Sam Wineman has had a really good year.

His short film The Quiet Room starring Lisa Wilcox (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4), Alaska ThunderFuck (RuPaul’s Drag Race), and Jamal Douglas (#Adulting) is finishing up a highly successful festival run, and we can exclusively report that it will debut on CryptTV on June 28 with a debut on Shudder in the same time frame.

The out gay director sat down with me for an interview for Horror Pride Month and spoke candidly about his busy schedule, the work he’s doing, and dug deep into his ideas about representation and being explicitly queer in the horror genre.

“There’s this climate in Los Angeles where you ask someone how they’re doing and they say ‘Busy!’ But I’m really great!” Wineman said, laughing. “There’s a feeling that you need to project that you’re working constantly, but I’m not sure ‘busy’ is an actual feeling.”

Whether he believes in the concept as an emotion or simply a state of being, he has certainly learned to operate in that space, and he admits that the festival circuit taught him a lot, not only about himself, but also about his audiences.

“The Quiet Room played a number of LGBTQ film festivals as well as festivals that were just straight up horror. At the queer festivals, I got to see people react to a lot of nods and ins to the community like when Katya and Alaska were in a scene together or even just in a scene where the actor is just more popular in the gay indie world like Chris Salvatore,” he explained. “I got to see the audience really connect with that. At straight festivals, I got to see people laugh at jokes that I thought were specific to my community but it turns out the more specific you are, the more of an access point it gives everyone.”

He spent a lot of time watching the audience during those screenings, and he says he’s picked out one oddly specific demographic that seems to get the most scared during the film.

“The person that always get the most scared is like that guy who has to fake scare his girlfriend. You know who I’m talking about?” he said. “Some straight guy who gets really uncomfortable so he does the “boo!” thing to the person next to him. That’s the guy who’s going to lose it when Hattie’s hand comes out from the table. Every single time. Girls whose straight boyfriends who feel the need to scare them are telling on themselves very early on.”

Still, what he’s taken away most from that experience has been connecting with the audience whether it’s a packed house of fans in Boston or a smaller gathering of fellow filmmakers in San Francisco, he’s learned more about himself and his craft throughout the process which made his work on Satanic Panic even more thrilling.

When he found he had the opportunity to work with Chelsea Stardust, a longtime friend and the captain of their horror trivia team, The Dream Warriors, on the new film which is heading out onto the festival circuit, as well, he knew the experience would be invaluable.

Stardust’s feature film debut All That We Destroy was recently released as part of Blumhouse and Hulu’s Into the Dark series.

“She has a way of getting performances out of actors that you would not expect. For me, as a filmmaker, that’s my favorite thing,” Wineman explained. “To see someone I already love give a different performance than they’ve ever done before. I don’t’ know how she does it, but she gets it every time. I had the fortune and coming in and shadowing her on set but I also got to direct second unit. It was really fun seeing a cut of a film and knowing where my shots were. To see my work integrated into the whole.”

More recently, Wineman has joined the folks at Attack of the Queerwolf as a co-host. For his first episode of the podcast, they dove into The Rage: Carrie 2, and he said he loves the idea of digging into those sometimes maligned titles to discuss and dig into their queerness.

“I love great films. I love things that are canon. I love things that are, from an academic perspective, progressive or deep,” he said. “That said, I fucking love trash. I think there’s value in looking at what is mainstream and looking at pop culture and mining that for what’s beneath the surface. Why is it that we had the reaction we did to that film at the time?”

This love of “trash” has been with him for a long time, and he recalls a specific instance in grad school when he was screening one of his films for the students and professors.

One of the professors asked what his references were for his film and he replied Death Spa and Chopping Mall. As his fellows students giggled in response, the professor became stern, asking if this was all a joke to him.

Wineman explained that he was, in fact, being serious. He had a passion for digging into movies like the ones he named, pulling out the parts that worked, and using them as inspiration. Still looking down his nose, the professor told him that was fine if he just wanted to be John Waters.

“I told him I would love to be John Waters,” Wineman said. “I should be so lucky to be that successful.”

But why, specifically, do these films speak to him? What is it about them that draws him in?

“I think, in looking at queer horror, we tend to latch onto those films that have been rejected or overlooked in some way,” he said. “I feel like there have been times in my life I have been overlooked because of my queer identity so I find joy in finding value in films that have been overlooked.”

This philosophy has played a major role not only in how he defines a queer horror film, but also those films he latches onto.

In the great catalog of genre films, there haven’t been a large number of films with over queer storylines despite the huge following of queer horror fans. Things like tokenism, queer-coding, and even worse queer baiting have led us to the point where we must apply a queer reading to the films we love to find ourselves.

For those unfamiliar, a queer reading is looking at a particular film, novel, etc. through a particular lens to find the queer themes underneath the surface, whether those themes were meant by the author/filmmaker or not.

For those starved for representation, it’s often our only course of action. Wineman admits that the first time he saw Jennifer’s Body, he thought he was queer reading the film, but upon a recent re-watch, he realized the film itself contains an explicit queer storyline.

“There’s this shot where they’re watching the band, and Needy reaches out for Jennifer’s hand, and she looks up at Jennifer but Jennifer’s eyes are on the stage rather than looking back at her,” Wineman explained. “Needy has this sad look on her face and she let’s go of Jennifer’s hand. To me, that moment makes this film explicitly queer. Anytime you think you’re seeing something that looks a little bit gay after that point is because it’s a little bit gay.”

The phrase “explicitly queer” came up a lot during our conversation, and at one point, I asked what he meant when he said explicit queerness.

There are a lot of ways that could be taken after all!

“I want to see characters who are visible in their queerness even if that queerness isn’t central to their story,” he said. “In The Quiet Room, my characters are all explicitly queer but their storylines weren’t dependent on them being queer.”

In his short film Milk and Cookies that will appear in a holiday-themed anthology called Deathcember, Wineman dug into parts of his own past in telling the story of a father who is constantly condemning his son’s gender expression.

The boy’s favorite toy is a pony and the other boys at school pick on him because of it. When the father has had enough, he breaks the toy and tells the boy he’ll have no more of this behavior, the boy begins to make wishes. First, of course, is to have the pony restored, but when that works the wishes begin to take a darker turn.

“My queer identity was apparent very early in my life and I felt like I was always being policed by adults,” he explained. “You can’t play with that. You can’t wear that. Putting that realness into my movies. That’s what I mean by explicit. I’m not interested, personally, in making anything that doesn’t express that.”

Wineman also notes that not every queer filmmaker is in the same place he is, nor are they ready to be as explicit in their story telling, and that’s okay too. Just like coming out to family and friends, we all have different ways and different timeframes of doing those things.

Every film made by a queer filmmaker through the queer lens with a queer perspective is a queer film and if some aren’t as ready to put their foot on the gas to move more quickly forward, there are others like himself who are ready.

Most importantly, though, he notes that there are large number of filmmakers who are, little by little, chipping away at the old standards to make real queer horror films and that excites him most of all.

Look for The Quiet Room on CryptTV and Shudder later this month, and keep your eyes open for Satanic Panic at festivals near you!

And in the meantime, add Sam Wineman to your list of queer filmmakers to watch. He’s changing the world, one scary story at a time.