who by comparison was more attracted to risk and rule-breaking.

I tried to tell Kelsey about this daydream world, but the part I couldn’t quite articulate without using a million mixed metaphors and euphemisms was that “Carmen” was me but a better version of me, a more experienced version, too. As in Carmen had sex. I, a person who didn’t understand the connotation of cum or even what really constituted making out, was trying to explain how my daydreams doubled as sexual fantasies. After my failed attempt to come out as Carmen, this idealized but also slanted version of myself who was somehow a witch and a spy and a dancer, a hero and a slut, I never tried to tell anyone again.

If Kelsey didn’t get it, no one would.

In my dreams, I’m beautiful and bad.

***

In Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a group of witches —though they’re never actually called that in the film, despite the title, perhaps because they’re mostly men and that goes against dominant cultural assumptions —plan a mass murder on Halloween rooted in an ancient Celtic ritual. The ritual hinges on children’s Halloween masks and a hypnotizing television program masked as a horrorthon.

There is no final girl in Halloween III. Laurie Strode is exchanged for a doctor slash alcoholic deadbeat dad played by Tom Atkins and his much younger love interest, the daughter of a dead man. It’s unclear if we’re meant to root for this bad dad who uncovers the mask conspiracy. But perhaps not all horror films need heroes.

Nobody wanted Halloween III. Or, rather, no one wanted the Halloween III they got. Despite the success of Halloween and its direct sequel Halloween II, original franchise collaborators John Carpenter and Debra Hill were done with Michael Meyers. They were only keen on making another film if it shifted focus away from him in a new direction. Well, the final result —which changed writer and director hands a couple times —doesn’t just veer left; it’s a complete departure. It’s not even the same subgenre of horror, slasher slashed in favor of a supernatural thriller. Of all the threequels I write about here, it’s the most freakish compared to its franchise siblings.

Carpenter and Hill wanted a Halloween anthology series, a set of disconnected films all taking place leading up to and on Halloween night. But audiences wanted what they knew already. They wanted Michael Meyers, even if it stretched credulity to see the same masked killer shot, stabbed, lifeless, resurrected over and over. People wanted something that was the same or close enough, even if it didn’t make sense, even if it limited the imagination rather than letting it run wild.

I have a soft spot for Halloween III for this reason, the movie no one wanted. It isn’t particularly good, I can concede that, but as far as my gay cousin analogy goes, it’s the finest example.

This is just like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, I might have said, when I wore masks that seemed harmless but in reality were a danger, something that could destroy if worn too long.

Gay cousin is just a nice way of saying family freak.

When I came out, one of my aunts said she wasn’t necessarily surprised but also that she hadn’t been certain I was queer or just…

Or just what?

Different, she said. Nerdy, she said. Interesting euphemisms for queer. The point was, I think, that I was a little strange, a little difficult to slot in.

I tried on various masks not just to hide but to explain, explain the ways in which I felt I was failing. I didn’t date, didn’t seem to have much luck with boys. I claimed I was cursed, not by witches but by something planetary. (“In the end, we don’t decide these things, you know, the planets do,” the main villain of Halloween III says.) I called it my love curse, told others I was destined to only fall for guys who were unavailable, who already had girlfriends or who were gay. Ah, the irony.

Put on your masks and watch.

***

The Exorcist III is known for one scene in particular, a sequence so stunning and terrifying it’s often listed as a scariest movie moment and indeed stuns even more than some of the iconic scenes in the original. The film is full of long monologues and long shots, this particular long shot of a nurse going about her tasks during a night shift. It’s so long; it’s so quiet. It lulls you into a sense of calm while also placing you on edge, because you know something is coming, but what?

Like Halloween III, the Exorcist threequel diverges from the franchise’s first film and its sequel, though not quite as drastically. While it overwrites the events of the second film, the story of Regan MacNeil hangs over The Exorcist III, which trades its possessed little girl and her tormented single mother for a doubly possessed man and a Lieutenant. It is, perhaps, a film about friendship between men. It is, without a doubt, a film about deep possession.

This is just like The Exorcist III, I might have said, when I was possessed by the thoughts and dreams of others.

When I was the most determined to play the role of Heterosexual Woman, to wear my ticking clock of a mask, the performance more closely resembled that of a Heterosexual Man. I liked blowjobs and sex without condoms and winning at beer pong. (Like these horror films, I am relying on, reinforcing stereotypes.)

Or, at least, I wanted people (men) to think I liked these things. I liked that people thought that I liked (heterosexual) sex and talking about it. I was fine with people thinking of me as a perversely sexual being but a perversion generally accepted and even applauded by society —the perversion of a heterosexual man, the only type of demon allowed to have a high sex drive. On tumblr, which had become like another version of my daydream world, this performance was rooted in the same overall impulse but different: I actually did lust over actresses and female characters. It was easy on tumblr to be extremely horny for women and still claim heterosexuality; just ask any of the friends I met on there who eventually, like me, came out. This horny posting still mimicked the way I thought men thought and talked, something I wanted access to, like I was begging for possession.

It’s difficult to know now which desires from then were my own and which I performed for others.

The magic of The Exorcist III is in its ability to transfix and terrify without ever showing you any of its most gruesome details. Characters describe the horrific things they see —the crucified body of a young boy, decapitation, severed fingers, stab wounds, and a body drained of all its blood —instead of the camera actually showing us.

Yes, sometimes it is better to tell than to show.

One of the twists at the core of The Exorcist III is that the possessed character known initially as Patient X is Father Damien Karras, from the first film. More significantly, he’s the former best friend of the threequel’s protagonist, William F. Kinderman. For a very long time, Kinderman thought Karras was dead.

“He was my best friend,” Kinderman says. “I loved him.”

I tell this story a lot, because it’s an easy story to tell when I package it up neatly, like a formula: When I came out as queer, I also came out as a horror fan, emerging from two conjoined closets.

Kayla’s a scaredy cat was something said in my family often. My sister liked to hide and scare me on purpose. I only liked scary stories when I was the one telling them, reading to that same jumpscare-happy sister and our cousin from the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark books.

In kindergarten, I saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, not a horror film by anyone’s classification other than my own. I have a false memory about how the movie ends, was convinced E.T. killed Elliot and everyone in a bloody mass murder. Here is what I’m pretty sure happened: I was indeed scared by something in the movie, and then I had a nightmare that looked like this gory alternate ending. My lingering fear of the film became a recurring joke in my family. Everyone still loves to tell the story of the time I came home from first grade in tears and fearfully explained we had been learning to spell words like pet, get, and set. The teacher kept saying ET!!!!!!!!!!

Needless to say, I didn’t love scary movies. I could barely handle the ones that were only scary in my mind. I avoided horror religiously. In fact, sometimes I used religion as my excuse, telling girls at sleepovers I wasn’t allowed to watch a certain scary movie everyone else was eager to squeal at because of my parents’ rules. That somehow felt less embarrassing than confessing I was simply too scared.

I was a fearful child. I was also a child fascinated by fear. From fifth grade to seventh, I pretended to be afraid of slugs because my best friend Kelsey was afraid of slugs. When she screamed at the sight of one, I did, too. In truth, I didn’t feel any type of way about slugs. In truth, I didn’t need to fake a fear, because I was already scared of so many others things. Large dogs. Snipers (growing up in Virginia in the early 2000s will do that to a child). Fireworks. Tornadoes, storms, clouds that moved too fast or were too big or too oddly shaped. Eventually, I packaged this fear up neatly and told people I was simply scared of the sky, a line I have delivered well into adulthood.

I’m only recently coming around on the sky.

Why the false slug fear then, if I already had enough fears to contend with? I thought it further tethered me to Kelsey, gave us a reason to scream together. I liked that. A shared fear is its own form of intimacy.

I haven’t changed Kelsey’s name throughout this essay, because I am certain she won’t read it. I’ve tried looking for traces of her through the years, but she isn’t really on social media, so the intel is scant. I know she’s alive, living her life somewhere with a child, not far from where we grew up. We fell out of each other’s lives so sharply, not just a veer to the left but a complete departure. I added her mother on Facebook a couple years ago, daydreamed a whole scenario where I asked her about Kelsey, about telling her what those years of my life meant to me, years when I felt close to her mother, too, the two of them and Kelsey’s younger brother suddenly reduced from a family of four to three when Kelsey’s father dropped dead of a heart attack. I never sent the message. It felt like I was after something impossible to actually grasp.

