“I’m a queer woman, and I struggled with my queerness at a young age,” Lauren LaVera tells Dread Central while discussing her latest film and major studio debut, Twisted.
Reflecting on her own experiences and how they informed her performance, LaVera points to her role as Paloma in the recent extreme horror film from Saw franchise director Darren Lynn Bousman, now available on VOD via Republic Pictures.
“When I started having the courage to announce my queerness, it wasn’t accepted in a way that I might’ve appreciated.”
In the film, she plays one half of a central queer relationship that unfolds amid the movie’s surgical brutality. For LaVera and Bousman, how that relationship was portrayed, and the visibility it offered, was a considered part of the film’s approach.
And her character’s confidence stood out to her, even on the page. “I loved the fact that Paloma was so unabashedly queer and so uninhibited and just so unapologetic. I wish that I had known her growing up. I think she might’ve brought me out of my comfort zone much younger.”
She describes the role as therapeutic.
“It was certainly therapeutic for me. I did feel a duty to tell this story as truthfully as possible,” she says, adding that she approached the relationship no differently than any other on-screen romance. “I wouldn’t approach this love connection any differently than I have in the past with hetero love connections. The love is exactly the same.”
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.
