Margaret Cho: ‘It’s f**king scary to live a queer life. Horror helps us rehearse fear without real danger’

In a world that so often feels as though it’s stacked against us, queer folk find solace in escapism.

Sometimes, that looks like a wild night out in the crevices of some underground queer bar, spilling drinks while watching drag queens lip sync for their lives. Other times, that might be laying at home under the covers, getting lost in the horrors of another world, watching someone bashing brains out in movies, or slay monsters in video games.

In Tina Romero’s gory-meets-glam horror comedy Queens of the Dead, it’s both. Set in a warehouse club in Bushwick, New York, the film follows an impressive rolodex of queer stars who start their night preparing for a huge blowout party with drag performers readying their acts, and end it covered in blood and guts, as zombies ravage Brooklyn. 

The rave-to-be is hosted by DJ Dre (Christy star Katy O’Brian), with a line-up of drag talent and queer folk ready to put on a show.

There’s exuberant headliner Yasmine (Pose star Dominique Jackson), kooky mother hen Ginsey Tonic (Drag Race star Nina West), Sam, a star who had all-but retired their drag persona Samoncé and is ready to make a comeback (played by A Strange Loop star Jaquel Spivey), and audacious performer Scrumptious (Tomás Matos of Fire Island fame).

Behind the bar is Doctor Odyssey actor Cheyenne Jackson as Jimmy, while I Saw The TV Glow star Jack Haven and comedian Margaret Cho play polar opposite butch-femme relationship duo, Kelsey and Pops. One of them is getting pulverised, the other is doing the pulverising.

“It’s f**king scary to live in a queer body, live a queer life in the world that we live in,” Cho told PinkNews ahead of the film’s release. “So I think horror helps us exorcise a lot of those demons where we can rehearse fear without real danger.”

Below, Margaret Cho and Jack Haven discuss how they would navigate a zombie invasion, why queer people would survive the apocalypse, and the enduring relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and horror.

PinkNews: Hello Margaret Cho and Jack Haven! In Queens of the Dead, your characters Pops and Kelsey deal with the apocalypse in very different ways. If you were in a zombie invasion, would your energy match your characters’?

Jack Haven: I would conserve my energy. I think I would, like, strap down. I’d be probably more like, very realistic. I think Kelsey… well first of all, she gets hit with an axe right away, so she can’t fight much. I think she starts to panic really quickly. I think I would not panic so fast. Who knows?

Margaret Cho: I think I would hopefully be more like Pops. I would like to be somebody that takes charge and makes sure that everybody is OK and that everybody understands what we’re going to do and we’ve got got a plan and we’re going to stick to it. But I’m not sure if I’d be that organised. I might panic and just run. I would hope to be more like my character if I could.

I’ve thought an unfathomable amount about how I would approach a zombie invasion. I’m heading to a garden centre; there’s weapons, food, all sorts. Have you spent much time thinking about your apocalypse plan?

Margaret: I would like to like take over – similar to a garden centre – but I think it would be an old school department store with the eateries on the bottom, so that you could go to sleep in like the homewear section where they have beds and furnishings. You could put on clothes from the clothing [department]. So we have the different floors that have the different services and if it’s abandoned, you could just live in there. I think that would be cool.

Jack: That’s so smart. That reminds me of a book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. They live in the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York]. I would go to the Met because then there’s knives and weapons too and armour [and] knights’ costumes and stuff. You got to think weapons. Got to think about the defense, you know?

Queer people obviously aren’t a homogenous group, but are there any skills most of us possess that would get us through an apocalypse?

Jack: Resourcefulness, I think will benefit queers. I think what won’t benefit us is that we laugh really loud. We might get caught. 

Margaret: Definitely, you’d find us right away. I do love just the brute strength of somebody like Katy O’Brian’s character, who just brings such muscle and such power. All that time spent in the gym is going to pay off. So, yes, it’s the muscle queens. It’s the ones that only drink protein shakes, that are always in a cutting phase. They’re like, ‘we’re going to actually use our muscles for something this time’.

Your characters, Pops and Kelsey, are lovers but are polar opposites. What do you think draws them to each other?

Margaret: I love the butch-femme dynamic. To me it’s very 1950s, it’s very classic. It’s a pairing we don’t see as often nowadays. I love the play on gender, the masculine and the feminine, yet it’s also lesbian. To me it’s really beautiful. It’s very classic. It’s the kind of girls I would see growing up as a young queer going to gay bars, but you just don’t see anymore. It’s antiquated but classic.

Jack: They really compliment each other so well. I feel like they both have what the other one covets. Pops has financial security and status and is very organised and domineering and Kelsey is very delicate and will surrender easily but is also sort of wicked in a way and I think Pops likes that. The playfulness of Kelsey is really infectious and allows Pops to break out of the spell of having to take care of everything.

Queer people have a very specific relationship with the horror genre. What is your personal relationship to horror?

Jack: I’ve done so many horror movies in the last three or four years that I’ve just been watching horror non-stop. I was really scared of it when I was a kid. The first one I watched was Carrie and then I was in a fit of shame for like a month being like, ‘I can’t believe I saw that!’ Then, just like everything else bad, I wanted more. Now I watch horror movies pretty much at least once a week.

Margaret: It’s so terrifying to be a queer person. It’s f**king scary to live in a queer body, live a queer life in the world that we live in. So I think horror helps us exorcise a lot of those demons where we can rehearse fear without real danger. I think that’s the need for queer people to watch horror. That’s the relationship that we have with it because we are usually in fear in life. So, why not have a safe place where we can work out those emotions through art? It’s a really important genre that I think that people don’t understand the necessity for for queerness in it. Which is why I love being a part of this project, which is so much [about] celebrating that.

Queens of the Dead is playing in select cinemas now and on Prime Video in the US.

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