It is strange to be best friends with someone, to love them, and then to lose them, especially for boring, difficult to explain reasons. There was no fight, no one reason. It wasn’t life or death, even if it briefly felt like it.

So how can I compare us to Kinderman and Karras? Except that, before I lost her, I did feel as if something possessed Kelsey. (K names have a plot significance in The Exorcist III, by the way.) But who was I to judge? I was possessed, too.

Sixth grade was when things began shattering between us. I met another Kelsey. And then a Katie and a Katelyn. We called ourselves K to the fourth, not adding to but exponentiating each other. I suppose it makes sense The Exorcist III —in which all the murder victims have K names —is so alluring and terrifying to me.

The other members of K to the fourth could handle horror. I wanted to be like them, able to watch something terrifying and then hold each other and scream together. Yes, that part sounded quite interesting to me.

I guess screaming at slugs was the closest I could get. Even when Kelsey and I started spending less and less time together, we were tethered by fear. It didn’t matter that mine wasn’t actually mine but hers. A self-inflicted possession.

I started college thinking I was straight, and I started college having never seen a horror film. Not a single one. Not even the “funny” ones. The jokes didn’t outweigh the potential of fear, and I couldn’t trust myself to be afraid, not in the dark next to so many other bodies, not in the only place I loved more than the confines of my obsessive daydreams, where I still spent much of my waking life.

The daydreaming stopped when I came out. It was no longer useful to me. I used tumblr less, too.

And when I came out, something began. My authentic life, yes, sure, but also my love for horror. It was like a veil had been lifted. Everything I’d feared before became rapturously desirable, whether that was making out with girls or a horror movie marathon.

What do you feel when watching horror that actually frightens you? Tingling skin? A swirling gut? Fluttering heart? A pit in your stomach? For me, it’s not uncommon to experience a rush not unlike arousal.

What I mean to say is.

When I watch horror, I feel it in my cunt.

I hear the sound of your terror ticking like a clock.

***

People make horrible decisions in horror films, but they really make horrible decisions in threequels. Logic leaks out of the characters until none is left.

Friday the 13th Part III actually is a direct sequel to the franchise’s second film, but it still fucks with the formula, introducing a new set of characters along with Jason’s iconic hockey mask for the first time. It fucks with form, too. It was released in 3D, certain sequences —including one of two characters juggling fruit —clearly shot for the gimmick alone. Now, experience the horrors of Friday the 13th as if it’s coming for you directly.

In Friday the 13th Part III, new protagonist Chris returns to her family’s home in a remote area near Camp Crystal Lake. It’s an ill-advised homecoming, especially since rumors of random killing and even cannibalism reverberate throughout the tiny town. Later in the film, Chris reveals to her boyfriend Rick who she has recently reconnected with that she came back to prove something to herself, to prove she’s stronger than she thinks she is. She doesn’t say it, but she also is seemingly there to remember.

In the other Friday the 13th films, characters aren’t looking for danger. For sex and games and unbridled, youthful shenanigans, sure, but they aren’t looking for the real kind of trouble, just the fun kind. The counselors at the original Camp Crystal Lake thought they were just signing up for a chill summer job. The camp counselors in the sequel are all assured Jason and his mother are long dead, Camp Crystal Lake condemned. But in Friday the 13th Part III, Chris is running toward danger. Years before, after she lost her virginity to Rick, she came home to angry, worried parents and a mother who slapped her. So she ran into the woods to punish them. But while alone in the night, she was attacked by who we know to be Jason. Her memories are hazy. She says she came home to prove something to herself, but I think she came home to find him, the monster who still haunts her. It is definitely a horrible decision, the kind horror hinges on. By doing so, she puts not only herself at risk but everyone she cares about, too.

This is just like Friday the 13th Part III, I might have said, when I chose to make my wounds deeper instead of letting them heal.

