A Nightmare on Elm Street + A Queer Horror Q&A

Thursday 26th October from 6pm

Tickets can only be purchased through the Cameo (Picture House) website:

https://www.picturehouses.com/movie-details/000/HO00013636/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-a-queer-horror-q-a

Join Kirsty Logan, Rebecca Wojturska and Lighthouse Bookshop at the Cameo Cinema for a Halloween celebration of all things queer and all things horror with a screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Join us, if you dare...

In Wes Craven's 80's classic, a group of teenagers' dreams are haunted by the terrifying Freddie Krueger, who murders them in reality. They must fight to stay awake while uncovering the truth about Freddie Krueger and their neighbourhood. The film will be followed by a Q&A exploring queerness in the horror film genre.

The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. This is the subject of essay anthology It Came From the Closet: Queer reflections on horror. Published by Saraband and with a foreword by Kirsty Logan, twenty-six queer and trans writers discuss the horror films that shaped them, from Jaws to Jennifer's Body, Nightmare on Elm Street to Hereditary.

Copies of It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on horror will be available to purchase on the night.

Speakers:

Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. Forthcoming is The Unfamiliar (Virago, 2023), a memoir of queer pregnancy and parenthood. She is also the author of two previous novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

Rebecca Wojturska (she/her) is the Managing Director of Haunt Publishing, a small indie press dedicated to highlighting marginalised authors in the Gothic, horror and dark fiction genres. She has worked in publishing for over ten years, and is also the Open Access Publishing Officer at the University of Edinburgh. She is responsible for managing Edinburgh Diamond: an open access hosting service which offers support and guidance to staff and students who wish to publish diamond open access books and journals. In her spare time she loves nothing more than reading Gothic literature, watching horror films and crushing her enemies at board games.