Pride Month Interviews: Meet TT Madden

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you contribute to the horror genre.

My name is Temple, but writing-wise I go by TT Madden (they/she). I've always been writing, and always been writing horror, but the first big horror thing I actually put out into the world was my work on two "seasons" of a Blair Witch tabletop game. That was a ton of fun to make, but also really made me want to shy away from anything big budget or "Hollywoody" and just do my own thing and write for myself without getting caught up in studio-esque nonsense. Since then I've been writing my own books (currently seven, including one with Timber Ghost Press, with four more in the pipe). I write a lot about the intersections of my own identity (trans, mixed-race) always with some weird, surreal horror thrown in there.

What drew you to the horror genre?

I always loved Goosebumps and other spooky stuff for kids like The Addams Family, and the weird parts of kids movies always freaked me out and fascinated me, like nightmare or the air conditioning unit in The Brave Little Toaster. Old horror movies like the original Universal Monsters were also something I could watch with my family since they were a little more "appropriate." But then I watched The Mummy in theaters at nine years old and that was really all she wrote (yes, of course, I am also bisexual, pretty sure that was in the fine print when I got the ticket). I still love everything genre-related, but since then horror has always been my main one.
 
If you could recommend one creation of horror that everyone should consume that is queer or queer coded, whether that be a book, podcast, movie, art, etc., what would you recommend?

There's obviously a ton of excellent modern horror, but for a personal recommendation I'd have to reach back in time to The Old Dark House for a few reasons. First, because it's one of James Whale's most underseen films, and also to show that queerness has always been around, it's certainly not a new phenomenon. It was before the strictest implementation of the Hays Code, but definitely plays with the time's queer coding. It also subverts expectations in some interesting ways.
 
When folks look back at the LGBTQIA+ movement of today’s day and age, what do you think the defining characteristic will be?

I think it will be defined by resilience and transgression, especially in horror prose and poetry. In the last few years I feel like there have been crazy-radical jumps in horror creators pushing the envelope to its absolute limit. Film is moving a little slower (which is natural). Every few months there's something new and wild that gets everyone talking, like an I Saw the TV Glow. But with horror books it seems like they're just getting absolutely cranked out every week. We're getting stuff like We Are Always Tender With Our Dead or You Were Never Meant to Be Human with a frankly delicious regularity, and it's all insane, groundbreaking stuff. And I think that makes a ton of sense. Right now queerphobia of all kinds is at an all-time high, especially with this administration, where simple existence is a sin, and the president is actively threatening us with death. Queer people (like any minority) already have to fight twice as hard to take up half as much space, and now with even more vitriol aimed against us, it's clearly coming out in the art we're making.

What are some areas of queer horror you think are under-explored?

There's a questioning and a certain kind of ambiguity that I'd like to see more in the genre. Very often there are stories of queer characters who are out and fighting oppression of one kind or another or on a journey to discover their own queerness, whatever that may be. But I haven't seen a lot of horror where a character experiments and finds out X or Y isn't for them. Maybe a character wonders if they're gay, and decides they're not, they're bisexual, or maybe just straight, but they needed that experimental room to find out. There's a lot of certainty to queerness in modern horror, which makes sense, and I think a little more ambiguity in our characters is okay. Hell, it took me until I was almost thirty to start using they/them pronouns, and five years later that I finally understood I was actually trans.

What do you find scary within the horror genre?

My personal biggest fear in horror is mass hysteria. Blood, guts, twisted monsters, anything else I'm basically cool. But any time there's a crowd of people that are going nuts, that gets too real for me. The scariest part of The Mist for sure. Touched By Shadows by Vaughn Jackson and Brom's Slewfoot both have mass paranoia stuff in them that made those books really hard for me to finish. There's even a part in the new Fantastic Four that got me. But for some reason I don't seem to be super affected by zombies.
 
What advice would you give to the next generation of queer horror content creators coming into the horror genre?

I would say to not chase a trend, and to make something that is uniquely you. You see it in every field, but in this current horror boom it's been much more obvious. One of the most recent ones is how in 2024 there was an absolute onslaught of announced Steamboat Willie horror when the character entered the public domain. In film you can see everyone chasing that sweet, sweet Terrifier cash with characters that are just Art the Clown with the serial numbers filed off. On the prose side extreme horror is a huge genre which a ton of presses call for, but then say "Oh, we actually don't want [several extreme things that are part of the extreme horror genre]." All of it has a sort of clout-chasing air to it, where you can tell people aren't passionate about it, they're just following what's cool. So, as cliche as it may seem, I'd say create the thing that only you could create, something you're passionate about. The worst thing a piece of art can do is make you feel bored. There's nothing like experiencing a piece of art that'll make you go "Oh, shit, this person really has some feels about this."

Where can folks find you these days?
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People can find me on my website, ttmaddenwrites.carrd.co, or on Instagram and Bluesky as @ttmaddenwrites