Every October, straight people get Halloween. We get Halloween plus a long, proud tradition of looking at a monster and going, “Yep. He’s one of ours.”
Some we adopted as a joke that got wildly out of hand, and some were made by gay men who quietly wrote themselves into the script. A few were just far too good-looking for someone who sleeps in a coffin.
Here are 12 horror icons the gay community claimed as family – and the real stories of how it happened.
1. The Lost Boys Were Gorgeous On Purpose
There’s a reason so many of us remember The Lost Boys (1987) as a formative experience, and it has nothing to do with vampire lore.
It’s Kiefer Sutherland as David, bleached mullet and long black coat, wearing a smirk that should have come with a parental advisory sticker. And it’s Jason Patric being slowly lured into a gang of beautiful boys who ride motorcycles, live in a cave and somehow still look like they’re in a fashion shoot.
That was the plan. Director Joel Schumacher, who was openly gay, wanted his vampires to be “older, model-types” rather than a Goonies-style gang of kids. Billy Wirth, who played Dwayne, was actually working as a model when he auditioned.
Alex Winter, who played Marko, has said out loud what the rest of us saw. “So it was not subtext,” he told Yahoo in 2022. “It was really evident what he was mashing up and how he was doing it, and to me it’s a beautiful part of the movie.”
And then there’s the sax man. Tim Cappello, oiled, shirtless and wrapped in chains, wailing on a saxophone at a boardwalk concert, gives us one of the most gloriously camp minutes in ’80s cinema. Joel had spotted him in a photo in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and kept that picture on his office wall.
Fans have also spent decades pointing at the Rob Lowe poster on the back of young Sam’s bedroom door. The usual explanation is that it’s a nod to Joel’s own St. Elmo’s Fire.
Sure it is.
2. The Babadook Came Out On Tumblr
On paper, The Babadook is about the least gay movie imaginable: a 2014 Australian horror film about a grieving mother, her young son and a top-hatted monster who crawls out of a pop-up book.
So naturally, we made him an icon.
It started as a joke. In October 2016, a Tumblr user posted, “Whenever someone says the Babadook isn’t openly gay it’s like?? Did you even watch the movie???” (as Newsweek later reported). Two months later, another user shared a screenshot of the film sitting in Netflix’s “LGBT Movies” section, and that post racked up more than 126,000 notes.
There was no stopping him after that. By June 2017, the Babadook was spotted at both the Los Angeles and Washington, DC Pride events. By September, he even had a boyfriend: when It hit theaters, Twitter decided Pennywise and the Babadook were dating, and the couple even got a ship name: Pennydook.
Director Jennifer Kent has been a very good sport about the whole thing. “It’s quite perplexing. I feel it’s really quite beautiful, but I still have no idea why,” she said in 2019, calling it “really sweet” that the gay community latched on.
That same year, a rainbow Pride edition of the Blu-ray came out, with part of the proceeds going to the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Jennifer said it had “pride of place” on her bookshelf.
Our boy got his own rainbow special edition. That’s more than most of us got for coming out.
3. Billy And Stu Went From “Subtext” To “That’s My Husband”
Plenty of gay men of a certain age remember the first time they saw Skeet Ulrich in Scream (1996). The brooding, Johnny Depp-ish boyfriend climbing through the bedroom window was the ultimate ’90s heartthrob – right up until the knife came out.
Then there was his best friend Stu, played by Matthew Lillard like an overexcited golden retriever who’d follow Billy anywhere. Including into a killing spree.
Screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who is gay, has said he modeled the pair on Leopold and Loeb, the real 1920s killers who were also lovers. Last year, Matthew made it official at a fan convention, calling Billy and Stu “the first husbands of horror” (we covered that moment in Matthew Lillard’s Scream confession).
They haven’t stopped since. Promoting Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 last December, their first movie together since Scream, Matthew told EW his favorite response to doubters is simply, “They’re not gay? Prove it.” Skeet’s contribution: “That’s my husband right there!”
