Review: “Bad Things” Queers the Classics With Claustrophobic Gay Horror
Stewart Thorndike’s sophomore feature draws on horror classics for a slow-burn queer thriller
by Jayne O’Dwyer
“Where are all the female Travis Bickles and Jack Torrances?” asked writer-director Stewart Thorndike when her sophomore feature was acquired by Shudder this past spring. It’s an ambitious question for the indie horror director, who was previously best known for Lyle, a debut film that was described as a “lesbian Rosemary’s Baby” and distributed mostly for free. Partnering with the horror genre’s de facto streamer is a big step up worthy of Bad Things, her equally ambitious attempt at an answer.
Like Lyle, Bad Things also lends itself to a pithy summary: a gay version of The Shining. Four queer friends–Ruthie, Cal, Maddie, and Fran—decide to spend a snowy weekend at an abandoned hotel that Ruthie has just inherited from her grandmother. She plans to sell the upstate New York property with the help of her mother, who is on the premises yet remains elusive, communicating only through cryptic text messages. Cal, Ruthie’s girlfriend, hopes that Ruthie will propose over the weekend. Maddie, Cal’s ex, brings Fran, with whom Ruthie once cheated on Cal. And when Ruthie isn’t texting her mother or hate-pining for Fran, she watches videos of hospitality guru Miss Auerbach, a devilishly seductive Molly Ringwald. Jack Torrance’s setup seems downright simple compared to this claustrophobic, queer mess!
Thorndike’s indie powerhouse cast of Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Rad Pereira, and Annabelle Dexter-Jones more than meets the challenge of communicating the film’s tangled web of intimacy. Every frame leaves the audience with an intense sense of what each character yearns for, from love to acceptance to validation, as well as the way their tempers flare in the tight quarters of the hotel. These claustrophobic surroundings bring the resulting fights to life, heightened by the death and decay of the hotel itself.
But no Shining re-imagining would be complete without its own touch of the supernatural. In Bad Things, this is provided by Fran—who says she’s “sensitive to energy,” a notion that’s quickly written off by the group until she starts seeing phantoms in the dining hall—and the hotel’s own morbid history. (Five people died while it was in operation, a figure that Cal—an indecently funny Nef—insists is “not that many.”) But despite the haunting presence of their own interpersonal histories and the mounting sense that the hotel itself is closing in, Ruthie and her friends are never truly trapped: where The Shining isolated its characters in remote, mountainous terrain, Bad Things situates its story in a building whose closest link to the outside world is a strip mall one parking lot over. Watching four East Coast elites spiraling down through isolation and interpersonal conflict makes for great schadenfreude until you realize they were one train ride away from a major city the whole time.
Favoring psychological scares over slasher kills, Bad Things finds its footing in dark humor, mommy issues, and mounting tension.
Whether maintaining similarities through the use of twins and the familiar tools of atmospheric horror or deviating with a less-remote setting, Thorndike’s choices reward seasoned horror viewers. And it’s not just The Shining that comes up for re-evaluation and revision under Thorndike’s lens. In the film’s opening shot, we see Ruthie traipsing through the snow, chainsaw in hand, drawing a visual comparison to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s (1974) Leatherface. This is particularly notable because that film’s iconic killer has also been the subject of a queer reevaluation. Treated poorly by the other members of the cannibalistic Sawyers clan,, Leatherface wears the skin of female faces as different masks: the “Grandma” mask for preparing food, the “Pretty Lady” mask, eyeshadow and all, for eating dinner. This cruel mistreatment at the hands of his own family coupled with his fluid gender expression makes Leatherface a potentially queer-coded figure, a fact made easier to see once Thorndike draws a direct parallel between the icon we know and her (Chekhov’s) chainsaw-wielding protagonist. She makes the case for queer horror always being there, and does so by building off a horror classic we did not even recognize as queer.
As we watch Ruthie unravel and isolate herself from her friends, we can see echoes of both Torrance and Leatherface; the lynchpin imploding the group’s relationships and the family punching-bag fighting back. It’s a devastating performance from Gayle Rankin, who deftly handles the psychological unmooring and brute physicality required of the role. Favoring psychological scares over slasher kills, Bad Things finds its footing in dark humor, mommy issues, and mounting tension. It’s a film that’s just begging to be streamed in a dark room with your closest friends when the film releases in August.
An exciting indie entry in the annals of horror, Thorndike’s Bad Things is a sharp, funny film that sheds new light on queer-coded classics while paving the way for more explicitly gay, female-led horror. Yet no matter how scares may evolve with the times, Eighties icon Molly Ringwald tells us what will never change in this genre: “Bad things happen to little girls who are left alone.”
Jayne O’Dwyer is a writer and MFA candidate at Columbia University. She is based in New York. Her work has appeared in Byline, passerby, and STRUGGLE magazine.
