Queer Horror, Wicked Witches, and Why We Need Monsters

In this episode of Horror Heals, Corey sits down with Heather, the force behind Queer for Fear. Part One of this two-parter dives deep into the queer relationship with horror, the villains we secretly love, and how the genre became a lifeline for outsiders looking for a mirror in pop culture.

Heather shares her personal journey of grief and discovery, from the death of her brother to finding both healing and community through horror. We talk about growing up as queer Gen X kids obsessed with VHS covers, discovering horror through films like Fright Night and Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and why the Wicked Witch of the West may be one of the greatest queer icons of all time (sorry Dorothy, but stealing shoes off a corpse is a bad look).

This conversation is funny, heartfelt, and full of chills—the perfect reminder that horror isn’t just about monsters on screen, it’s about survival, identity, and connection.

Queer Horror, Wicked Witches, and Why We Need Monsters

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

• Why Heather started Queer for Fear and how horror became the center of her academic and creative work
• The Wicked Witch as a queer villain icon—and why Glinda might actually be the real monster in The Wizard of Oz
• The healing power of horror as a trauma processor
• The messy joy of growing up in the 80s horror aisle, when VHS covers were pure nightmare fuel
• Reclaiming films once mocked (Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Fright Night) as part of queer horror canon
• How horror conventions evolved from “black-shirt bros” to radically inclusive spaces

Why You Should Listen:

If you’ve ever felt like the weirdo in the room, this episode will feel like home. Heather’s insights are sharp, hilarious, and deeply moving—a reminder that horror heals not just through screams, but through belonging.

Links & Resources:

• Follow Heather on Instagram: @queerforfear
• Check out Heather’s book: Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by How the Cow Ate the Cabbage LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Hello, foils and dudes. It's your old pal trying to hear the voice of the good people. And I want to welcome my good friends of the Horror Heels podcast. Is horror good for mental wellness? But of course it is. I delight in the delicious deaths of beautiful people on the silver street. So get ready for a hell of a good time with my new fiends, Cory and Kendall, on the Horror Heels Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Welcome back to Horror Heels, the podcast where we celebrate the monsters that scare us, the villains we secretly root for, and the communities that keep us coming back for more and more. In today's episode, I sit down with Heather, who has turned a lifelong obsession with horror into groundbreaking academic work, and a vibrant queer horror community. We dive into the Wicked Witch of the West as a queer icon, why Fright Knight and Nightmare on Elm Street 2 mean more than just cheap thrills, and how growing up in the 80s meant discovering horror through VHS covers that were sometimes scarier than the movies themselves. Heather's story reminds us that horror isn't just fun, it's a way to process grief, claim identity, and carve out space when the world tries to render you invisible. But don't worry, we keep it lively too, because yes, Linda might actually be the real villain of the Wizard of Oz. So let's get into part one of my conversation with Heather. Oh Heather, welcome to the Horror Heals podcast. That's a lot of H's in there.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

I wanted to like introduce you as your um aka on your Instagram, but I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. So you mind uh what is your also known as on Instagram?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

You can totally you can say that. You can totally say own it. Say it with like verb and viv, like like just say it real good.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Heather is also known as Dr. Horror Dyke. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

It sounds like also another, like, yeah, your Instagram, Queer for Fear, I love that. You know, just it's instantly tells you what it's all about and that we need more representation in mainstream, especially. And I think we're starting to see things going that in the horror world a little bit more. Like we're seeing like really quirky, great films are like becoming mainstream hits. Like I just watched Weapons last night. I'm like, what the hell did I just watch?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, it it it is a horror. I think between Sinners and Weapons this year, I think it's two of at least the highest-grossing films so far. Yeah, which just because they're both very idiosyncratic personal projects.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Right. I love it. I love that we're just not in complete world of like reboots and sequels and stuff. I mean, those are still out there, of course, and you know, we I don't know about you, but we love all horror, good and bad.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Oh, yeah, I'm a total trash panda. It's like I have opinions. It's like, I mean, I have, you know, you go into any kind of movie, you have your own personal take, and then I have to always like measure myself. Met Weapons is a perfect example. I saw it and I had a very quick reaction to it personally, but then I have to step back and be like, hey, this is art, this is a cultural product, everyone's gonna come to it with their own baggage, their own lens. And just because I have certain issues with it, I also think Gladys is amazing, right? Like what an iconic, like I mean, I don't want to spoil, I mean, I shouldn't say anything.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, I mean, I've I've been careful, I mean, I watched the trailer before seeing it, but I've been lucky to not really know too much more than that. And the trailer really doesn't tell you that much once you see the movie. It's like even I was halfway through and I'm like, is this gonna be a horror movie? I'm like, oh, just wait.

