We're kicking off a new film screening and discussion series at Le Mondo. Hosted by OMEN and inspired by the collection of essays, It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror , the series focuses on horror movies through a queer lens. From October until March 2024, we'll be screening and discussing a new film and companion essay on the 13th of every month.
Join us for drinks, a film screening, and an informal post-screening discussion after.
This October 13th, our first boovie pairing is Jennifer's Body (2009, dir. Karyn Kusama) with Both Ways by Carmen Maria Machado. This month features special guest artist, Joe Vallese, the editor of It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror!
Le Mondo | 406 N Howard, Baltimore
When: Friday, October 13th
Doors/Bar: 7PM | Event: 7:30PM
Free**
NOTE: This Boovie (boo! movies! boobies?) series is focused on queer, trans, and female voices in discussions around horror. If you aren't in those categories - you are welcome to come out, but step back because you ain't getting center stage. ;)
Want in on the reading action?
Now until December 31, you can purchase a copy of It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror for 20% off from our friends at Feminist Press!
Sign up on the OMEN email list for event updates and to grab the discount code!
After 12/31, you can always purchase locally from our buds at Red Emmas or Greedy Reads.
ABOUT YOUR HOSTS, OMEN
OMEN is an informal, Baltimore-based horror movie club for women, trans, and gender-nonconforming folx. In watching and discussing horror from a variety of times and places, we explore our fears and passions through the genre, pulling our own experiences and self-identities out of the masturbatory loop of cismale-centered creation and critique. You can find us on the IG. (Sometimes we even update it!)
ABOUT GUEST ARTIST,
JOE VALLESE
Joe Vallese is the editor of It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. He is also the coeditor of the anthology What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey. His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb, VICE, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, North American Review, Narrative Northeast, VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana, among others. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable in Best American Essays for his essay “Blood, Brothers.” He is currently clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and previously served as site director and faculty for the Bard Prison Initiative. Joe holds an MFA New York University, and MAT and BA degrees from Bard College.
JENNIFER'S BODY (2009)
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Written by Diablo Cody
A wry horror-comedy about female friendship, Jennifer's Body centers around two midwestern teenage girls, Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (played by Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), as they navigate their changing and increasingly toxic relationship, high school, and one of them becoming a demon-possessed monster who feasts on the flesh of their male classmates. This movie was critically panned and largely dismissed by audiences upon its release in 2009. (Thanks in no small part to a horrendous aughts-era marketing campaign geared toward teen boys that focused almost exclusively on schoolgirl porn-ifying actor Megan Fox.) Fourteen years later, Jennifer's Body has rightfully been rediscovered and reevaluated over the years. The film is now a favorite of many LGBTQ+ genre film-lovers and has become a bona-fide cult "forgotten feminist classic."
BOTH WAYS
Written by Carmen Maria Machado
We've been big stans of Machado ever since Her Body and Other Parties in 2017. In Both Ways, Machado reflects on the film's reception both then and now, alongside her own experiences as a young queer person during these eras, and posits Jennifer's Body as a "fucking classic" and uniquely bisexual film, inherently resistant to heteronormative frameworks.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
THE BOOVIE SCHEDULE
October 13
Guest Artist: Joe Vallese November 13
Guest Artist: Carrow Narby December 13
Candyman (1992) with Sumiko Saulson's "Centered and Seen" January 13 Pet Sematary (1989) with Zefyr Lisowski's "The Girl, The Ring, The Well"
Guest Artist: Zefyr Lisowski
Guest Artist: Addie Tsai
March 13
Sleepaway Camp (1983) with Viet Dinh's "Notes on Sleepaway Camp"
Guest Artist: Viet Dinh
MORE ON: IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET
Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.
Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.
It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror. Some words of praise below!
“A brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking. This is full of surprises.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A critical text on the intersections of film, queer studies, and pop culture.”
—Booklist, starred review
“In this wonderful and only somewhat disturbing book (the subject is horror, after all), queer and trans writers explore the horror films that have shaped them and most reflected their own experiences. Horror, the anthology argues, while often full of misogyny and anti-trans, homophobic tropes, is also uniquely subversive and queer.”
—Shondaland
“Killers, monsters, and demons are frequently metaphors for what we don’t understand about our own humanity; they’re an attempt to externalize the “monstrousness” so many of us suppress within ourselves — or that others project onto unchangeable aspects of who we are… I finished [the anthology] with a new appreciation for the horror genre.”
—Autostraddle
"Finally: a smart and serious yet playful book that interrogates the complex queerness of horror and the films that make a horror of queerness. These clear, insightful, and deeply personal essays reveal the real reasons why we've all been so scared."
—Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
"It Came From The Closet reminded me why I fell in love with horror. Each essay connects queerness with the fear, connection, and blur of horror movies. Writers question whether horror is meant to punish those deemed sinful or create a new pathway of being. As Legacy Russell discusses in Glitch Feminism, what cannot be defined can contain power, and horror movies have allowed queer people to see themselves in blobs, the unseen Blair Witch, and mysterious monsters. Covering class, race, and ability, this collection carefully untangles the threads of why we can’t look away, even when we desperately want to turn off the TV."
—Nikita Imafidon, Raven Book Store
Sponsored by Free Fall Baltimore
** This month's IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET film screening is free, thanks to the generous support of Free Fall Baltimore, a grant initiative of Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA)