review – GenderTerror

Nyx Fears: Horror, Cats, and Skeletons!

Started in 2013, May (also known as Nyx Fears), has covered many topics but mostly focused on horror movies. May has made several lists that could be classified as doing us all a favor and watching some of the most baffling, absurd, and grotesque the horror genre has to offer. With elaborate set-ups, a few drinks, and a few inside jokes, May has set-up her own section of horror YouTube that is a wonderful balance of review, opinion, and honesty.

GenderTerror was able to interview May about her YouTube channel, her very public transition, her cat, and a little bit about her creative process.

GenderTerror: What made you decide to start making YouTube videos, especially horror movie reviews?

May: I’ve always been interested in horror stuff so it was obviously what I was gonna do if I ever did YouTube. I think I got the motivation because it was snowing one day in Texas and I just decided to go for it. There’s this sorta wall people run into where it seems too hard and weird to coordinate so they give up without ever actually trying. So I basically felt bored enough to give it a try. I had a microphone from when I was in a failed high school band so I just plugged it into my computer and started recording without editing and putting it online. Thank God I learned to edit but ya gotta start somewhere. And being online very quickly changed my life and I figured out how to actually make quality videos. Haha.

GT: What does horror mean to you?

‘What Keeps You Alive’ – an era of hope for queer horror

In horror, queer women have always been subject to their own version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: predator or sex object. Colin Minihan’s thriller ‘What Keeps You Alive’ offers not only a burst of fresh air, but hope for a new generation of queer audiences.

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Sonic Monsters: A Guided Tour Through SOPHIE’s ‘Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides’

Those of us who inhabit bodies that do not align with societal expectations are at risk of falling prey to those who seek to enforce them. There is a long and storied history of queer fans finding strength and power in identifying with the Monster. Tied in with the above is the societal fear of the artificial body: the idea that humans can be constructed in part or wholly. From Altered Carbon to The Fly, popular culture is rife with anxieties about what technology can do to humanity, to our very definitions of what humanity is. It’s easy to see why: so much of the media we consume has been tweaked and enhanced, from CGI superheroes to tightly autotuned pop songs. And it’s in this intersection of artificiality, horror, queerness and pop culture that we find SOPHIE and her debut album, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. (The title is important, but I’ll get to that later.)

(I recommend listening along while reading. I also recommend using headphones for full immersion.)

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The Horror of Assimilation: Queerness in Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives

In an era where acceptance and assimilation have an increasingly blurred boundary, The Stepford Wives becomes the tragedy of a generation of activists slain by those who call themselves allies.

Since its publication in 1972, the ubiquity of Ira Levin’s dark satire novel The Stepford Wives has been almost unquestionable. With millions of copies sold, two movie adaptations (one passable, one frankly terrible), and a permanent place in the vernacular with the term ‘Stepford wife’, Levin has inspired a generation of social horror and brought a very real sense of the terror of everyday prejudice into the limelight. With this political niche of horror growing in popularity after the success of 2017’s social horror masterpiece Get Out, we are reminded again and again that the patterns we see in fiction are replicated in society at large. The victims of horror are the victims in reality too. Social horror presents us with a tension marked by very clear social categorisations that are easier for many to ignore in reality: black versus white, men versus women, oppressor versus oppressed. Battle lines in horror are drawn clearly for those who choose to see them, and protagonists are left to deal with the messy in-betweens, the people they love, and the betrayals of trust involved. For those unfamiliar with Levin’s sinister suburb, The Stepford Wives tells the story of Joanna Eberhart, a feminist/photographer/mother/housewife who has moved with her family from a bustling city to the idyllic Stepford, a suburb with unassuming middle-class professionals and their submissive, carbon-copy wives. From the very beginning, it is clear that something is amiss in Stepford, and the novel tells the story of Joanna uncovering a conspiracy against Stepford’s women, coordinated by the men of the town. The novel has been lauded for its prescience, with Levin presenting a world in which perfection is the biggest aberration, where against the backdrop of the rise of second-wave feminism, these Stepford wives are the biggest abnormality, not the feminist protagonist who questions them.

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Happy One Year Anniversary!

Art by Tsi-bi, who has also done The “Thing”!

In the beginning of August in 2016, I began to rebrand my personal blog into a queer horror community. As someone who has always loved horror, I felt there was a significant lacking in queer horror coverage as well as in showcasing queer horror creators and their particular works, some new, some old. I wanted to create a place for people to be able to share their love of horror, discuss their love of horror, as well as support the uniquely queer type of horror created by artists and writers.

Thus, on August 28 2016, I re-launched the site with Monsters Of Our Own, a piece on trans identity and monsters that continues to be extremely popular to this day. GenderTerror became it’s own special place in the queer horror world that is continuing to grow and expand.

In one year we’ve had:

27 unique contributors
15 exclusive art pieces
20 exclusive short stories/interviews/reviews
37,530 views
25,081 visitors
all from all over the world from every continent (except Antarctica).

The following are the top 3 posts in each category. This does not mean there is not other fantastic work on the site! Please use these as a stepping stone if you are new here and wish to explore the wonderful area of queer horror!

GamerGate: Ethics? What Ethics?

Content/Trigger warning for links: Miosgyny, violent threats, sexism, racism, antisemitism and slurs.

GamerGate has been covered as a hate movement by various places from Kotaku, to the New York Times, to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the BBC News. However, they often decry that these are a few people in their vast movement which is “actually about ethics in gaming journalism”. However…

You cannot claim to be about ethics in journalism when you break literally every journalistic code in the book. Ethics is defined by “moral principles that govern a person’s or group’s behavior”. This is obviously a very broad and subjective term. However, GamerGate is specifically about journalistic ethics in gaming journalism. Interesting considering that gaming and reviews are something subjective, as with all arts.

So let’s look at ethical standards already in place for journalists. According to the Society of Professional Journalists there are four main points an ethical journalist should follow. These points are broken down into smaller points, almost all which are broken by GamerGate as well. However, this article will stick to the four main points.

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