unknown 4:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

It is it it's a lot of pace, it's got a pace going, and it's like, yeah, what I will say again is that I'm so happy for just original. Like, even if I have personal things with certain films, I'm just so happy for just completely original films doing their own thing. And like you said, it's like I'm not anti I'm not anti-franchises because horror is built out of like a zillion franchises. So I'm not anti-any of that. But but there was a moment with Hollywood where you just feel like if it was a original idea, they were like, no, it has to have some kind of intellectual IP that's been going on for blah, blah, blah. So exactly.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Yeah. Yes, you hit it right there. So can we talk a little bit about why you decided this approach of like talking about and writing about horror and queerness?

SPEAKER_01 5:05

The reason I have the Instagram Queer for Fear is that my like off off being recorded, we were talking about how 2016 seems to be some sort of start. Maybe it was when David Bowie died. There also was a weasel that got into a particle collider in Switzerland and did something bad, which I'm also like, are we living in another like lesser dimension that's just filled with shit? So my younger brother died in 2016, and it kind of put me into a God, I don't want to say a tailspin, but it hit me really hard. It was like he was my only brother, and it was, yeah, it's your younger sibling. And seeing, you know, holding my younger dead brother's hand in a hospital bed, just like it made me feel like I had to do something different with my life. And my partner was like, I've always been obsessed with horror since I was a kid. She was basically like, I think you need to do something with horror. And that I started looking for PhD programs because enough time had like gone by that I for like when I had did my master's like years before, I had forgotten that sometimes I really have a hard time with academia and some of the institutionalization parts of academia. But I started looking for a PhD program where I could do something with horror. And once I found a place that would finally take on a horror project that was specifically a queer-centered horror project, I created queer for fear, not knowing what I was exactly gonna do at first with the like with the queerness and horror in the PhD, but I knew I needed to start creating community. And that's why I started it. And it felt very much, you know, I can't remember, I think it was like 2017, maybe the beginning of 2018 I started. And it's been really like fun and gratifying to watch that world just balloon out and balloon out and balloon out. Like the fact that you have a podcast that's horror heals. Now, I'm not saying that it's a hundred percent like a queer podcast, but it kind of by default is right.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Well, yeah, it's two gay guys who are the hosts.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Yeah. So when I was doing my original research, there was uh Scream Queens and that was it. There was like one one one guy doing really explicit analysis from a queer lens. And then by the time I had finished my PhD, I couldn't even honestly name them all right now because there were so many queer lens horror podcasts. If you had any specific questions about queer for fear or the PhD, I'm happy to answer any of that.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Did you get any kind of mixed reactions when your family or or friends like when you said, like, this is what I'm gonna do, this is what I'm gonna focus on for my PhD? Like, were they like, huh?

