‘The Covenant’ is Really Hot Queer-Coded Horror
The first memory I have of ever seeing a same sex couple on my television is Richard Clabaugh’s Python. No, seriously. The film opens with a lesbian couple camping in the woods, the first to fall victim to the titular giant snake. Otherwise, the early 2000s were a wasteland, especially in the horror world, even more so in the horror world I had access to as a kid in the suburbs. That’s why I loved shows like Buffy and Supernatural. I could carve out identities for myself, or at least ogle the hot young stars fighting monsters. And in 2006, I was really, really into Renny Harlin’s The Covenant.
The Covenant is a queer-coded masterclass in teen horror. Think any of David DeCoteau’s movies with a much larger budget (and, unfortunately, less conspicuous queerness). A bunch of hunks, including Steven Strait, former Abercrombie model, Taylor Kitsch, and Sebastian Stan are among the descendants of the only surviving colonial witch families. They’re dubbed the Sons of Ipswich, which makes them popular and rich, though their supernatural abilities are unknown to everyone outside their coven.
And what does that coven do, exactly? The thrust is the battle with Stan’s Chase Collins, a new student who is looking to consume the others’ powers, but on the periphery, there’s a lot of swimming, midnight rendezvous, and shirtless phone calls. Much has been written about The Covenant’s unintentional (or maybe not) queerness, including by Justin McDevitt at Rue Morgue and DeVaughn Taylor at Horror Press (whose interpretation of protagonist Caleb as a young man combatting his own latent queerness I’m partial to). Rather than revisiting the film with another queer theory lens, I’m instead going to credit The Covenant for something else entirely: it was hot.
This is not me being shallow (though it certainly is in some sense). Yes, there are constraints here, namely a very specific kind of cisgender, white guy hot, and to its detriment, The Covenant often plays like the prelude before any number of Sean Cody movies. It’s very 2006 in that way, dated in terms of optics, though that regression is simultaneously part of its charm. Hear me out. As a young kid exploring his own sexuality through horror at the time, there was a place, an important one, for shallow, objectifying queer horrors. The Covenant was stripped of realism and is firmly in the camp of not only camp, but also fantasy. Keep in mind, the Sons of Ipswich are not only hot and chiseled, but rich. Really, really rich.
It’s pure fantasy, an only-in-the-movies depiction of what a secret, surviving coven of witches might look like, but my adolescent brain wasn’t trained to respond to anything more. Small as it might seem, the shallow charm was the point. The Covenant was hot guys doing hot guy things. Queer cinema, especially queer horror, is much richer than that. It’s also much more political, and through an adult lens, The Covenant itself is imbued with considerable social commentary. Yet it operates as baby’s first queer horror movie all the same, a safe option for exploring burgeoning feelings without the threat of discovery. I could rent The Covenant, no questions asked. I’d have had a much harder time asking to check out Todd Haynes’ Poison.
It certainly helps that The Covenant is pure, unabashed camp, almost a prerequisite for subsequent queer reclamation. Director Renny Harlin exercises his Deep Blue Sea and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master muscles well here. While The Covenant isn’t as creatively successful as either of those, Harlin still has fun with all the tropes. Think nasty spiders and gaseous spirits hovering just out of frame. The soundtrack is also pure early aughts bliss, all loud and angry and cool. It’s very masculine, hyper-charged testosterone drums and electric guitars, but it works, augmenting the camp while also rendering the action that much hotter. The final fight is, after all, just a snowball fight in the rain—something needs to pull its weight to create the illusion we’re seeing really cool stuff.
And as a kid, I thought it was aggressively cool stuff. That was the dream. To be a Son of Ipswich and live in rich, private school seclusion with four hot dudes bound to me for life. There’s nothing a suburban, closeted geek would ever want more. The Covenant was horror as a gateway, a cacophonous opportunity for me to not only explore my own nascent desires, but also better understand them at the same time. I’ve expressed similar sentiments in older pieces of mine, but for my queer generation, we were right on the cusp. It was identification in shows like Courage the Cowardly Dog and shirtless witches that helped bridge the gap between exclusion and more prominent representation. The Covenant was hot and hunky, but it was also a lifeline, a buoy to which I could tether myself as I came into my own.
I’m more than eager to see which horror movies from this current generation carve out a queer niche of their own. The dialogue is different, as is the climate, and while circumstances are better, they’re not exactly great. I’d love more queer horror, but even today, that remains a pretty big ask save for the occasional treat. In the meantime, I’ll just have to rewatch The Covenant again and again. Steven might be Strait, but I’m certainly not.
The Covenant is now available to rent online. While a moderate box office success at the time of release, the film has since slipped into obscurity, relevant only to those of us who begged to see Steven Strait and Sebastian Stan kiss. I’d encourage you to check it out again, and if you do, let me know what you think over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
Categorized:Editorials
