Horror and Queerness in the Rural South: A Short Analysis of Route 77 - The Haunted Highway
"That what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories" (Noël Carroll, 1987, p. 57).
Route 77: The Haunted Highway takes place in an unspecified town in rural Texas, most likely inside the Texas Panhandle, a square-shaped and predominantly rural region of 26 counties in northernmost Texas. It is also estimated that around 7.2% of males and 16.2% of females aged 18-19 identify as LGBTQ+, so around 38. 000 individuals. Despite these estimates, the panhandle is a religious and politically conservative part of the state, the sociopolitical climate presenting significant challenges for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families (Peeples & Butkovich Kraus, 2025). However, it is important to mention that space is not absolute or fixed, but dynamic and full of inquiry, so we must not fall into the mistake of assuming that ruralized spaces are always hostile, homophobic or socially conservative. Space is a site of contestation, it is heterogeneous and inhabited by diverse groups of people. There is no coherent essence of southerness since space is always being created in the present moment (Harker, 2019).
The cast of character for this version is composed by Tuesday, the mysterious maid of a haunted motel; Argus, a mercenary looking for Kayla, or "her girl" as she likes to call her; and Barbara, an UTTU magazine editor with a sheep's head and daughter to three mothers (an arcanist, a human and a sheep mother). All three of these characters share in common the fact that their existence can be considered outside of the hegemonic cultural categories, not only because all of them are arcanists but also because of their appearance, gender, sexuality, age and social class, giving way to different kinds of vulnerabilities and discrimination. I'll analyze these characters through an intersectionality-focused lens, an analytical framework that has it's roots in Black feminism, to help us understand and explore the complex experience of belonging to multiple identities and social groups (Kempapidis, Heinze, Green & Gomes, 2023).
Ever since she was a kid, Tuesday loved horror stories. She would often scare her friends, telling them all kinds of stories about ghosts in the attic and eyes that lurk in the depths of the forest. She's been the object of all kinds of rumors after her disappearance. "Poor Christine, she could've gotten married and live near her family and the farm." But she never wanted that, she's never been like that. Christine has always been like a silver knife: Thin, delicate, quiet and sharp; sharper than anything. She found an answer to her fears in the act of frightening others, to her, succumbing to fear is surrendering to fiction. It's no wonder that she would end up going to a haunted motel surrounded by rumors and stories, much like herself. Through the story we can find multiple instances that point to Argus's and Tuesday's sexuality being outside of that established by the hetero-cis-normative societal standards.
Queer people suffer a number of societal aggressions as "punishment" for their non-normative transgressions. Similarly, horror films are censored and banned at familial, community and national levels, often considered a lowly genre by scholars and critics. It's in this transgressive nature and the explicit illustrations of taboos that queer people identify with. They connect to horror through a shared status as societal transgressions and the figurative Other. In horror we can find a cathartic space where non-normative bodies, identities and expressions are actively centralized (Petrocelli, 2023). "[…] horror is queerness. From the very first horror films, it was about queerness, and it’ll always be about the Other. It’ll always be about destroying the nuclear family, the status quo, structures that are in place. It’ll always be about something being outside of that, breaking shit up. It is queer. The physical intimacy of it is queer […]" (Davis, 2020, pp. 29–30).
Through the patch we can see that Argus's adoption and reinterpretation of traditionally masculine roles challenges gender norms. While there's some debate whether Argus could be considered a butch or not, she'll be refereed as such in this analysis considering butches are a spectrum as big as one's self-perception and cannot be defined solely on a series of characteristics. Especially considering Argus's job as a mercenary and bounty hunter reject the classical division of labor and gender-based expectations. Butches prove how masculinity and femininity are a cultural phenomenon, and how these could be reformulated and eliminated. She embraces a kind of masculinity that doesn't exist in relation to cisgender men, one that does not belong in heteronormativity. Being a lesbian woman with a disability (vision impairment and half blindness) she's also at the intersection of multiple stigmatized identities, having to contend with ableist, heteronormative and cisnormative public perceptions.
Another character that's at an intersection is Barbara, having to manage a chronic illness through the chapter (constantly worrying about the amount of battery she has left in her only means to alleviate her condition while trapped inside the motel), and also dealing with mistreatment and discrimination related to her appearance (being left on her own on the side of the highway, which triggers the events of the whole story). She also mentions how usual it is for people to have extreme reactions when seeing her for the first time, often thinking she's some sort of horrifying hallucination. We could also mention how she suffers at the hands of Tuesday because of her age, being referred to as a baby and not being taken seriously no matter how often she would express her worries. Luckily, she's able to find a place where she's accepted (outside of UTTU) in Vertin's suitcase where she was warmly greeted by the children there.
Finally, in Argus's relationship with Tuesday we can find the dynamics of a Butch-Femme relationship, while some people believe this division reproduces heterosexual dynamics (with Butches being perceived as the ones with an active role) in reality, it is the transformation of such dynamics (Fernández, 2025). Gender, rather than being a representation of biological conditions, Butler (1999) understands it as a series of repetitive actions that create an effect of naturalization of the gender expression, a set of rules that reinforce the binary division of gender in "male" and "female". It is queer practices such as these that destabilize gender norms, revealing them as an artificial construct. It is through such practices that we can open the door to new forms of expression and resistance.
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