‘They/Them’ director always related horror to the queer experience

After a lifetime of querying—and queering—horror, John Logan is reclaiming the genre for the outcasts of gender and sexuality.

He’s doing this with They/Them (cleverly pronounced “They-Slash-Them”), an upcoming horror set at a gay conversion camp featuring LGBTQ+ protagonists. Although he’s spent decades as a writer of blockbusters like Gladiator and Skyfall, Logan chose a gender- and genre-bending slasher to make his directorial debut. He told MovieWeb why he made that choice, and how one can draw a line from Judith Butler to horror films.

“There was something that spoke to me about it, and a lot of queer theory will say that the reason queer people are sometimes drawn to horror is because it embraces the idea of the other, the outcast. And many people feel like that they are different, they feel like monsters, they feel not accepted by society. I certainly didn’t when I was a kid. And so I’ve always had a really sort of tender responsiveness to horror . . . “

Despite being a genre meant for queer people, horror underutilized queer people. And if they were used, they were demeaned, and Logan wanted to change that.

“Horror has a really complicated relationship with gender and sexual identity and always has, and when I was growing up, queer characters were mostly invisible. If they did exist, even in a coded way, they were villains, or they were jokes, or they were victims. They were never the hero, and that always bothered me.”

See if his reclamation succeeded when They/Them streams on Peacock on Aug. 5.