"Same Thing Really": Queer Love and Horror as "Gothicky" in Ratched and The Haunting of Bly Manor

Abstract

This chapter, however, attempts to understand a certain recurring trope of queer horror: its embrace of nostalgia and a queer sense of pastness as a thematic and formal element of particular importance to LGBTQ+ subjects. This idea connects with writings in queer studies on queer engagements with an emphasis on backwardness, retrospection, and a rejection of chrononormative structures (e.g. Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Halberstam 2011; Love 2007) that, as Elizabeth Freeman (2010) suggests, threaten to bind the queer or non-normative subject into a construction of linear time and lived experience that is both patriarchal and heteronormative. In addition, the prominence of spectral nostalgia in the horror genre also demands a consideration of Derrida’s concept of hauntology from a specifically queer perspective, wherein the queer spectator is forced to re-read the queer horror text’s intricacies by way of an always-already-present historical conflation of monstrousness with queerness. This chapter discusses these and more theories on Queer Horror and the Gothic in relation to Ratched (Netflix 2020) and the adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Mike Flanagan, The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix 2020).