I made all my worst decisions when I was closeted. Mean, selfish, destructive decisions. I was soft and sensitive on the inside but outwardly hard. I liked arguing with people, could talk a person to death if I thought they were wrong. I feared a lot of things, but confrontation wasn’t one of them. I hated hugs or excessive affection. My best guy friend in college, who would become one of the first people I came out to, got a mini cactus for his dorm room and named it Lil Kayla, “because if you hug her, you’ll be sorry.”

At the end of my sophomore year, I made a friend at the college newspaper where we both worked. I’ll call her Chris, actually, not because the Chris of Friday the 13th Part III reminds me of her but because her real name does feel energetically close to Chris, and I’ve got a thing about names. I’ve written a version of this story before, but it wasn’t the threequel version. I edited all the worst parts out.

Chris had a boyfriend, a serious boyfriend, both in that their relationship seemed very adult and because he was a very self-serious guy, laughably so now that I think back on it. They had bonded over their shared love of grammar. Chris’ boyfriend was older, had already graduated, lived in a different state entirely. It was easy to forget about him. For me, at least. But I think for her, too.

I spent the summer after my sophomore year living in the city where Chris grew up. Her boyfriend lived there, too, with his best friend, another guy who worked at the paper. Chris’ boyfriend’s best friend and I became briefly entangled, which basically amounted to occasionally making out and playing tennis. He liked me more than I liked him, mainly because I liked Chris, even if I was lying to myself about it to hide my true desires. He invited me to the Hamptons one weekend, and I went, and it wasn’t a horrible decision, but it wasn’t a great one either. When he tried to initiate sex, I said no, he asked why, and I said I just didn’t want to, and he cried. He asked if I was a virgin. I said no. I wasn’t lying, but I thought I was, because at the time, I’d only ever had sex with women, and I thought that didn’t count. Those feral and frantic hookups with women were always a secret, always something I explained away as not entirely real, like it’d happened only in a daydream.

By the time junior year came around, Chris and I were obsessed with each other. We didn’t hide it. We just threw a mask on it, called it friendship. We went out of our way to spend more and more time together. She was in a sorority, so outside our shared lives in the newsroom, our social circles didn’t overlap much. People joked about us dating. Sometimes, when Chris was drunk, she told me she had a secret, but then refused to tell it.

I didn’t know what to do about this Chris situation. I’d tried getting with her boyfriend’s best friend as some sort of solution. It hadn’t worked. I didn’t want to have sex with him, and then we couldn’t even be friends anymore because he lied and told everyone we had. So I tried something else. Around the same time I became friends with Chris, I became friends with one of her close friends, another guy who worked with us. I’ll call him Rick, why not.

Rick had a girlfriend. At the time, I was still convinced I was the victim of a curse that only made me interested in guys with girlfriends. It was a creative way of transfiguring lesbianism into something else.

I didn’t know what to do about this Chris situation. Nothing had happened; nothing could happen. I have a memory of practically straddling her at a party, but it’s hazy. I wonder how she remembers it.

Suddenly, Rick was single. And then I slept with Rick. In my distorted mind, I thought I was losing my virginity, because I thought it only counted as real now that it was with a man. I didn’t tell Rick this though. I wanted him to think I was experienced, nubile. I was trying on a new mask, one I’d wear for quite a while longer.

Chris was very upset when I told her what happened with Rick. We fought. We fought with an intensity that confused me. She told me I’d changed everything, said we’d been a trio and now I’d ruined it. I was already going off the rails. Chris deleted all of our texts. When she told me she did this at brunch, I wanted to run away.

I kept sleeping with Rick. Even after the initial fights, after the deleted texts. My gay friend Andrew jokingly asked Chris and I if we were breaking up one of these nights when we were fighting about it. I thought Andrew was being ridiculous. But when I play the scene back in my mind, there we were, Chris and I, standing apart from everyone at the party, my hand grasping her shoulder, like I was holding her in place while she swayed from alcohol and anger.

Sleeping with Rick was a horrible decision. Perhaps not one that prompted horror movie consequences, but a horrible decision nonetheless. One that hurt us all: me, Rick, Chris.

