Description:

Calling all Perverts! Step into the world of Horror Tropical, where drag goes to die and monsters live. Horror Tropical is a never to be seen B-horror film, dreamed up in 2022 by alternate drag artists, Vanilla Sawyer Angora Doll, Tomghast and Eddie I'm Home, while the film never came to be it found its voice in 2024 as an art book, created by a friend of the bar, Spent Pension.

Horror Tropical is a love letter to alternative drag and B-horror movies, the art that reflects my experience with transness, trauma and disability, where mainstream media could not. We live in a world dominated by fascist and colonial narratives, baked into governments, systems and screens. Stereotypes and caricatures of people of colour, indigenous people, LGBT+ people, and fat people are only one side of the coin in upholding systemic dehumanisation; plain erasure is the other. Who is allowed to make art, who's allowed to be seen and how they are allowed to be on screen is tantamount to who is allowed to exist in the world at all. Hollywood wants the art of outsiders to disappear, to remove the inherent counter-narratives marginalised art holds by making sure our lives and messages are either unseen or watered down until they're inoffensive and alien to ourselves.

The success of RuPaul's Drag Race is a microcosm of this, at the expense of leaving its black, trans, and underground roots behind, betraying itself in order to better appeal to heteronormative audiences. It has gone on to define most people's understanding of drag, who can do drag, how they can do it, establishing good drag as that which is skinny, hyper feminine, white and expensive, everything the Horror Tropical characters oppose.

The drag underground has a natural overlap with horror, as does all marginalisation. When media presents us as outsiders encroaching on perfect suburban utopias, we begin to see ourselves as such. However, horror also allows us to explore fantasies and heightened emotions we can't in real life, explore ideas of sex, violence and fluid bodies outside of gender. So much of horror is made up of B-projects on shoestring budgets, not popular enough archive, that would never break out into success but still have value in the ideas they present, no matter how shoddy. Horror Tropical is a mixture of all these things. These characters embody what was left behind from Drag Race, reflect the beating heart of the underground and drag's history.

It's crucial to make art that speaks to our own unique experiences in the world, and show multiple ways of existing, even if that means only ourselves and a handful of other people will resonate with it. Horror Tropical is mine, a project made for perverts who can't go anywhere else, by a pervert who can't go anywhere else.