Monster in the Closet

Monster in the Closet

United States – 1986

Director – Bob Dahlin

Troma, 1993, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 26 minutes

The very title of this movie invites an easy assumption when writing in the context of a queer blogathon. I decided to go ahead and make that assumption more or less just because the VHS tape had been sitting in my “In” box for quite some time and I wanted an excuse to watch. If you’re looking for the simple send-up of classic B monster flicks that Monster in the Closet purports on its surface to be, it’s here, packed with B-movie personnel and flaunting its Troma pedigree. And if, like me, you’re looking to find a bunch of subtext, you can’t miss a preponderance of queer innuendo that, even if it stumbles a few times along the way, turns out to be surprisingly transgressive.

image from Lost Highway

Clark is a novice newspaper reporter who thinks he’s gotten his big break covering a series of alleged monster abductions originating from closets. When the closet monster turns out to be real, the full forces of socio-cultural status-quo maintenance are called in to return things to acceptable normalcy. When the most hetero normative institutions, the police and the military, prove unable to destroy or even slow this physical expression of monstrosity, will the scientific/medical community calculate and codify its degeneracy into submission? Or will it be the love of an attractive and conspicuously available young reporter? Glimpsing for the first time Clark’s handsome visage, the monster softens, then abducts him and heads to San Francisco carrying him like the classic “damsel”.

Perhaps a more appropriate question is whether paranoia, punishment, oppression, hatred and violence is preferable social behavior than, well, than love. The answer to this eternally vexing question lies amply suggested beneath a few thin layers of parodic silliness, but never explicitly committed to in Monster in the Closet. What sealed the deal for me was that Clark doesn’t hook up with the obviously romantically available female lead. Pairing them up would have been a straightforward and easy way to truncate any idea that homosexuality was anything more than monstrous. But it doesn’t. In the end, people rebuild their closets having dispelled all notions of “monstrosity”, which anyway, is better symbolic of fear and shame than any lifestyle choice.

Watch the whole thing online and come to your own conclusions.

This post is a part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Garbo Laughs