My teenage self grew up in the closet, convinced that Clive Barker was the only openly gay person working in my favorite genre: horror. Luckily, I was wrong: the presence of LGBTQ+ characters in fantasy cinema has been a constant throughout its history and has only increased in recent decades. Besides being part of the collective imagination, cinematic monsters from Gothic literature—like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, or Mr. Hyde—were among the first examples of representation. queer on the big screen, always linked to the different, the strange and everything that challenged heteronormativity.

From the predominance of negative clichés—lesbians with psychopathic tendencies, bloodthirsty bisexual vampires, transvestite killers, and a long etcetera—to the progressive acceptance of diversity, Scream Queer It offers a comprehensive exploration of the evolution of LGBTQ+ representation in the fantasy genre through the analysis of hundreds of films. Along the way, it exorcises traumas and recounts the personal experiences that have shaped the author: a gay man obsessed with horror films.