Book Review - Desire after Dark: Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media - Richard Wolff

Aug 24, 2026

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Richard Wolff reviews Andrew J. Owen’s Desire after Dark: Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media, examining how queer identity and occult fantasy intertwine across film and television. The review highlights Owen’s Foucauldian historical approach to vampires, witches, warlocks, and monsters, and how audiences find pleasure in resistance to heteronormativity. It traces key eras from the 1960s and Stonewall through HIV/AIDS, then considers millennial coming-out narratives shaped by Tumblr, cable, and youth-oriented movies.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

Book Review

Core argument and theoretical framework

Historical analysis: television and film eras

Iconic films, censorship, and HIV/AIDS readings

Millennial depictions and youth media

Richard Wolff Book Review Andrew J. Owen, Desire after Dark Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021, 220 pages, ISBN: 978-0-253-05382-4 An evocative synergy exists between, on one hand, unabashedly queer identity and expression in the media and, on the other hand, the wondrous, even eagerly strange, worlds of occult-themed film and television, wherein that which is both queer and occult may be valued, explored, and enjoyed for its eccentricities. This observation lies at the heart of Andrew J. Owens’s excellent and insightful book Desire after Dark: Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media. Owens explores how non-normative, queer personas have emerged, evolved, and been celebrated by horror TV and film creators and fans over the past 60 years for their resistance to conformity, particularly in media focused on witchcraft and vampires. Basing his approach to queer media studies in part on Alexander Doty’s influential Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (1993), Owens explores how the production and reception of queer characters broadly conceived in occult media re-center and relish that which challenges “heteronormative hegemony”. Proceeding historically in Foucauldian fashion to mine how different eras and industrial practices reveal particular cultural engagements of the occultly articulated queer, Desire after Dark engagingly examines cinematic and televisual vampires, witches, warlocks, and other monsters for how they challenge the “straight” world by use of their queerly eccentric powers, and the pleasure particular audiences find in such resistance. Owens begins his analysis in the Sixties, where a convergence of shiftsin culture, industry, and audiences created new possibilities for television [168 | Richard Wolff www.jrfm.eu 2022](168 | Richard Wolff www.jrfm.eu 2022), 8/1, 168–172 DOI: 10. 25364/05 .8:2022 .1.10 programming and avant-garde film. The countercultural movements of the era opened the way to anti-assimilationist attitudes, particularly among youth who were reassessing prevailing ideas about sex, traditional values, and conformity. Following the lead of more tame TV programs of the era, such as the sitcoms Bewitched (ABC, US 1964–1972), The Addams Family (ABC, US 1964–1966), and The Munsters (CBS, US 1964–1966), which both celebrated the occultly strange and comically examined conventional gender roles and ideas of domesticity,“America’s first supernatural soap opera”, Dark Shadows (ABC, US 1966–1971), emerged to appeal to the countercultural youth market. Employing camp in the context of a genre whose very open-ended narrative resists stability, Dark Shadows’s vampiric storylines, centered around Barnabas Collins and other male characters, invited a fascination with the eccentric and opened avenues for queer readings. The same era saw changes in the film industry – particularly America’s elimination of the Hollywood Production Code and creation of the ratings system, and Britain’s reconsideration of its own restrictive film practices – give rise to more explicit depictions of same-sex desire explored in vampiric cinema. In this light, Owens smartly examines Hammer Films Productions’ Karnstein trilogy – Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, GB 1970), Lust for a Vampire (Jimmy Sangster, GB 1971), and Twins of Evil (John Hough, GB 1971)– with its focus on the female gaze and lesbian desire, celebrating its frank approach to fantasy in terms both erotic and supernatural. Owens’s analysis then moves to the Stonewall era and the queer community’s demand for cultural recognition on its own terms, which he notes corresponds with a simultaneous rise in Satanist interests. Here, Owens connects the frankness of the queer moment with that of visual representations in the form of underground, pornographic, and arthouse cinema. That each of the concurrent “outsider” movements demanded acceptance on its own terms l

FAQs

What main relationship does the review emphasize between queer media and occult-themed content?

The review stresses a synergy where queer identity and occult worlds are valued and explored for their eccentric pleasures, especially when characters resist conformity.

How does Owen’s approach to queer media studies structure the book?

Owen uses a historically oriented, Foucauldian method to show how different eras and industrial practices shape cultural engagements with occultly articulated queerness.

Which historical periods and media developments does the review highlight?

It highlights the 1960s emergence of occult-themed TV for youth, later shifts in film industry practices enabling more explicit same-sex desire, Stonewall-era recognition politics, and an HIV/AIDS-era discourse linking sexual infection with vampire mythology.

Aug 24, 2026

Upload by Skyler