Hey, welcome back. This is LGBTQ&A. I'm Jeffrey Masters, and this is a show where we get to know different members of the LGBTQ community.

Today I'm talking with Michael Varadhi. Michael is a screenwriter. He also hosts the brand new queer horror podcast, Dead to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jeff.

I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to talk, too.

So you are most known for being a screenwriter in horror.

You also write holiday movies.

Yes. I want to get to that. But first, can we just define what horror is? I ask because it's different than scary movies. Is that right? Well, horror is a encompassing genre. You know,

I think that I run into this all the time where people seem, will tell me,

oh, I don't really like horror movies. And I guarantee that's not true. Because during the 80s,

especially, we sort of had this kind of flood of a certain kind of horror movie. Roger Ebert

called them the dead teenager movies. So I think that for a lot of people of a certain kind of horror movie. Roger Ebert called them the dead teenager movies. So I think

that for a lot of people of a certain generation, when they think of that, they think of gratuitous

violence, they think of kind of just like a little bit of sleaze. And that's true. There are those

horror movies and people who really enjoy them. I happen to be one of them. But horror is more than that. I think that there are so many different subgenres and iterations of what horror can be. There's suspense. There's psychological thrillers. There are movies that aren't classified horror movies that I would argue could be.

Because you have to have that element of peril often to push a story forward.

I think horror for a lot of people is a genre that deals with the spooky unknown and threats

that are kind of beyond our mortal coil, but sometimes very much attached to our mortality,

if that makes sense.

Oh, it does.

So, for example, like a scary movie would probably fall under the horror category, but not every horror movie would be scary movie.

Right. Or am I just caught up on these labels? Well, no, I think you're caught up on the labels because I think that hopefully every horror movie in some way is scary. Tushay. But what makes it scary to you would be different per film. Like, if you're watching Saw, you're definitely sort of taken by the body horror of it,

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