Murder-mystery ‘Deathtrap’ has more to offer the gays than just a hunky Christopher Reeve
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting the 1982 whodunit Deathtrap, which notably featured a, well… *spoiler alert*Murder mysteries and whodunnits tend to have a particularly queer appeal.
The worlds of Agatha Christie, Jessica Fletcher, or Benoit Blanc are always full of larger-than-life characters hiding secrets from each other, exotic faraway locations, fabulous women wrapped in outrageous clothing, and drama hiding in every corner.
The genre revels in the archetypes and narratives that we gravitate towards, either because of its sense of camp and heightened reality, or because themes like hiding one’s true identity and making sense of a chaotic world are reflections of our own experiences.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.The canon of whodunits in film is wide and expansive and though they always manage to find a queer audience, overt queer representation in them is surprisingly quite slim.
Films like 1975’s The Last Of Sheila, 1976’s Murder By Death (which we’ve covered in this column before) and more recently the Knives Out movies have had queer characters in different forms of prominence.