SPEAKER_01 7:49

No, I think that anyone who actually knows me knows that I'm a horror person. I'm a horror gay. I've always been a horror gay. So there wasn't any of that. I think that the reaction was like, are you really going back to school again? I think that was more the reaction. And the more interesting part of the reaction was finding a university that would take a queer horror project like that. I have a very, very, very small family. I grew up with a mom and a brother. And then when I was a teenager, I got a baby sister, but with such a large age difference. If she's really mad at me, she'll yell, I didn't ask for two moms.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Oh yeah. I got that after my dad died.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

So I don't I think they were just supportive the whole time, all the way through. I have no memories of him not being supportive.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Which came first for you? Was it the love of horror or the discovery of your queerness?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Interestingly, I think they're intertwined in a way that I didn't have language for. So, you know, as a tiny, tiny little like kid, I was like obsessed with people will be like, you know, I've been asked, like, what's your horror route? Or you know, when did you first get turned on a horror? And I'm always like, yeah, I think the Wicked Witch of the West was my first. Like, I was so, so, so drawn to her. And I was little, I mean, I was like, you know, two, three years old, Wizard of Oz playing, you know, it was one of those things that was always on TV back when we had like three stations. Kids don't know that those things went off the air. I was always drawn to the Wicked Witch of the West. The next like real flashbold moment was later on I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was a teen, and it totally like kind of rearranged my brain. And I think that in some ways, even though when I was little, I didn't have words for being queer. We were little queer, like we were little queer things, little queer entities before we had the language. And I think there was something about the outsider-ness, because I remember when I was a little bit older, not the first time I saw The Wicked Witch of the West, but I really did see Wizard of Oz like multiple times a year, every year, kind of my entire life. Like it still happens to this day. I always like I remember the first time when I was maybe like six, seven, something like that. I remember being like, but you killed her sister. Like, I kind of get why she's so pissed. And so it was just one of those things that like before I had any knowledge or language for like the villain's root story of like how the villain always has a reason for being the way they are, that I think it's all entwined with my queerness because there's an outsider-ness to all of that. And then I came out early. I mean, for like, you know, for my generation, kind of I feel like you said something like, you know, I'm a Gen Xer, and I came out pretty early. I came out in 1983, and I was yeah, I didn't think of the repercussions of what would happen by doing that in junior high school, and I was living in Arizona at the time, and there were repercussions for doing that at that time. But all of that, like my queerness and my love of horror, I can't separate the two. So I can't do the chicken or the egg game with them because I think somehow they're I mean, that's kind of what I I literally argue it in my book. I think that for queer people, there's an ontological connection to the genre, so it's hard to disentangle those two because it's so felt inside of us.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, Kendall and I totally agree. And thank you for bringing up The Wicked Witch because she's popped into my head a couple of times during interviews, and I haven't had the opportunity to talk about that, but you totally like the same thing like, Yes, you killed her sister. That was one of the go-to movies that my grandparents were growing up. We spent a lot of weekends with them, and they had like a laser displayer. We're both Gen X, so yeah. And so and they Wizard of Oz, you know, that was like we probably watched it every time we were there. And the at first I was a little, you know, terrified of the witch and the monkeys, and but it just she stays with you. And the amazing thing, Margaret Hamilton, just one of the greatest performances of all time. Yes, she's got so a little screen time, but she is such a strong force in that movie. It's you know, I just ooh, I'm getting like chills thinking about it, and I really want to go and see the thing at the sphere in Las Vegas that's about to open where that's like the whole immersive thing at starting. Next week, I think they're actually starting, and it's gonna be like the movie, but they've got a bazillion speakers and all this visual stuff, and they're incorporating scent and all this stuff. It's like, wow, that's just the reason enough to go to Vegas in my mind.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

100%. I'm like, now I'm really upset. Someone sponsors, get us there.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I actually for the hundreds of times I've seen that film, I never once thought about the fact that literally Margaret Hamilton doesn't have that much screen time because that presence is it's kind of like Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. You forget that he's actually only on screen. So I guess if you nail your delicious villain part just right, it's like you own the movie in a really weird way. And not only did they kill her sister, they stole her fucking shoes right off her feet.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Yeah, totally. Glinda might be the real villain of the whole space.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Showing up in that bubble, really.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Yeah, exactly. Oh, you got so thank you again for touching on that because that is one of my favorites, and we've got you know, Wicked Witch and Miss Skulch ornaments on our Christmas tree. I mean, we're into it for sure.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

