Gay filmmakers and fans to invade NYC's Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors

As the site's resident horror hound, I'm always on the lookout for queer horror stories to share that don't involve being forced to recap late-season episodes of Brothers & Sisters. (Zing!)

Enter Fangoria, the longest-running and most venerable horror publication, which for decades has been serving up scoops, reviews and musty must-see curiosities to genre fans everywhere. This weekend the mag is hosting its Weekend of Horrors in NYC (at the Javits Center) and it's giving gore-gore gays like me plenty of reasons to attend, the least of all being the premiere of A Far Cry From Home, a nasty hate-crime cautionary tale from queer filmmaker Alan Rowe Kelly.

Kelly and I have been friends for years (you may remember him from the Blood Work! True Blood vlog series) but we met professionally, at a horror film festival in San Francisco where we both had films showing. We've been tight ever since, and I actually had the chance to see an early cut of Far Cry a while back. The story of a troubled gay couple whose trip to the country becomes a nightmare when they run afoul of religious fanatics, it's nasty, uncompromising, and unsettling stuff, and it's pretty ballsy for Fangoria to be hosting the premiere of such a dyed-in-the-wool queer film on Friday night, the fest's kickoff. 

Here's what Alan has to say:

I’m very excited and especially thrilled that Fangoria has stood behind this little film from their first viewing and have been so supportive in writing about it and promoting it as a true piece of horror ... I didn’t expect A Far Cry From Home to become so personal to me until I actually finished editing it. I never realized that the message of HATE could be brought to the screen with such brutal force and remain in the genre as a modern piece of horror and not an obvious ‘message‘ film.

Torchwood and Buffy star James Marsters

If it sounds like Far Cry might be too much for you to take, never fear — the fest offers plenty of other gay and gay-friendly guests, including Torchwood's James Marsters, Six Feet Under's Ben Foster, horror hunk Joe Zaso and the legendary Betsy Palmer (Mrs. Voorhees from Friday the 13th).

More than anything, it's great to see gay visibility making headway even in a perhaps unexpected arena as horror movies (Fangoria even launched a gay blog on its website last year from gay filmmaker Sean Abley). If you're a queer for fear and in the NYC area over the weekend, definitely stop by the fest and get messy.