By André Salas

Alex Dove's Zombies.

A teen strips and steps into a steam-filled bathroom shower. Almost on cue, a shadowy black-gloved figure enters, rips back the curtain and strangles his prey, the camera zeroing in gratuitously on expanses of smooth bare flesh. Pretty routine slasher stuff — except that in this instance the naked corpse is quite clearly male.

Welcome to the hair-raising world of “scream kings,” an unlikely horror subgenre — depicting everything from slashers to vampires to flesh-eating zombies — in which the nubile, often nude victims all happen to be attractive young men. Almost completely devoid of female characters, these films often have heavy homoerotic overtones, if not explicitly gay subplots.

The leading purveyor of this peculiar new genre is DeadGuysCinema.com, an online retailer of direct-to-video nasties run by filmmakers Alex Dove and Todd Russell. A chance meeting at a film festival led to their first production, Dead Students Society, a slasher film with a good-looking male cast as the victims. The successful straight-to-video release of that film convinced the duo there was an audience for their work beyond the fetish crowd.

Although topless females are not exactly novelties in the world of mainstream horror — “Just try to name an ’80s horror film where girls aren’t featured in a throwaway topless scene!” says Dove — predominantly male casts shot with a homoerotic eye are.

Or were.

Moviegoers across America flocked to Jeepers Creepers 2 last year and were treated to a busful of shirtless jocks being tormented by a hideous creature.

“If you look at [Jeepers] it’s just a really lovingly shot film of the male form,” says Dove. “Our goal and vision is to make mainstream horror films that feature guys as the stars of the story — both as villains and as victims,” he adds. “I really think our latest film, Zombies, shot with a new digital camera and higher production value, is going to find a more mainstream audience, even though it has a gay storyline.”

Among the growing genre’s other prolific producers: Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’s ambitious gay-slasher HellBent is set to play the festival circuit prior to a theatrical release next year, and Rapid Heart Pictures’ David DeCoteau is creating a stir with Voodoo Academy and The Brotherhood, slickly shot 35mm straight-to-video thrillers featuring scantily clad young “men in peril.”