Just in time for Halloween season, Knife + Heart, director Yann Gonzalez’s deliriously stylish, blood-soaked queer thriller, is now streaming on Dekkoo.
Set in Paris in the summer of 1979, the film stars Vanessa Paradis as Anne, a producer of low-budget gay adult films whose personal and professional worlds are beginning to unravel. Her editor and lover, Loïs (Kate Moran), has left her, and Anne throws herself into making her most ambitious film yet in an attempt to win her back.
Then one of her actors is brutally murdered.
As more members of Anne’s filmmaking family become targets of a mysterious masked killer, she is pulled into an increasingly strange investigation that transforms Knife + Heart from erotic melodrama into a feverish murder mystery.
Director Yann Gonzalez takes the heightened colors, elaborate murders, mystery and eroticism of classic Italian giallo cinema and filters them through an unmistakably queer lens. The result is one of the more distinctive gay movies you’ll find on Dekkoo.
Shot on 35mm and powered by a hypnotic retro score from M83, Knife + Heart is at once a slasher film, a love story and an affectionate tribute to a vanished corner of queer culture.
But beneath all the neon, sex and blood is something surprisingly tender.
Gonzalez gives the men in Anne’s films lives, friendships and a genuine sense of community. As the killer begins tearing that community apart, Knife + Heart becomes as melancholy as it is macabre. That combination of desire, heartbreak and danger makes it a particularly provocative entry among Dekkoo’s collection of sexy gay movies.
Out For Blood on Dekkoo
Knife + Heart arrives on Dekkoo as the newest addition to this month’s Dekkoo Selects: Out For Blood, our October collection celebrating the darker side of queer cinema.
From killers and creatures to psychological terror and things that go bump in the night, Out For Blood brings together gay and queer films perfect for Halloween viewing — and few movies embody that collision of sexuality, camp and horror quite as spectacularly as Knife + Heart.
The film’s erotic undercurrent also makes it a natural fit for viewers exploring Dekkoo’s steamy gay movies, although Knife + Heart adds considerably more blood to the equation.
Sexy, strange, romantic and unapologetically bloody, Knife + Heart is a horror film with a pulse all its own — and another reason to explore the growing collection of gay movies streaming on Dekkoo.
Halloween is the perfect excuse to turn down the lights, lock the doors and spend the night with something a little darker.
This October, Dekkoo Selects: Out For Blood ventures into the darker side of queer cinema with nine horror movies, thrillers, slashers and supernatural stories filled with deadly secrets, twisted desires and things that definitely go bump in the night.
Whether you like your queer horror genuinely frightening, darkly funny, sexually charged or just completely bonkers, there’s something here worth adding to your Halloween watchlist.
Here are nine gay horror movies and queer thrillers streaming now on Dekkoo.
Scorch Marks
A remote getaway becomes anything but peaceful in Scorch Marks, a chilling psychological thriller about trauma, obsession and a past that refuses to stay buried.
Beckett retreats to an isolated rental hoping to escape the ghosts of his past. Instead, his already fragile grip on reality is tested by the unexpected arrival of Joel, his abusive ex-husband. Forced together, the two men must confront the toxic history that still binds them — while something increasingly sinister closes in.
Dark, unsettling and deeply rooted in the complicated history between its two central characters, Scorch Marks is an ideal place to begin your descent into Out For Blood.
The Prodigy
How hard will you fight when giving up seems easier?
In The Prodigy, street hustler Adam has nearly given up on life when he suddenly finds himself captive at the mercy of a deranged psychopath. Survival means finding a reason to keep fighting — and discovering just how far he’s willing to go to stay alive.
Filmmaker Omar Salas Zamora delivers a brutal queer thriller where desperation, survival and violence collide.
Ganymede
Coming out can be terrifying. Ganymede takes that fear and transforms it into an actual monster.
When a high school wrestling star develops feelings for an openly gay classmate, his burgeoning desires bring some horrifying consequences. Soon, a grotesque creature begins invading his thoughts, turning his struggle with sexuality, repression and fear into something frighteningly real.
Part coming-of-age story and part creature feature, Ganymede uses the language of horror to explore what happens when desire collides with the pressure to be someone you’re not.
Poltergays
Not every ghost story needs to be serious.
The wickedly funny short Poltergays turns the haunted-house formula on its head when Perry and Tiff Myers decide their friendly gay roommates, Tanner and Derek, must actually be malevolent spirits from the great beyond.
Their attempt to expose the supposed supernatural threat may ultimately reveal something considerably scarier: their own haunting homophobia.
Consider this your supernatural palate cleanser before heading back into the bloodier corners of the collection.
There’s a Zombie Outside
What if the monster you created suddenly followed you home?
During a camping trip with his boyfriend, filmmaker Adam spots a zombie lurking near their cabin. His friends chalk it up to stress and paranoia — until Adam returns to Los Angeles and realizes the zombie may have followed him.
There’s a Zombie Outside mixes horror and comedy with a distinctly queer, self-aware sensibility, blurring the line between filmmaking, identity and reality itself.
It’s strange, funny and just unsettling enough to make you wonder what’s waiting outside your own window.
The Deep Queer Massacre
Sometimes you want sophisticated psychological horror.
Sometimes you want horny gay guys, a witch’s manor, short-shorts, super-soakers and complete chaos.
The Deep Queer Massacre proudly belongs to the second category.
This deliberately outrageous horror-comedy sends a group of young gay men to a secluded vacation home in Normandy, where their fun quickly gives way to a series of increasingly bizarre horrors.
At just under half an hour, it’s the perfect dose of campy queer carnage for your Halloween movie marathon.
Carnal Sins
Folklore, religion, repression and forbidden desire collide in Carnal Sins.
After moving to a deeply religious community, young Nino discovers that beneath the town’s pious exterior lies a world simmering with secrets and repressed desires. Looming over it all is the legend of the Almamula, a mythological creature said to stalk the nearby forest.
Atmospheric and provocative, Carnal Sins uses supernatural folklore to explore sexuality, shame and the things communities would rather keep hidden.
Birder
An idyllic queer retreat takes a disturbing turn in Birder.
Set at a sex-positive queer nudist camp in the woods of New Hampshire, the film introduces a mysterious bird watcher whose arrival disrupts the retreat’s seemingly carefree atmosphere.
What follows is a sexually charged satirical thriller that steadily turns desire and vulnerability into something much more dangerous.
For viewers who like their thrillers provocative, uncomfortable and unpredictable, Birder belongs on the list.
The Black Widow
We finish our Halloween watchlist with something short, strange and decidedly twisted.
In The Black Widow, a student discovers a mysterious theater where the boundary between what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening around him begins to disappear.
As images of sadomasochism, murder and gay sex consume his thoughts, fear and arousal become increasingly difficult to separate.
At just over 20 minutes, it’s a surreal final nightmare for anyone willing to venture all the way to the darkest corner of Out For Blood.
Enter the Darker Side of Queer Cinema
Horror has always provided a place to explore the things we’re afraid to say out loud — desire, identity, repression, obsession and the monsters hiding just beneath the surface.
Dekkoo Selects: Out For Blood brings those themes together in nine wildly different films, from supernatural scares and psychological thrillers to queer horror-comedies that aren’t afraid to get bloody, sexy or completely ridiculous.
So turn down the lights.
Keep the doors locked.
And whatever you hear outside, don’t investigate.
Queer chills. Killer thrills. No one gets out clean.
Watch Dekkoo Selects: Out For Blood now on Dekkoo.
