With its focus on characters and narratives outside the mainstream, horror is considered by some to be an inherently queer genre. According to the founders of the Stage Fright Festival, horror has “a special and symbiotic connection to queer culture.” The festival celebrates that connection with a lineup of performances that range from campy to creepy to chilling. This year’s festival will take place Oct. 9-19 at the CoHo Theatre in Northwest Portland.
Amica Hunter and Jeff Desautels are the co-founders of the Stage Fright Festival. They join us to talk about how the festival has evolved since it launched in 2022 and what makes horror so queer.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the 4th annual Stage Fright Festival. It’s happening now through Sunday at the CoHo Theater in Northwest Portland. It’s described as Portland’s only queer horror theater festival, but according to the founders, horror has always been queer. As it says on their website, queerness is woven into the blood-soaked fabric of the genre, lurking in the shadows of repression, transformation, desire, and defiance, and that’s exactly why Stage Fright exists. Amica Hunter and Jeff Desautels are the co-founders of the festival. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Amica Hunter: Yes, thank you so much for having us.
Jeff Desautels: Yes, thank you.
Miller: Amica, first, what did horror mean to you when you were growing up?
Hunter: I was always a fan of the genre, before I even knew that it was a genre. I think there’s something about creepy things and unsettling things that just makes me feel excited in a way similar to when you see something cute. I know that that sounds strange, but just that feeling inside where you’re like, ‘oh my gosh, this is exciting and stimulating,’ and you just feel a little bit more alive in that moment.
Miller: Was Halloween a big deal for you as a kid?
Hunter: Oh, absolutely. A lot of homemade costumes. One of the earliest costumes I remember was I wanted to be a scary pig fairy. So my mom helped me try to achieve that, and I know that it was very disappointing for me when I asked people if I was scary, and they said, “no.”
Miller: But you wanted to be all three, a fairy who was also a pig who was scary?
Hunter: Who was scary. Yeah, yeah.
Miller: Jeff, what about you? I mean, does horror go back a long way for you?
Desautels: It does. It’s funny, as a kid, I wasn’t really into the genre, like I was reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, but I was always into the supernatural and the paranormal a lot. Hearing that story, I remember when I was a kid, maybe like seven, I asked for a broom for Christmas so I could ride around the living room like a witch. So, yeah, it’s always been there.
Miller: How did this festival start?
Desautels: I think Amica and I just realized we both have shows that are kind of in this spooky genre, and then we knew some folks as well. And we were big fans of the horror festival in Minneapolis, and we saw that being a success, so we thought we’d do a little experiment and have a mini-festival. So, it was our two shows and then two other folks, just over a weekend at Curious Comedy in Portland, and people came out.
We had people who just generally liked to find things to do for the Halloween season and saw that we were doing this, and as a small independent artist, it’s a really good sign when people you don’t know come to a show. So we wanted to capture that lightning in a bottle, and here we are.
Hunter: I feel like our kinship around horror is a little bit surprising because we both have clown backgrounds. We are not scary clowns, but we’re clowns who like scary stuff. So coming from more comedic, physical comedy backgrounds, it was sort of like, ‘hey, you have a slightly spooky, funny show, and I have a slightly spooky, funny show, let’s really lean into our secret passion of Halloween time.’
Desautels: Yeah, I think the thing that is interesting, too, and that’s not always acknowledged, is horror’s relationship to comedy as well, because it’s kind of the same impulse. You’re either screaming or you’re laughing because of something that’s surprising to you. So I think that’s helped us using those instincts and like…
Hunter: Yeah, you can really go over the top.
Miller: It’s interesting that the connection between those two, because you’re right, I mean, anyone who’s been in a theater – I guess I was thinking of a movie theater – for a horror film, almost any movie you can at some point hear laughs, which are sort of nervous laughs, as a way to not scream sometimes or to break the tension, but you see them as connected.
Desautels: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s kind of the same biological piano you can play as a performer.
Hunter: Yeah, I mean, you see Jordan Peele has made that kind of obviously connected, and more and more we’re seeing movies like, I feel like “The Substance,” or I just saw “Weapons,” which I loved, where they’re really playing both sides of that at the same time.
Miller: Well, you know, it is striking that all those examples you mentioned and that I mentioned, too, they’re movies. Because if a friend said they were going to go to a horror festival, my mind would immediately go to a horror movie festival. What’s the connection? What’s the history of horror and live theater?
Desautels: Honestly, there’s not a ton of history to mine from. I mean, there’s a few shows. When I was in London for a little bit and I saw “The Woman in White,” things like that. So I view it as kind of an untapped potential. I think in film, horror is used as a way for a new director, because you can make something that’s pretty successful on a very limited budget. And so I think using that as a philosophy, as we have a lot of independent artists and small companies just starting out, I’m like, this is a genre that has inherent tools you can use to make something that’s effective with not a lot.
Hunter: Yeah, and I really love the original, I guess I’d say, horror theater originally would just be around a campfire, right? Or a flashlight under your face telling spooky stories in the dark. And so it is very ripe with potential for that, because having live theater where we’re all in the same room and you can hear people breathe, you can hear people gasp. We have shows where there’s a performer talking on stage and then all of a sudden a voice is speaking from behind you in the audience. Just the excitement in the air of, you never know where someone’s going to pop up, or the things you can do with limited lighting. It’s really, really fun to see.
Miller: It does sound scary, as you’re mentioning that, some of the possibilities of interactive theater, or somebody behind you scaring you, almost literally making you jump out of your seat because they’re in the room with you.