Earlier this month, at a 30th-anniversary panel at New York Comic Con, fans told them they were their “queer awakening.” Matthew’s answer was perfect: “We were not doing queer on the day, but we’re here for it 30 years later.”
So were we, Matthew. So were we.
4. Elvira Always Knew Who Her Real Fans Were
Long before she became the Mistress of the Dark, a teenage Cassandra Peterson was go-go dancing at a gay club in Colorado Springs, and once filled in for a drag queen who didn’t show up.
You can draw a line (not a straight one) from that club to Elvira: the plunging black gown and a double entendre in every other sentence. She’s basically a drag queen who happens to be a woman, and she knows it. “I’ve had people tell me I’m like a gay man trapped inside a woman’s body, and that’s very flattering,” she told Out in 2015.
Her gay fans have always shown up for her. “They come out in droves for sure,” she once said of her events. And in 2021, she came out herself: her memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira, revealed her long relationship with her partner, Teresa “T” Wierson.
The day the news broke, she lost around 11,000 social media followers and gained around 60,000. The ones who left? “Mostly straight, older guys,” she said on a podcast.
Funnily enough, they weren’t the fans she’d been nervous about. “Honestly, I worried more about my gay fan base,” she admitted. She needn’t have. That Halloween, she suggested the hottest costume of the year would be “Gay Elvira…Gayvira.”
Honey, we’ve been going as Elvira every Halloween since the ’80s. Welcome to the club.
5. Jerry Dandrige Was The Neighbor We’d All Spy On
Here’s the plot of Fright Night (1985): a teenage boy becomes obsessed with the handsome, mysterious man who’s just moved in next door. He watches him through his bedroom window. Nobody believes a word he says.
Yes, technically the neighbor is a vampire. But still.
Chris Sarandon‘s Jerry Dandrige is the ultimate ’80s vampire daddy, all cheekbones and scarves, eating an apple like it owes him money. He doesn’t live alone, either. He shares the house with Billy Cole, his live-in companion who guards the place by day, and the movie never once bothers to explain what’s going on there.
Critics have been reading between the lines for years. Chicago’s LGBTQ paper Windy City Times called the film “chock-full of gay subtext.” BJ Colangelo at Slashfilm put it even better: “Whether or not Holland intended it, ‘Fright Night’ is exploding with queerness.” The same piece calls Jerry “the hottest dad in town,” which honestly belongs on his tombstone.
It helps that vampire hunter Peter Vincent was played by Roddy McDowall, described by Slashfilm as one of Hollywood’s “openly closeted” actors, and Amanda Bearse, who played the hero’s girlfriend, later came out.
Watch it again now and you’ll notice Charley spends a very suspicious amount of the movie staring at the house next door.
6. Chucky’s Creator Was Told His Script Was “Too Gay”
Most horror franchises turned queer by accident. Child’s Play turned queer because its creator, Don Mancini, is a gay man who kept sneaking us in.
His big swing was Glen/Glenda, the child of Chucky and Tiffany, who first appeared at the end of Bride of Chucky (1998) and starred in Seed of Chucky (2004). Chucky names the kid Glen, Tiffany names them Glenda, a wink at Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda.
Not everyone was on board. Don has said one studio note on his first draft read: “It’s too gay and it has too much Jennifer Tilly.” (As if there’s such a thing as too much Jennifer Tilly.)
For a while, Don was told not to mention Glen/Glenda at all, and Universal had him cut a reference from Cult of Chucky, according to PinkNews. So when the franchise moved to TV in 2021, he went all in. The lead of the Chucky series, Jake, is a gay 14-year-old, and his romance with classmate Devon became a fan favorite.
“That’s always been our aim from when we started, to give gay teenage horror fans characters that they can identify with,” Don told The Queer Review. In season 2, non-binary actor Lachlan Watson took on both Glen and Glenda, and all three seasons earned GLAAD nominations. Not bad for a franchise that started out in 1988 as a killer doll movie.
7. Louis And Lestat Were Always A Love Story
Anne Rice‘s vampires were gay long before anyone said it out loud on screen. Her 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire owed its success “in large part” to gay readers, according to NBC Out, and Anne herself once said she felt she had “a gay sensibility.”