Years later, five to be exact, Chris wanted me to explain. We found ourselves in the same city again. I was in the middle of a bad breakup. She wanted to know why I’d done it, why I’d fucked Rick if I was really gay. I could sense the hurt in her voice, the accusation, too. She was mad at me, still, years later. She felt tricked. You had a boyfriend, I wanted to say. You were wearing a mask, too.

I tried to explain, but the words, again, weren’t coming out right. It should have been simple to just say it: I fucked him because I couldn’t fuck you. But the words tumbled out of me clumsily, like I was stabbing at something wildly when really I just needed to aim for the heart.

Months passed. My breakup finally finalized. Chris and I went our separate ways, and then we reconnected again, for just one night in the city where I grew up. She still wanted answers about Rick. I had none to give.

We went to one of the country’s longest running dyke bars. We talked. We danced. She wanted something other than answers from me: assurance that if we did anything, it would be real. I imagine she didn’t trust me, thought I might betray her, hurt her. She’d known me at my worst, at my most selfish. I assured her it would be real. I assured her it didn’t have to mean anything beyond the confines of the night.

So, it happened. We slept together. Finally. It felt like a beginning and an ending, a release and a repression. It needed to happen, even if it wasn’t rom-com perfection. It wasn’t a horror movie either. It only happened the one time. I’ve barely spoken to her since, another friendship snuffed out. We’d shared a fear too, this one more real than the slugs.

She may have wanted to rehash the past, but that night, it was like we were reintroducing ourselves to each other, and I wanted to wipe the past clean. The masks were off, couldn’t we leave it that way?

I’m here with you. Can’t that be enough for now?

***

In Poltergeist III, Carol Anne is rather inexplicably sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago. Or, I guess, the subtextual explanation is that she and her trauma were too much for her parents to contend with. Or a more generous reading is that they thought she’d be better off the farther away she was from what had haunted her before.

But trouble follows Carol Anne wherever she goes.

It’s not difficult to read queerness onto Carol Anne. She’s reminded, often, that she’s different from the other kids around her, that she doesn’t slot easily into her new family structure, which includes an older step-cousin. She attends a school for the gifted (different, nerdy), where a child psychologist is supposedly helping her heal, chocking up her experiences of the supernatural to a form of group hypnosis (doubtful adults in Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors similarly attribute the paranormal effects of trauma on group psychosis). He punishes Carol Anne for being haunted.

Mirrors play a significant role in the visual horror of Poltergeist III. Reflections depart from their real life counterparts. Mirrors distort, transport. None of the rules of reflection apply.

There aren’t necessarily rules for coming out, but I still found a way to break them.

I gave the regular formula for coming out the old college try. It was my senior year of college, and I’d already slept with women, but I’d convinced myself that was more fluke than sign. I was better with guys, which is to say, I was more outside of my body, giving the performance I thought others wanted to see. I wore my masks. I erected my daydreams. I was in great need of an exorcism.

I was back in my parents’ home during a college break when I tried telling someone I was gay for the first time, my friend Raine, the only person I’d meaningfully kept in touch with from high school. It felt a lot like the time I told Kelsey about the daydreams. It was in the same room, Raine on the same trundle bed Kelsey had been on. It went just alright, no fault of Raine’s but my own. I still wasn’t good at finding the right words.

To my dismay, it wasn’t like breaking a seal. I struggled to tell anyone back at school the truth. I had to get very, very drunk to do it. Even for my college best friend Emily, my roommate of two years, whose bed I still crawled into sometimes even though we had separate rooms in the same rundown house because I felt like I slept best with my body pressed against hers. I had to drink two bottles of fucking Andre before I could tell her, and even then, all I could manage was “I was dating a girl at one point.” All that prologue for a vague confession.

I came out to a few other friends one-on-one. I didn’t use labels. I kept it vague. I was still trying to figure out the words. Things got complicated when I got a boyfriend. Well, they actually got easier, depending on how you look at it. Once again, I was able to pretend that everything that had happened before was a fluke. I could put the mask back on, let the possession in.

