It’s strange to write about Martyrs as part of Gayly Dreadful’s wonderful fundraiser for The Trevor Project. There’s no uplifting love story in this gory 2008 New French Extremity film, no victorious Final Girl, no sense that wrongs have at least been righted. It’s one of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen, and if we read it as a queer film (which it is), it offers no sense of validation or hope whatsoever.

Martyrs was always going to draw me in. I developed an interest in horror at a very young age (in retrospect, I realize it may have partly been a way to cope with an early trauma). Extreme horror gets a bad rap even from some other horror fans, but it’s one of my favorite subgenres. The combination of gory violence and religious vocabulary in Martyrs appealed to that part of me that will forever be negotiating my youth in a fire-and-brimstone town. I knew going into the film that I was going to like it, but I didn’t expect it to somehow speak to my experience as a queer woman.

The queer storyline in Martyrs is short and possibly unrequited. The one kiss between the two main characters, Anna and Lucie, occurs after Lucie has murdered an entire family she believes to be involved with torture she suffered as a child. Trying to calm Lucie, Anna kisses her, but Lucie pulls away. Later, once Lucie is dead, Anna’s mother expresses disapproval of Lucie, calling her a bad influence and a “pervert.” It’s the kind of relationship that straight critics and audiences often refuse to acknowledge as queer or overlook altogether. But to queer women, it’s painfully recognizable.

I grew up in a rural Appalachian community where religion permeated the landscape itself. It's a place I love but have a deeply complicated relationship with, and at risk of emphasizing the negative aspects, I'll say that it's a place full of individual and collective trauma. The representations of queerness that were popular when I was a teenager were so unlike the lives available to the queer people there that they seemed like bad science fiction. It’s probably no surprise, then, that I gravitate more toward films like Martyrs than popular queer media.

Martyrs isn’t the first movie to really dig right into the pit of my stomach and make me reflect on what it means to be a queer horror-loving woman, but it’s one of the most important ones to me. Ultimately, beneath all the brutality, the story shows the danger of the unspoken self. Lucie can’t articulate her trauma and begin to heal, so her quest for revenge takes her right back to the people who abused her. It’s about the horror of simply existing: for Lucie, as an abuse victim. For Anna, as queer. For the cult’s other victims (explicitly chosen because they are women), the horror of simply being women.

The women of queer history exist on the margins of queer society. I realized this when I got the opportunity to actually study queer history in college. While there’s a rich history of queer men, many records of queer women that should be there simply aren’t. There are many reasons for this that won’t fit into this article, but it all goes back to a devaluing of women who aren’t heterosexual and/or cisgender. Such women all too often become unspeakable, invisible - even in the queer community.

I did my PhD on captivity in horror films so that alone fascinates me, but in combination with her own queerness and those overlooked legacies of queer history, Anna’s captivity takes on new meaning. The dungeon she’s held in is part of a house belonging to the couple who once tortured Lucie. It’s no coincidence that when we first see the Belfond family, they seem like a perfect, wholesome heteronormative family. The house holds a great secret the Belfonds can never let be known, and Anna is abducted into that secret space.

The rebuffed kiss occurs in the smallest room of the house. Anna’s care for Lucie's corpse and another captive, Sarah, occurs within the privacy of the house's walls, and once the cult members find her there, she never has the opportunity to even try to escape outdoors. No thwarted chase through the woods for her. Her own imprisonment and torture occur deeper within the house, as one hidden space reveals another and another and another. She disappears into an almost literal closet. She is their secret.

Queer history shows us the importance of speakability (see: every early queer scholar ever). What do we call ourselves? What do others call us? What can we say about our experiences that lend power to them? What the cult wants from their captive is for her to speak - to torture her so extremely that she sees the secret that waits after death and can relate it to the cult. But (spoiler alert) the cult never knows what she sees, nor does the viewer. The last actual words we hear Anna say are to the dead Lucie: "I miss you." Here, at the end of her connection to the living world, it isn't physical pain she feels but the loss of the woman she loved, whose memory in that moment guides her to stop fighting and eventually become the martyr. Even though its result is Anna’s destruction, I see a queer reclamation in that moment.

Visibility also has significance to the plot. Skipping the typical notion of the "martyr" as someone who dies for their beliefs, the film uses the etymological meaning: witness. The cult hopes that through torturing a woman, they can force her to witness the other side of death. As part of her torture, her captors depersonalize her, remaining silent and seeing her only when feeding and beating her. Anna becomes "visible" again only when she's been skinned. Her flayed body demands to be looked at. Moreover, Anna’s body itself has been queered. As a martyr, she lacks any visible signs of sex or gender. And whether or not the viewer believes she does see something on the other side of the death, the film makes it clear that she has transcended the limitations of the human body.

If you're a gorehound like me, the image is as strikingly beautiful as it is horrific. And if you’re a queer gorehound, it’s immensely powerful. Here is a queer woman who endures the most extreme mortification of the flesh. Her queerness, manifest in her devotion to Lucie, is even what brought her to this state. Whatever she sees as she looks into the beyond, even if it’s actually nothing, she goes into it as a queer and queered being - to use the film’s own label in translation, “an exceptional being.”

Extreme horror is a controversial subgenre, one that even many horror fans dislike. But for me, it’s been a cathartic way of confronting trauma and fear - of the world around me, of myself. Horror in general lends itself to queerness due to its fascination with otherness and alienation. Extreme horror, when done well, has its own queer value. It speaks what normally isn’t spoken and reveals what isn’t normally seen. Queer people have historically been told they should not or do not exist, yet we exist, and we keep existing. Martyrs isn’t a happy queer story at all, but to me, it’s a gorgeously affirming one.