October used to mean pumpkin carving, cheap masks from the drugstore, and late-night marathons of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Now it means opening Netflix and finding yourself dropped into a haunted house where every door leads to a different queer-coded nightmare. Some of it is intentional, some of it isn’t, but the effect is the same: spooky season is a queer playground.
This year’s lineup proves it. Ryan Murphy’s latest season of Monster resurrects Ed Gein, the killer who inspired Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Boots tells the story of a closeted gay teenager who enlists in the military in the 1990s. Mae Martin’s Wayward spins a queer-tinged mystery in a town full of secrets. Even the return of Nobody Wants This, Netflix’s relationship drama, feels like part of the mix: horror isn’t just blood and knives, it’s also intimacy and exposure.
If it feels like spooky season has been remixed by a drag troupe, that’s because horror has always belonged to the outsiders. Long before streaming, long before “representation” was a marketing hook, monsters were already us.
The Queer DNA of Horror
Film historians have been shouting this for decades. Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (movie) traced how queerness was smuggled onto screens by turning us into villains and predators. B. Ruby Rich and her contemporaries argued that horror, more than any other genre, was about the Other—the body and the desire that frightened straight society.
You can see it everywhere once you know to look:
Dracula was never just a foreign count biting virgins. His seductions crossed genders, his contagion spread desire as much as death.
Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t merely grotesque; he was a queer allegory for the outsider, desperate for recognition, shunned by his “father,” abandoned by society.
Psycho’s Norman Bates blurred lines of gender performance, creating terror from transgression.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 has been called “the gayest horror movie ever made”—its lead actor Mark Patton later became an icon for how subtext leaks through even when the script insists it isn’t there.
And the Final Girl trope—Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott—has always been a stand-in for survival through difference, the one who endures precisely because she doesn’t fit the mold.
Even Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” written in 1964, could be read as a secret manifesto for horror: exaggeration, artifice, the drag of performance. Horror’s monsters have always been drag queens in latex masks.
Netflix’s Haunted House
So what happens when you walk through Netflix’s October catalog? It looks less like a content hub and more like a haunted house built on queer foundations.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story
(Steaming now)
Ryan Murphy’s obsession with turning true crime into glossy melodrama continues, this time with Ed Gein, the grave robber and killer whose life inspired half a century of horror films. Gein’s crimes were grotesque, but the cultural fixation on him has always blurred queerness and monstrosity. He’s the figure who let filmmakers explore gender, disguise, and identity under the cover of “true story.” My only caution is that Ed Gein’s story was horrific enough without Murphy’s additions.
Boots
(Streaming Now)
A closeted teenager enlists in the U.S. military in the 1990s, navigating loyalty, repression, and exposure. There are no ghosts here, no haunted houses, but it may be the scariest show of the month. Horror has never just been about monsters; it’s about the fear of being seen. Boots captures that with suffocating precision.
Wayward
(streaming now)
Mae Martin’s miniseries takes the familiar trappings of a small town thriller—secrets, violence, buried trauma—and infuses it with queer sensibility. Horror is always strongest when the characters are outsiders who know too much, and Wayward lives in that tension.
Nobody Wants This, Season 2
(October)
Not horror in the traditional sense, but still perfect October programming. The vulnerability of queer relationships has always carried a shadow of danger, the possibility of loss or rejection. In its own way, Nobody Wants This is about the most frightening thing of all: intimacy.
The Accidental Gay
Part of the fun of October streaming is watching straight-coded shows get kidnapped by queer audiences. Maybe it’s the chemistry between two male leads in a thriller. Maybe it’s the way a horror heroine carries herself like a drag queen with a knife. Queer viewers have always been adept at finding subtext, remixing it, claiming it as our own. Streaming just makes the process faster, the memes sharper.
A Century in Costume
So no—you’re not the first to point out that horror is queer. The critics got there decades ago. But this October feels different. The closet door isn’t just rattling anymore; it’s been kicked off its hinges. Netflix isn’t hiding the coding—it’s programming it. Shows like Boots and Wayward don’t leave you hunting for crumbs of representation. They serve it straight up, no disguise.
Meanwhile, Monster: The Ed Gein Story reminds us that queerness and monstrosity were once blurred deliberately, a warning dressed up as entertainment. That history lingers. The haunted house is still full of mirrors.
Closing the Loop
Every October, the world pretends to love monsters. We decorate our porches with ghosts and skeletons, we binge slasher marathons, we joke about the things that scare us. But for queer people, the performance was never optional. Horror has always been our genre because we know what it feels like to survive in the dark, to live with secrets, to carry difference like a knife in the pocket.
So when you log on to Netflix this month, remember: you’re not just picking shows. You’re walking into a tradition. Horror has been queerness in costume for over a century. The only difference now is that the costume’s looking thinner by the day.
Looking for more, check out my guide for October here:
🎃 Caleb Reed’s Queer Horror Guide: October 2025
October is the one time of year everyone pretends to love monsters. But queer people always have. Horror was never straight—its monsters, final girls, and outsiders have carried queer DNA for more than a century. This year, streaming platforms have turned October into a haunted house built for us. Here’s your map.
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