Hunter: Yeah, the show that I just closed in the festival, it’s mostly very, very goofy and we’re playing grave robbers. It’s a ‘choose your own adventure.’ It is very corny and campy. But there is one part where we get genuine screams, which is in the blackout, we suggest that we are touching worms and then we just fling wet pieces of string out, and so somebody might get hit with a wet worm and that is a really fun moment for us.
Miller: How much do you want people to actually be scared? Because you’ve both talked about campiness and about humor, but are there also shows that you’ve done or that you’re excited to do where it’s just legitimately terrifying?
Desautels: Honestly, with the way the lineup was, we have an application process and people submit, so we don’t have a ton this year, but I would love to see a full on scary horror happen, so… Just to say that if horror is like not your thing, if you’re not into that, I think there’s still plenty for you to do at the festival…
Hunter: Yes! Please come. This year particularly, it’s leaning pretty comedy. Usually we have a blend of both, but we also have these fun installations. There’s a rat king where you can make your own rat and tie it into the thing. We have things going on that are interactive that are not necessarily shows that are all very… You know, in good fun.
Desautels: I will say last year we did an adaptation of “Dracula,” and I think we all had intentions of having it have some legitimately scary moments, but we’re all clowns, so I don’t think we ended up with a lot of scary parts.
Hunter: That was a great show.
Desautels: We did have a lot of fun.
Miller: That’s how the two of you met, right? Because you both came from actual clowning traditions and training?
Hunter: Correct.
Desautels: Yeah, two different schools, but we both ended up in Portland with our respective clown companies.
Miller: Amica, you said that you’re not scary clowns. How do you feel about the fact that, I don’t know, over the last 20-something years, for some people clowns have become so associated with creepy characters. I don’t think it was just Stephen King. It seems like he tapped into something that existed. How do you feel about that?
Hunter: I kind of have a big eye roll for that, but it’s not my thing, a scary clown thing. I think it’s like, ‘why are we doing this?’ But also if that’s your thing, that’s fine. Yeah, we’re definitely not done any favors by Stephen King or John Wayne Gacy or whoever would just wear the outfit and scurry around and creep people out a few years ago in the news.
But I think when we’re talking about actual clowning, the genre can be scary because there’s no fourth wall and they see you and they can approach you, and I can see the potential for that being scary because most of the time it’s done innocently in a sort of symbiotic and fun way, but if done incorrectly, it’s very uncomfortable.
Miller: Jeff, I read part of a short essay that’s on your website right now about the connection, I think that… I think it was a symbiotic relationship between queerness and horror. What does it mean to you to call horror an inherently queer genre?
Desautels: I think it makes a lot of sense because, horror as a genre, it’s examining the things in society that are taken as a norm, and kind of poking and prodding at that. And as an audience member, if you haven’t sat with those ideas, that kind of makes you unsettled. And what’s interesting is when you come to that space as a queer person, you’re kind of in on the joke already. You’re like,
‘That’s my life, I live that, I’m gonna be rooting for the monster in this movie I’m going to be seeing.’ So I think that’s why they’re tied together and it’s interesting to explore.
And it’s also interesting of, if we’re looking at the horror film genre, having people making the films, behind the scenes, as queer people, kind of coding it that way and putting their own messaging in that, where if you’re watching as a queer person you’re picking up on it. And then we’re at a space today where we can make films where they have the queer themes right there on the surface. So it’s been an interesting evolution.
Miller: That is an interesting shift. I mean, what does that mean, do you think, for the final product if it was once the subtext or was coded, as you said, by queer directors or writers who, in the 1950’s or the ‘60’s or later, did not have the artistic freedom to make the narrative clearer? Now many people do have that freedom. Has it changed horror?
Desautels: I think maybe a little bit, but I think we’re still not there as a society, clearly, where it’s accepted, so it’s still a useful medium, I think, to use. Do I imagine a world where it’s a Utopia and everyone’s okay with queerness and we have language around gender expansiveness? Maybe we don’t need horror anymore and we’re doing something else, who knows, but…
Hunter: I think we’ll always need it.
Miller: What are we gonna need it for?
Hunter: I don’t know. I find it weirdly comforting, you know? To just get scared together. I know it sounds strange, but watching something spooky together and all having that physical response at a jump scare at the same time, or talking about, ‘Well, that’s obviously a bad idea. Don’t open that door.’ I think it recreates that herd mentality of, we’re a community against whatever forces, supernatural or physical, that might be coming after us.
Miller: You know, it’s fascinating. I’m not sure that there is a genre where the experience of watching it in an audience is more different than watching it alone, than horror. Comedy is the only other thing that comes to mind, and we were talking about the connections earlier, but watching a horror movie by yourself is so different from watching it with 200 other people, even 200 other strangers. For, I guess the reasons you’re talking about, that there’s something you’re experiencing all the scariness together, which changes the scariness.
Hunter: Yeah, and both of those genres are eliciting an involuntary response, like laughter is an involuntary response. Screaming or gasping is an involuntary response. So I think it’s really tapping into that kind of primal, animal nature of a sort of physical thing that’s happening to you while you’re absorbing media.
Miller: Amica and Jeff, thanks very much.
Desautels: Thank you.
Miller: Amica Hunter and Jeff Desautels are the co-founders of the Stage Fright Festival. It is the queer horror theater festival that is up right now through this coming Sunday at the CoHO Theater in Northwest Portland.
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