Lauren LaVera and Darren Lynn Bousman on Queering Extreme Horror With ‘Twisted’ [Interview]
“I’m a queer woman, and I struggled with my queerness at a young age,” Lauren LaVera tells Dread Central while […]
![Lauren LaVera and Darren Lynn Bousman on Queering Extreme Horror With ‘Twisted’ [Interview]](https://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/lauren.jpg)
“I’m a queer woman, and I struggled with my queerness at a young age,” Lauren LaVera tells Dread Central while […]
![Lauren LaVera and Darren Lynn Bousman on Queering Extreme Horror With ‘Twisted’ [Interview]](https://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/lauren.jpg)
On the topic of the film’s queerness, Darren Lynn Bousman says he was very intentional about how he handled the relationship onscreen. That intention was evident to me as well while watching the film as a queer horror fan.
“Here I am as a white male director who’s straight,” he tells me. “How can I approach this in a way that feels organic and doesn’t feel exploitative?”
Bousman says that mindset informed specific choices, including an early scene of queer intimacy. He also points to a smaller visual detail later in the film.
“In the hotel room scene, they’re wearing the same pyjama top and bottom, one has the top, the other has the bottom. It says everything about their characters. It was trying to approach it in a way that felt organic as opposed to exploitative.”
That attention to organic framing and detail is evident onscreen, something I noted in my review of the film.
“One of the film’s more meaningful strengths is how it handles its queerness,” I wrote, adding that “Twisted shows a clear discomfort with the male gaze, especially in how it frames bodies, vulnerability, and desire. Even at its harshest, the film avoids turning pain into spectacle or sexualizing trauma. That choice matters. In a genre that has often crossed that line without thinking twice, Twisted feels more aware of where its camera is pointing and why.”

The horrors of Twisted are extreme and surgical by design. It is fitting, then, that LaVera and Bousman brought a similar precision to crafting the film’s queer representation. The brutality may be front and center, but the care behind how this relationship is portrayed is just as deliberate.
Watch Twisted now on VOD from Republic Pictures/Paramount.