And I got to, there's this awesome movie theater outside of Chicago. They have a themed theater, so they did like a Wizard of Oz room where you could actually watch it. And I got to interview and meet a few of the last living munchkins. And the owner, I was in his office interviewing him and he had to pop out from it. He has one of the original pairs of the ruby slippers. I didn't touch them. I wanted but I respected it.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah, I would want to touch them, but then in my head I'd be like, don't touch them. These are like historical artifact. Don't get your greasy little paws all over it, Heather.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Right, like what if one of the rubies came off in my finger or something, you know? And like I want to all went off. It'd be a jail.

unknown 14:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Do the children still watch Wizard of Oz? Is it something that is still being passed down?

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Like, I will have to ask Bernice's nephews about it. And then I've got my step siblings have young kids. I wonder if they've been exposed to it yet, just because it is so iconic. I mean, how can you not?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

How can you know it's just Yeah, that's uh part of me is like, of course, but then I used, I asked someone recently if they were a friend of Dorothy and they're like, What the fuck are you talking about? I'm like, wait, what are you talking about? You don't know what that means?

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

So I was like, oh, okay, well, either A, you're completely not, or the youngins aren't we have to make sure as queer elders we are passing along the coded ways of understanding family.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, you know, we're both genetics, and I think probably a lot of our exposure to horror was like 80s stuff. And there wasn't a lot of overtly queer stuff in mainstream horror films in the 80s until you know Nightmare on Elm Street 2 came along. Yeah, it's I'm glad it's finally getting like the filmmakers are finally embracing the whole yeah. It's a queer movie. I'm sort of denying because it's like, you know, and it's I think it's coming like I getting remastered and coming out this year, and there's like I guess it's like not that there's like missing scenes or anything like that, but just the way that they remastered it, like it looks better than it's ever looked before. So I can't wait to see it in 4K.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah, it's great. I mean, and I'm old enough to remember when it came out, and it was definitely one of those films that man, did the horror community go after it. I mean, and when I say the horror community, it's like in the mid-80s when I'm a teenager and into horror, like there was no place for me to find horror fandom. I mean, especially because I was Afab, meaning I was assigned female at birth, and it was definitely not anything that like you know, little quote unquote girls are supposed to be into. So that film got like really it was weirdly because they didn't even oh because it's quote unquote subtext, but as you said, the subtext is so in your face. I'm pretty sure it's just queer text at this point in time. But the way it was received was I just remember being in school and like people talking about it, and then just being like literally like they didn't have the language to know that it was a queer narrative and what was going on in the narrative, but they could use kind of slurs to talk about the movie. Yeah. I'm really happy that that film finally has a new place in the horror canon of especially the queer horror canon.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

I don't know what the horror bros think, but are there movies that kind of jump out at you that are like maybe that was a little bit more subtext than it was overt, but that you were drawn to because of the the queerness of the film?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Oh, Fright Knight. I was obsessed with Fright Knight. And it's like that's another one that's like they say it's subtextual, but I'm like, is because I feel like it's right there. Yeah. I totally could identify with you know, Evil Eddie and the friend, the friend who just didn't fit in no matter what. I'm just talking about like what is actually on screen and that relationship with the two, you know, the two older, you know, quote unquote older. I mean, I was a teen when that movie came out, so it's like the next door neighbors, you know, Chris Randon was older, right? And like, what's going on with that relationship where they literally will like the one character who's more we now know is the caretaker, but they would literally physically hang all of each other. And I remember that's how desperate. Yeah, I don't want to speak for all of us, but I'm gonna speak for all of us. I felt like when you were young and queer and you just didn't have that, you would grab for any fucking crumb. And two men touching was a crumb. Yeah, because I wasn't gonna see two women touching, or if I did, it was always desexualized. So it's a real complicated thing. And I just talked about this recently on a panel where someone asked me, they basically asked why so many of my references were gay male. And I'm like, because that's what I saw, that's what I saw growing up. Women were invisible to me, lesbians were invisible to me because they were rendered invisible by society in so many ways. So I had gay men, and that's how I knew I was gonna be okay. Is that I'm like, if they could live out and proud, like Paul Lind is one of my heroes, and I'm not even joking. Like I loved Paul Lynde. Oh, yeah. So I'm trying to think of other horror films. So I wrote a book called Queer for Fear, Horror Film, and the Queer Spectator, and in that book I argue multiple things. So one of the things we already covered is I argued that queers ontologically have a connection to the horror genre. So because it's ontological, it's like all horror had meaning to me growing up in some kind of capacity. So when you say horror heals, you know, I dedicated an entire chapter to basically the healing power of horror, horror as a trauma processor. Yeah. And you know, 80s also, I feel like we were so lucky to be kids in the 80s when those horror movies are coming out. Cause man, they were like a special ilk of horror. And I love horror, so I love old things. I mean, 70s also had incredible horror films. I'm not denigrating any other time, but to be a kid in the 80s going to mall theaters and seeing horror movies, it was a special time. Oh, I don't know where you grew up, but I grew up first part of my life was in Brooklyn. Then we moved to Arizona, then we moved to San Diego.