When Hollywood finally made the movie in 1994, the casting was its own drama. Anne called Tom Cruise as Lestat “so bizarre.” Then she saw the film, changed her mind completely and took out a multi-page ad in Daily Variety to praise him.
Director Neil Jordan says the longing between Lestat and Brad Pitt‘s Louis had helped sink earlier versions of the script, so he put it back in. “I thought it was appropriately homoerotic. The metaphor is absolutely clear,” he told TheWrap. Add Antonio Banderas as Armand, and you have three of the most beautiful men of the ’90s brooding at each other in lace cuffs. For a lot of us, it was a lot.
Then AMC’s series arrived in 2022 and dropped the metaphor entirely. Showrunner Rolin Jones pitched it as “a gothic romance,” saying he wanted to write “a very excitable, aggressive, toxic, beautiful love story.” With Jacob Anderson as Louis and Sam Reid as Lestat, he got one.
“I guess I didn’t know that there was a possibility for their relationship to not be explicitly queer,” Jacob told PinkNews. The third season, retitled The Vampire Lestat, aired this summer, and AMC has already ordered a fourth.
Nearly 30 years after Cruise and Pitt circled each other in candlelight, Louis and Lestat finally got to kiss.
8. M3GAN Became A Gay Icon Before Her Movie Came Out
Some icons take decades to adopt. M3GAN took one trailer.
In October 2022, months before the killer robot doll movie opened, a clip of her doing a stiff, unhinged little dance down a hallway hit the internet. The gays were simply gone. “my entire TL is the gays stanning M3gan,” as one tweet put it, and the M3GAN dance hashtag went on to rack up more than 186 million views on TikTok, NBC News reported.
The dance was performed by young actress Amie Donald, who has a dance background and helped choreograph it. Director Gerard Johnstone called it “one of those crazy, sleep-deprived, 3am thoughts.” Best 3am thought anyone’s ever had.
When writer Akela Cooper offered a thoughtful theory about the gay fandom and found family, gay Twitter had a simpler answer: we just love a doll who serves looks. Gerard got it in one: “People love camp. I guess gay people and I like the same things is what I’m trying to say.”
By the time M3GAN 2.0 came out in 2025, she’d landed her own Out digital cover and made an appearance at WeHo Pride. Star Allison Williams thinks she knows why it worked: “I think if we had been making her with the expectation that she would be a queer icon, she would have been dismissed by the queer community.”
9. Pinhead’s Look Came From Clive Barker’s Nights Out In New York
Hellraiser (1987) gave us the most famous villain outfit in ’80s horror, and it has a very gay origin story.
Writer-director Clive Barker, who came out at 18 and was honored by GLAAD in 2004, has said the look of the Cenobites, right down to the pins in their leader’s head, was inspired by New York’s S&M clubs, including one called Cellblock 28.
“But I was emotionally inspired by them, too,” he told The Guardian in 2017, as quoted by Attitude. The austere atmosphere of those places, he said, “definitely informed Pinhead.”
Even the leather wasn’t in his original novella, The Hellbound Heart. It was added for the film, so the look everyone remembers came from Clive’s nights out rather than from the book.
The original Pinhead, Doug Bradley, has his own favorite piece of trivia: “I do like to point out that I did wear a skirt as Pinhead.” And when Hulu rebooted the franchise in 2022, trans actress Jamie Clayton took over the pins.
So when you spot a guy in full Cenobite leather at a Halloween party this year, he’s closer to the source material than he probably realizes.
10. Bill Skarsgård And Jacob Elordi Made Monsters Irresistible
At some point in the last decade, Hollywood figured out that you can cast a gorgeous man, bury him under prosthetics, and the internet will thirst anyway.
Bill Skarsgård got there first. In 2017, people online were openly confessing to an inappropriate interest in Pennywise, a child-snatching clown who lives in a sewer. (In fairness, they were mostly interested in the man under the greasepaint.)
