Queer thrillers might be so back. With the recent successes of movies like Love Lies Bleeding and TV shows like Killing Eve, it’s clear that I’m not alone in my affinity for media that combines a little action with a lot of queerness. While I’m still crossing my fingers for a full-blown queer thriller revival in the second half of the 2020s, there are plenty of standout examples of the genre that already exist, going as far back as the 1940s.
The queer DNA of the genre makes sense: Thrillers are defined by the same blend of secrecy, tension, and desperation that has defined many queer people’s private lives. There are also structural reasons why LGBTQ+ themes have also become intermeshed with the thriller genre. From roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, a set of guidelines for the American film industry known as the Hays Code banned open depictions of homosexuality, interracial relationships, and other “morally evil” content. During those three decades, many filmmakers secretly slipped queerness into their films by assigning stereotypically gay traits to characters who were framed as antagonists, hence the term “queer-coded villain.”
In 1968, the Hays Code was replaced with the current MPAA rating system, meaning that queerness in America cinema could exist not just as subtext, but as text. Now we don’t just have queer-coded villains in the thriller genre: we have out queer heroes and villains, along with characters who land somewhere in the moral gray area between those two poles.
The thrillers on this list run the gamut from merely queer-coded to explicitly queer — with a hard emphasis on explicit — but if there’s one thing that unites them all, it’s that they’ll have you on the edge of your seat. Read on for 11 LGBTQ+ thrillers, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope to the Kristen Stewart film Love Lies Bleeding.
