Queer Horror! (with Dr. Chuck Tingle)

A detail from the cover of Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

It's a scary time for LGBTQIA+ folks — and many of us are turning to horror stories that take our real-life terrors and make them even more monstrous. To find out why, we talk to Dr. Chuck Tingle, the author of Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, and we geek out about why queers love to be scared. Also, we talk about horror movie soundtracks — and the 1970s prog rock experiment that changed horror movie music forever.

Notes, citations, etc.

Dr. Chuck Tingle on Bluesky and Tumblr

Dr. Chuck Tingle’s website. He’s the author of Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays

Camp Damascus abandons the usual tropes of gay-conversion-camp stories like the movies They/Them, or But I'm a Cheerleader

In an interview with the Guardian, Tubular Bells creator Mike Oldfield describes himself as "the godfather of scary movie music”

Read an article about the ways that being in a harmonic minor key can make music sound scarier

Check out the F vs J hip hop project by Fabolous and Jadakiss

In an article from Popular Science, Sascha Frühholz, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Oslo, says “We think that we perceive scream-like soundtracks as danger cues, most likely because they mimic the sound quality of human screams."