Director Stewart Thorndike puts a queer spin on The Shining in the claustrophobic indie thriller Bad Things

Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) has recently inherited her grandmother’s abandoned hotel, and has returned to stay in it for a few days with her girlfriend Cal (Hari Nef), their friend Maddie (Rad Pereira) and seductive tagalong Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones).

Despite feeling uncomfortable there, Ruthie is hoping to use the trip fix her and Cal’s troubled relationship. She’s also reluctantly entertaining the idea of keeping and running the hotel with Cal instead of selling. After an unexpected moment of infidelity, the weekend takes some increasingly unusual turns and it soon seems as though they’re not alone in the hotel.

Co-starring Molly Ringwald, this claustrophobic indie thriller takes some loose inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, putting a decidedly queer spin on the haunted hotel subgenre. Director Stewart Thorndike, who burst onto the scene with the equally chilling queer horror indie Lyle in 2014, is also the perfect filmmaker to take on a Kubrick homage. She had an acting role in the auteur’s final film Eyes Wide Shut and got a first-hand glimpse into his mastery.

 

Watch the trailer for Bad Things below and click here to pre-order your copy. The film will be available on DVD starting this week at TLAgay.

 

Halloween Highlights: 50 Queer Horror Flicks We Think Are Worth a Look – Part 3

If you’re the same kind of scare-seeking movie geek that I am, you’ll know that October is a time to light a few candles, turn down the lights, open up the windows to let in that fresh autumn breeze… before really setting the mood with some seasonally-appropriate scary movies! Being authorities on all things gay-cinema, though, we at TLAgay.com wanted to put in a good word for some queer movies that don’t make the usual ranked horror lists. We came up with a selection of 50 different gay titles that are either direct horror movies or horror adjacent (suspense, mysteries, thrillers). Below, you’ll find part three of our ongoing list – in alphabetical order – with new lists appearing each Monday in October. Keep checking back each week for the latest additions!

 

We tried to limit these to films that are currently available on our site – either on DVD or Blu-ray, or available via our On-Demand service. If a movie is missing from this list, chances are good it’s just out of print or otherwise currently unavailable/hard to access. This isn’t, as you’ll see, a definitive list of the greatest gay horror – that’s not what we were going for. This is just a sampling of some offerings that usually fly under the radar. Some are good, some are great, some are delightfully campy and ridiculous, some might be downright terrible, but they’re all available to help get your into the Halloween spirit!

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