For This Queer Immigrant Filmmaker, Horror Has Been and Always Will Be Political
I refuse to be erased.
My love for horror films began when I realized they offered something the real world never did: a place to hide. A space where fear was thrilling, not paralyzing. A space where the monsters were on screen—not walking beside me in broad daylight. John Carpenter, Jennifer Kent, David Robert Mitchell, and others pulled me into their worlds, and for a while, I felt safer there than in my own skin.
Take Mitchell’s It Follows, for example—a film wrapped in the eerie quiet of suburbia, pulsing with the anxiety of miseducation and the looming specter of disease. To many, it’s a metaphor for the spread of HIV among teenagers. To me, it was something else: a refuge. A darkened theater became my safe space because outside of it, there was no comfort to be found.
But escapism is not apoliticism. Every film—every single one—is a reflection of its time, even when its creators don’t want it to be. I learned that the hard way.
I grew up as a queer kid in a country where support was a fantasy. Where being different meant being alone. And now, that same country doesn’t just isolate people like me—it arrests us. It erases us.
That’s why I make horror films.
Both of my shorts—Dead End and The Power of the Strike—are not just reflections of the political climate. They are fights against repression, against silence, against the far-right forces tightening their grip on the world. Horror has always been political, and I wield it like a weapon, hoping that somewhere, someone who feels as alone as I once did sees my work and knows they are not.
That’s why I see Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an instant classic, a film built on one of the most electrifying, necessary scripts ever written. Peele speaks directly to and from his community, fearless and unflinching. He tells the world: I am here. I will not be quiet. I will not apologize. He forces those who have stolen voices like his for decades to listen.
And that’s why I was furious and extremely upset when Terrifier creator Damien Leone said he wanted to remain “apolitical,” as if that were still an option. As if silence weren’t complicity.
As a filmmaker who fled my home overnight with nothing—no future, no guarantee I’d survive, only the instinct to keep going—I already experience gatekeeping in every studio meeting, in every whispered conversation about what stories are “marketable.” Gatekeeping is a shadow I live under, Nosferatu’s hand on my shoulder, always lingering. And the last place I ever expected to find it was in the mind of an independent horror director.
Everyone has the right to tell the stories they choose—or to say nothing at all. But what message are we sending to the next generation of queer, immigrant, outsider filmmakers? The ones still clawing their way into this industry? The ones whose stories are waiting to be told?
That’s an open question. But it’s one that Jordan Peele, Jane Schoenbrun with I Saw the TV Glow, and Coralie Fargeat with The Substance, answered not too long ago. And way before them, Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, George A. Romero, and the legends of horror all knew the truth.
Horror has never been neutral. Horror has always belonged to the outcasts, to the rebels, to the people who refuse to be erased.
And I refuse to be erased. Even if the fight sucks me dry. Even if it buries me alive.
Categorized:Editorials
