Remembering the Homophobic, Transphobic Horror of “High Tension”

Which is why it’s a little weird, and kind of fucked-up, for the film to frame the story this way.

Fucked up, but not surprising. The early 2000s were a very weird time to grow up gay in. Sure, we had “Queer as Folk,” “The L Word,” and the gay cinema of the 90s. But that was about all we had. Primetime TV was still full of lazy, homophobic jokes and a complete lack of believable queer characters. If you were anything but 100% gay or lesbian, you were simply not part of the equation. And most movies and TV shows still couldn’t resist the urge to throw in a fun “man in a dress” joke or two. The world as I remember it from 2000 to 2010 was an extremely homophobic one, in the truest sense of the word. Phobia as in fear—deep and primal.

In America, we talk about homophobia now mostly in terms of intolerance. But in the years before Prop 8, when even the most mainstreamed white gays felt the need to fight for their rights, there was an atmosphere of actual fear concerning queer life. People were afraid of what would happen once gay people got rights. Remember those arguments about how gay marriage would usher in a new era of people marrying dogs and cars? Remember those anti-gay adoption ads that showed the burly silhouettes of two men grabbing a small child by the hand as if preparing to lead him into a sex dungeon? It was as if gayness itself was enough to make people completely lose sight of what they believed to be the moral edges of the universe. The fear of gay marriage seems absurd today, but I remember how scared of it people were then. They weren’t just scared of us changing certain institutions: they were scared of us. As people.

So they made us villains. Brian DePalma ushered in a new era of trans-sploitation with Raising Cain and Dressed to Kill. Paul Verhoeven gave us Basic Instinct, the classic tale of a murderous bisexual who supposedly keeps killing her male exes despite weight 90 pounds soaking wet, and using that most ridiculous of murder weapons, an icepick. These films were campy and silly, but they also carried a very clear message: “we’re scared of you. You’re unpredictable.” Gay people were, at that point, not yet neutered by capitalism. We didn’t have “Glee” or “Kinky Boots” on Broadway. Before gay people were packaged as safe, entertaining, and harmless, we kept straight America up at night. Because we scared them.

But is a movie like High Tension actually homophobic? That seems too simple a designation. You could look at the final twist at the end and read it as more transphobic than lesbophobic. But the fact that Marie justifies her murder spree by saying that she loves her friend and wants nothing to keep them apart points to a much more common narrative of the early aughts: Lesbians love too much. It makes them crazy, and then they kill people. Monster, the Aileen Wuornos biopic, came out the same year. So did Party Monster, which told the story of the queer “club kid killer” Michael Alig. A year later, the play “Doubt” opened off-Broadway, and “The History Boys” opened its West End run. Gay people were either killers, or pedophiles, or victims. All three? Maybe. But you couldn’t be anything else.

I was in high school and college during those years, and it was, for the most part, a relentlessly depressing decade. But more than anything, I was scared. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways there were to die. I felt like someone was always waiting behind some corner to kill me. When I would go home to visit my family, the quiet of the night would freak me out. My family would be talking and laughing at dinner, and I would feel a pricking at the back of my neck and turn around, expecting to see a cloaked figure armed with an AK-47 outside the window, ready to pick all of us off. I would sit in the corner of a room because that was the only place where I could see everything happening at once—and even then, I feared the wall behind me opening up to swallow me. Because nowhere was safe. And if I saw a movie that was even a little bit scary, it was enough to send me into a panic-induced fever for weeks at a time.

I spent years of my life just being scared, from morning until night.

It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that after I came out as trans, I stopped being scared. I didn’t have those invasive, bloody thoughts anymore. I started to able to watch horror movies with some regularity: the more gruesome, the better. Because they’d lost their power, somehow. Suddenly every scary movie wasn’t a window into my future—it was just a movie. I’d never understood how people could say that before: “It’s just a movie.” And then, all of a sudden, I got it.

At some point, I’d stopped being scared of the eventuality of death, however gruesome, and started just being sad about it.

That’s the thing I feel the most now when I watch a horror movie. It’s not scary or gross or viscerally shocking, it’s just sad, because a lot of people die. When people die now, I get sad, not scared. Fear is just one way to think about death: sadness is another. And part of growing up into an adult means you stop being scared of the hypotheticals, like being killed by an ax murderer, and start fearing the things you know will come to pass. The deaths of your friends and family, and eventually, yourself.

But the thing I fear now, more than anything, is myself. I’m not scared of a psychopath breaking into my apartment at night. I’m scared of waking up someday and realizing that I’m a monster. Either because I haven’t stayed true to the things that are important, or because I didn’t do right by a friend, or because I let myself, in some way, be hypocritical. I’m scared of having whatever happens to people like Jeffrey Epstein and Scott Rudin happen to me. Because that’s the only response I can have. It’s the type of evil so baffling that the only response is: “given that kind of power, everyone probably has the potential to be evil. Including me.”

That’s the thing that gives a complex edge to this weird, lightly problematic movie. The idea that a woman would act like a predatory man in trying to secure the love she wants. The idea that a woman could be that violent and that bloody and that insane. It doesn’t make sense, but technically, it could. Anything could. And if you watch movies that paint you as a monster for long enough, chances are you’ll start believing it’s true.