DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Turning The Tables
They/Them fulfills John Logan’s dream of making a queer-heroic slasher film
So who’s going to survive? Place your bets now.
IT’S TOUGH TO FIND AN ORIGINAL YET organic backdrop for a modern horror story any more, especially for a slasher film. But for queer writer/director John Logan, there’s a particular scenario that he’s long had his eye on for exploration: gay conversion camps.
These controversial enclaves are meant to “turn” homosexual teens towards straight lives through a variety of physical and psychological tactics. Logan tells Red Alert that the experiences of friends who endured these camps inspired his directorial debut for Blumhouse, They/Them.
“I was struck by the monstrousness of it,” Logan says of the practice. “Sometimes it was done in a religious setting, and sometimes in a secular setting. But it always seemed to me to be a horror movie, because most of these places are camps. They’re set apart. They’re in the desert or they’re in the mountains.