SPEAKER_03 19:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Video stores a lot of times would put horror in the back, kind of just one section removed from the adult section. Right. And yeah, I just remember always going and scanning every single cover because also VHS horror covers are an art form onto themselves.

SPEAKER_03 19:51

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

And it's how you picked your movies, right? Because I didn't have I didn't have a subscription to Fangory, I didn't have a subscription to like famous Monsters of Filmland because I was a poor kid growing up. And you know, just in culture, you would get to know about the things that broke through, but otherwise you're just looking at covers, right? Like, so like seeing the house cover with the little skeleton hand pushing the thing. I'm like, that I'm gonna rent that.

SPEAKER_03 20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Or, you know, I just also told this story, but as I remember like my it's a long story, but my like father died when I was young, and his mom, to be closer to him, would send for his kids, like me and my brother, to live back in Brooklyn every summer. And so we'd have like a every Friday we can go rent a movie, and I'd be in the horror section, you know, pulling the movies. I remember looking at the cover for I Spit on Your Grave and being like, Can I rent this, Grandma? Yeah, she looks like a strong woman totally. Yeah, she didn't she didn't know. I will tell you that like at as the movies started and she was like walking around doing stuff at one point, I think she saw what was happening and was like, that got taken off. Like that was the end of that was the end of that. But I also said it kind of left me in a really weird space because I you know taught like talking about the genre rape revenge. Rape revenge was the only sub-genre in my research that more horror-loving queers disliked than liked or loved. But also my research, I learned how incredibly important that subgenre is to a lot of sexual assault survivors to process their trauma. So the thing that wound up happening was that I saw the rape, but I never got to see the revenge. And it left like a weird psychic scar in my head. Like, but what about you? What are some of the ones that you like are films that you really attached to?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Well, well, definitely Fright Knight, but when you mentioned that, the first thing I thought of was Night of the Creeps because I really related to the friend, you know, the friend on the crutches.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

And you know, just like, why am I just so drawn to this character? You know, why am I so upset that he's infected now? You know, it you know, I didn't know. Like I I came out a little bit later. I think I was 20, right around 20. But it was like yeah, I probably always knew, you know, about because I mean this is like, why am I why am I drawn to this?