He had another K name, if you can believe. We were fresh off of breakups, me with a woman who I was never actually dating, him with his long-term long-distance girlfriend. A fresh start, just like Carol Anne’s. The intimacy was built in; we were already good friends. It helped that he drank too much and I was so good at pretending.

When I came out for real, it was in front of a literal audience. I wrote it into a standup comedy set I performed in the basement of my rundown college house. Again, I fear I’m sounding silly. But the pre-coming out anxiety I got every time I sat a friend down to tell them didn’t seem worth all the trouble. A performance I could do. I never got stage fright, not even in my theater kid days. The words, finally, flowed out of me. Talking about my queerness before that show made me feel at odds with my own reflection, fractured, like I was watching someone else talk for me. I had trouble saying it out loud, until I had the protection of a literal script, one I’d written for myself.

I’ve written this story about the standup show before, but I left out the part where I had a boyfriend at the time. In my standup set, I didn’t come out as bisexual or queer; I came out as gay, as a lesbian, used the word homosexual even. My boyfriend was in the audience. We hadn’t talked about any of this before. After the show, there was an after party, and then he and I went to bed together. I’d changed everything, and yet nothing changed. We stayed together, and when we did break up the first time, it wasn’t because I was a lesbian but because he was moving back to Texas. We got back together. I even lived with him for three weeks in Texas on my way to live in Los Angeles, where we did break up again —maybe, finally, because I was a lesbian, but that wasn’t the reason he gave at the time.

Yes, he broke up with me.

Coming out as a lesbian with a boyfriend certainly fucked with the formula. I still don’t know how to explain it fully. Something about mutually destructive horrible decisions. Something about not being able to take off a mask. Something about becoming my own poltergeist, making my life unnecessarily complicated and fraught.

If you talk about things, they happen.

***

I have a soft spot for Scream 3 because of its use of doppelgängers. I love doppelgänger horror for the same reason I love cannibalism horror: Both conceits feel distinctly queer.

In Scream 3, familiar characters return: Sidney, Gale, Dewey. But they’re also joined by characters who are actors playing versions of them in Stab, the in-universe horror franchise inspired by the events of the film. Parker Posey gives a scene-stealing performance as an actor playing a version of Gale Weathers. In Scream 3, Ghostface kills people off using the script for Stab 3.

The characters come into contact with their Hollywoodified counterparts, body doubles who are beautiful and bad. It’s perplexing, especially for Gale, who hates the idea of someone else pretending to be her. It’s perplexing, too, that the killer has given everyone a roadmap for his kills, an actual script. They keep trying to break free of the script they’ve been given, but it’s hard. It’s hard to break rules.

This is just like Scream 3, I might have said, when I felt forced to follow a script I hadn’t written for myself.

It was hard, and there were many false starts, many regressions back to what was known and comfortable, the formula, but I broke free of the script eventually.

There are so many people I write about in this essay who I don’t talk to anymore. They knew a different version of me —not better or worse, just different, my doppelgängers. There are so many stories in here I’ve technically written before but with softer edges, tighter punchlines. I was afraid of seeming off the rails.

I’m still leaving so much out.

Maybe that’s what a reboot is for.

The past is not at rest.

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Author’s Note: Originally, this piece was just supposed to be an introduction to this year’s iteration of HORROR IS SO GAY, with teasers for what’s to come. Ever since I started the series three years ago, I’ve always written a breezy little intro post. Instead, this year I wrote a 6,000+ word personal essay. I guess you could indeed call it a threequel plot twist; I certainly didn’t plan this, but here we are! But I wanted to take a moment to say you’re in for a treat (and, of course, some tricks) this year, because we have more pieces than ever before running as part of this annual series, from some writers you already know and love and from some making their Autostraddle debut. Check back all month long for the hottest horror takes from a crew of brilliant queer and trans writers. Drew Burnett Gregory and I will once again be teaming up for some collaborative projects, too, including an update on our Scariest Queer Movie Moments list and a brand new list that had us logging nearly 100 hours of horror movie viewing. You don’t want to miss it! 👀 And be sure to revisit Horror Is So Gay pieces from past years, too!