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Sean Abley is a journalist, screenwriter, dramaturg, novelist, and award-winning playwright. As a journalist, his byline has appeared in The Advocate, Unzipped, Attitude, Men's Health, online at ChillerTV.com, Blastr.com, WickedHorror.com, and for over 15 years in Fangoria Magazine and Fangoria.com. One of the longest tenured film journalists focusing on queer horror, he created Gay of the Dead in 2009, the first horror blog to feature interviews with LGBTQ filmmakers working in horror, for Fangoria.com. This led to his first book, Out in the Dark: Interviews with Gay Horror Filmmakers, Actors and Authors. In 2014 he created the long-running "Queer Horror" panel at San Diego Comic Con. Most recently, Queer Horror: A Film Guide, an encyclopedia of horror films with LGBTQ content that he created and co-edited, was published by McFarland Books. His next book of interviews, Gay of the Dead: Conversations with LGBTQ Filmmakers Working In Horror, is being rolled out on his Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/GayoftheDead) and will be available in printed form in 2025.
As a screenwriter, Sean has written the B-movies Socket, Rope Burn, Witchcraft 15: Blood Rose, Witchcraft 16: Hollywood Coven, and Camp Blood 9: Bride of Blood. For television, he's written for So Weird, Sabrina: the Animated Series, Digimon, MegaBabies, and more reality television than he'd care to admit.
As a playwright, he has been widely published and produced, with over 400 professional and educational productions in the U.S.A. and eleven other countries around the world.
Before moving to Los Angeles, he was the co-founder and co-Artistic Director (1992-1997) of Chicago’s prolific Factory Theater (still going strong as of this writing). In 2018 he founded the Desert Playwrights' Retreat, an all-expenses paid writing retreat for LGBTQIA playwrights.
Sean has an MFA in Playwriting from The Playwrights Lab at Hollins University, and is a member of the Antaeus Theater Company’s Playwrights Lab, the Writers Guild of America, Playwrights Union (Los Angeles), and the Dramatists Guild. You can find him as "Gay of the Dead" on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
In previous episodes, we explored how queer themes have been woven into horror for over 250 years, highlighting that the genre has always had an inherently queer essence. It resonates with many members of the LGBTQ+ community...