SPEAKER_03 22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Yes. And Monster Squad, you know, of course, you know, like the the Rudy Rudy character, you know, I've in my past I was kind of drawn to the bad boys, you know. So yeah, and I mean and the 80s just kind of spoon-fed us all this this stuff, whether on purpose or not. But it was as you said, it was a great time to grow up because it was such a wide variety of stuff out there, you know, for us to discover. Like I can say that Elliot was my first crush at like seven years old. So I've yet to tell Henry Thomas that, but I did mention it to D. Wallace and she said, Oh yeah, tell him.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Oh, I love that. I think you should tell him. It's like I think there was something about the 80s too, where especially we kind of also became the MTV generation where dialogues around the cultural products became expanded. It's like they accordioned out. So Freddie just didn't live in the movie. Freddie lived beyond the movie because I was obsessed with the nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And it was like I don't think any other generation really had that kind of accordion out where all of a sudden Freddie is like literally on MTV, like Robert England's doing a bit, or in the videos for Dream Warriors and stuff like that. So I think that yeah, I think horror is just, I mean, I love the fact that you know, to hark again on the title Horror Heals. I just think it's really it feels special to me that we're actually using like you dedicate all of this energy to talking to people about the healing power of horror. And I'm sure you're talking to all kinds of humans. So I specialize in the queer relationship to horror, but that doesn't take away anything from anybody else. It's just that I think that the queer relationship to horror is distinctive and special above all other marginalized identities. But horror itself, I mean, it's literally the genre of trauma, right? So of course, people would come to it to figure out ways to process through their own different traumas. And like the thing is with horror, it's all kinds of traumas. It's like physical trauma, psychological trauma, existential trauma, psychic trauma, all the traumas are there. So I think it's such a powerful genre. I mean, I wouldn't have dedicated, like in some ways, I've dedicated my life to horror in some ways.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Thank you for doing that. You know, beyond just being able to share that outsider experience with watching the films. Like I was a comic book nerd growing up and stuff, so I'd been to comic cons and stuff, but going to actually just horror conventions totally changed my life. It was like, oh, this is everybody's accepted. We're all the weirdos here. We're all weirdos. As long as it's not 100 degrees outside when I go to horror cons. We're pretty sure that this is a gay guy because I dress pretty like my suits are flamboyant, like they're a little blinding, blinding sequenty, you know, whatever. I will do several costume changes through the day. I get nothing but compliments. I've never had anybody say anything negative.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

No, I love that. I I think it's also shifted because someone, I'm sure there's uh, you know, I didn't come across it in my research, but I'm sure there's someone who's done something about this when it talks about horror fandom and conventions. Because I went to my first convention when I was a teenager and it was the Fangoria weekend of horrors that was in LA, and it wasn't a very welcoming space. It was a different time, right? It was like, I can't remember if it was 89, 90, or 91. It was a very like the horror fan that was predominant was what I still call like the black short horror bros, who are the cishet guys who feel a particular I don't know. It's like when I talk to them about horror, I'll just say I feel like I've never felt like how did we like do we see the same thing? Because that is absolutely not what I see out of that film. But when I started going to conventions, I started going to my first horror cons right when I started my PhD, I was like, Oh, I need to really understand this. And you're right, they're like, the horror cons now is kind of like it's kind of like the craft took over. Like, we're the weirdos, mister. It's kind of like it there was a reclamation that came from all sorts of marginalized people who loved horror who just come to these cons and they are such a lovely space. Overall, overall, there's still moments, and I still wish that I had the resources to create. I have a few friends and I who always want to create specifically a queer horror con that travels. It kind of equalizes the ability for little queers, you know, little queerdos who are stuck in areas where it's either financially not feasible to get to a horror con to be able to have that experience, but it would take so much money that I don't have.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Yeah, but if enough of us kind of team up, it's certainly doable. Okay, that's part one with Heather. And I love how much ground we covered already. Queerness, grief, healing through horror, the outsider-ness of villains, and why those dusty VHS covers in the back of the video store mattered so much. Heather shows us that horror is more than just chump scares or gore. It's art, it's community, and for many of us, it's therapy, but with better special effects. From the wicked witch to Freddy Krueger to overlook gems like Frank Knight, horror reflects our fears and our desires, sometimes more honestly than the so-called serious genres ever could. Stick around for part two where we scrape even deeper into Heather's book, The Power of Horror Conventions, and How Phantom itself has become a healing space. Until then, remember, horror heals. Sometimes it heals by making you scream, sometimes by making you laugh, and sometimes by letting you know that you are never the only weirdo after all. And remember, when somebody And don't forget, when someone asks, is horror good for mental wellness? You tell them, of course it is.