Bill leaned right into it with Count Orlok in Nosferatu (2024). “He’s gross. But it is very sexualized,” he told Esquire, as Collider reported. “Hopefully, you’ll get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time.” That’s the entire hot-monster experience in one sentence. And he’s back in the clown makeup for HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, which has already been renewed for a second season.
Then came Jacob Elordi as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein (2025). Fangoria declared him “the internet’s latest thirst trap” based on preview footage alone, months before release. When the first look dropped, one fan’s reply summed up the whole mood: “I still would.”
Guillermo, to be fair, made it easy for us. “I wanted him to look beautiful, like a newborn thing,” he told Variety.
Somewhere, Mary Shelley is very confused.
11. Hannibal And Will Are “A Little In Love,” Says Hannibal Himself
We’ve written about the murder husbands of NBC’s Hannibal before, in our Hollywood’s hidden gay moments list. But they keep giving us new material, so here we are again.
Quick recap: showrunner Bryan Fuller, who is gay, took Thomas Harris‘s cannibal psychiatrist and FBI profiler and turned their cat-and-mouse game into the most romantic thing on network TV. In the 2015 finale, Will and Hannibal take down a killer together, embrace and go over a cliff in each other’s arms. “The love is absolutely on the table,” Bryan told TVLine.
It got close. Bryan has described Mads Mikkelsen‘s lips hovering over Hugh Dancy‘s mouth, though there was “never any actual lip-locking.” His best line about it: “I was just following the lead of the actors, as opposed to having a gay agenda. The gay agenda came later.”
The cast hasn’t let it go either. At Fan Expo Boston in March, Mads described the pair as “cat and mouse… and, okay, a little in love.” Asked how long it would take Will to fall for Hannibal, Hugh’s answer was: “Seven seasons?”
The show only got three. A revival has been tangled up in rights issues for years, but the Fannibals are still waiting, presumably over a nice glass of red.
12. Jesse From Nightmare On Elm Street 2 Paid The Price For All Of Us
In 1985, Mark Patton was a young actor with the lead role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. He played Jesse, a teenage boy being possessed by Freddy Krueger, and the film around him was, to put it mildly, not subtle.
Jesse runs into his gym coach at a leather bar. He bolts from a makeout session with his girlfriend to spend the night at his male friend’s house, telling him, “Something is trying to get inside my body.” One review at the time reportedly called it the gayest horror film ever made, and the label has stuck ever since.
Mark, who was gay and closeted at the time, didn’t write any of it. But for years, screenwriter David Chaskin denied any gay intent and suggested the subtext came from the casting. In other words, from Mark. “Did you actually go to a freshman English course in high school? This is not subtext,” Mark later told BuzzFeed News.
It cost him dearly. In 1987, when he was offered a gay role in a TV pilot, producers asked him how he’d deny being gay. He walked away from acting. His partner, Dallas actor Timothy Patrick Murphy, died of AIDS-related illness in 1988. Mark was diagnosed with HIV on his 40th birthday, in 1999, and came close to dying.
He rebuilt his life far from Hollywood, working as an interior designer before settling in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with Hector Morales Mondragon, now his husband.
Then horror fans came looking for him. In 2010, the makers of the documentary Never Sleep Again tracked him down, and he became a fixture at horror conventions. David eventually came clean too: “I feigned ignorance… My movie was being outed and I didn’t know how I felt about that,” he wrote to BuzzFeed News in 2016. And in the 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, Mark sat down with him and confronted him on camera. “Maybe it was a little exploitative, but you know, that’s what movies did,” David offered. Mark forgave him anyway.
Mark has been open about living with serious illness, and when death rumors spread online last November, he shut them down himself: “I am alive l am sick and having physical problems, death is not on the list.”
Gay fans have been finding him at conventions ever since. As he told BuzzFeed, some of them say: “You were the first person I ever saw onscreen that I felt would love me back.”
Of all the horror icons we’ve claimed, Mark is the one who was actually one of us, and he paid for it. The least we can do is claim him loudly.