Original subtitles

- It's a perfect night for mystery and horror.

The air itself is filled with monsters.

- I'm all ears.

Open up your pits of hell.

- As queer people, we are considered outside of society

and I think horror is outside of society.

- Horror stories upset all the right people.

People who can't handle ambiguity,

people who can't handle violence or eroticism,

people who think of the world in these very clear-cut terms.

- Most Americans are repelled

by the mere notion of homosexuality.

The CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans

look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear.

- What was that?

- The main thing about horror was

that it was exciting to get scared

and that there was an honesty to it,

because I was responding to how my body felt.

So, kind of like porn.

- Your blood starts pumping.

There is something very, very primal about being afraid.

- Horror designed to make you incredibly uncomfortable.

And I think that queer people

are just generally better at being uncomfortable.

- Now kindly undo these straps.

- Because queer has been seen as bad,

has been seen as the other,

of course we're gonna put anything bad

and anything the other as the monster.

- I know who I am now, Sam.

- You wait till mom finds out, buddy.

- I always thought of myself as a monster

or a freak or a weirdo.

- My, I'll bet you monsters lead interesting lives.

- I'm Frankenstein, I'm Dracula, I'm Mrs. Danvers.

- So many of us can relate

to being the the monster in the room.

- I want to walk amongst the commoners unnoticed.

A prince amongst paupers.

- The reason queer people have latched onto these monsters

is because we see in them that society

is always trying to eradicate us.

And we're always waiting to fight back.

- That's how we're represented in film.

We're the bogeyman.

We're the ones who are out to get you.

- A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country

and is threatening to pervert

an entire generation of our American children.

- You sit the fuck down!

- They constantly portray abnormal sexual behavior.

They glorify unnatural sex acts.

- Show me.

- With so many queer creators,

we see this affinity with the shadowy margins

of what's considered respectable society.

- Are you a member?

- I'm looking for somebody.

- Aren't we all?

- The moment there's some kind of queer lens

being used to create,

it immediately reflects and reverberates

throughout the piece.

- The evolution of queer horror

really parallels the evolution of queer liberation.

- They're waiting for you.

- You begin with queer artists

taking the spaces we're allowed to have

and slipping what we can say into those spaces.

♪ I'm afraid there's no denyin' ♪

♪ I'm just a dandy-lion ♪

- There's something affirming about that vision in horror,

because at least we know we exist,

at least we know we are out there,

even if we're only there

to put the fear of God into straight people.

- Through this material, today's youth can be enticed

to enter the world of homosexuals, lesbians,

and other sex deviants.

We know that once a person is perverted,

it is practically impossible for that person

to adjust to normal attitudes in regard to sex.

- We queers have been a part of the genre of horror

since the beginning, right?

Since the beginning.

- The horror genre as we know it

really dates back to folkloric traditions

and then the gothic tradition in literature

in the 17th and 18th century.

When you wanted to write about queers,

you had to find a sort of coded way to do it.

- We queers have always had our own language.

- If you know, you know,

but otherwise it just kind of goes over your head.

And if somebody sees it, it's on them.

It's not quite on you.

- The gothic is literally about sublimated,

hidden things coming to light.

The dead, or the past, or desires,

or things that have been pushed down.

The whole point is you can't suppress the dead,

you can't suppress the past.

It's always gonna come up and erupt

in some really interesting and terrifying way.

- One of the defining characteristics of those gothic novels

is that they are all about transgression.

Resurrecting the dead, drinking blood,

making Faustian deals with the devil.

And tied to that is, of course, sexual transgression.

- We've now reached a sort of stage

with a very, very long history of the gothic

in literature and in film,

where we can actually start to look back at things and say,

"You know, that's not quite

what it appeared to be at the time."

- The general names from the 19th century

that we associate with horror

are really Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson,

but before that is Mary Shelley.

She is an angel.

- You think so?

- It is no surprise that a woman created the horror genre.

We're suppressed in more ways than one,

especially a queer woman.

She had all the ammunition in the world

to create monsters, and she did.

- Mary, what an icon.

I'm just gonna invent science fiction in an afternoon.

Do you guys want anything?

Like, "Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Mary."

- Mary Shelly is not only the mother of the horror genre

and the science fiction genre.

She is a leading feminist idealist

and also the goth-est of the goth girls.

- Mary Shelley is so goth.

She lost her virginity on her mother's gravestone.

- Here I come!

- We all know this image of Mary Shelley,

hanging out in the graveyards,

and there's a much more romantic

and heartfelt way to look at it.

Her mother, Mary Goodwin, was a prolific writer

before feminism was even a word,

was very much so of the feminist spirit.

She died within weeks of Mary being born.

The only way for Mary Shelly

to have a connection with her mother

was to be in the space that her mother left her

and to read her literature

and sort of piece together a relationship

with this woman she never got to meet.

- Mary Shelly was pretty radical.

She was very sexually liberal,

experimenting, very open-minded.

And what was also great

was just her equality with the men

that she was spending time with.

- Mary Shelley was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

They were also part of a who knows exactly

relationship with Lord Byron.

The trio was allegedly booted out of England

because of their notorious behavior.

- She was one of the original hags, right?

I mean, she could hang out, you know?

She was there for her gays, and they were there for her.

Hanging out with these sexually fluid men

and also having her own secrets

really speaks to her being a pioneer

in the art of monsters and of horror and storytelling

at that time when those stories were so new.

- She's so goth.

- They ended up in Europe at Villa Diodati

where they all decided to write ghost stories

fueled by drugs and sex and alcohol.

- She's really turning it for the goths, honey.

- She's 18, she's hanging out with her husband and his bros.

I shouldn't call them bros.

They were all having sex.

- It is an age of dreams and nightmares.

- Yes, and we are merely the children of the age.

- And she has a nightmare about this shambling behemoth.

She writes it down, and she kind of invents science fiction

and horror in the same moment.

- As the story goes,

Mary Shelley came up with the concept of Frankenstein

when she was debating,

what's the scariest story you can think of?

Kind of fitting that a female author

would think the scariest thing I can think of

is a man trying to create life.

- It's such a commentary on a man's world,

and it's such a commentary on the audacity of men

to think that they could even create

a functioning creature without a woman.

Like, the balls it must have took for her

to put those words on that page.

- She's writing in an era where there aren't a lot

of female authors to begin with.

It's certainly not a respectable thing

for her to be doing.

Just by virtue of her writing this book,

this is like this radical statement that,

I, a bisexual woman, am capable of these manly pursuits.

- The Frankenstein monster is literally made up

of bits and pieces of other people and other psyches,

is this extraordinary outsider.

- This idea that you can recombine the elements

of a human to create something is inherently terrifying.

But I think that that's sort of what it means to be queer

is you're sort of taking all these elements

of masculinity or femininity and you're redesigning them

into the person that you are.

- The monster chooses to attack

and kill Victor Frankenstein's wife

on their wedding night so that they never consummate.

And from that point on,

Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with his male creation

and is chasing the male creation all over the world.

And if that's not a queer narrative, I don't know what is.

- The literature shows Frankenstein

as so much more articulate and smart and charismatic

instead of this mumbling, horrible creature.

- The monster and Frankenstein are kind of constantly

ever changing, two beings within the same

that are overlapping.

Frankenstein catches up with the doctor and explains,

oh yeah, I learned language.

You know what I mean?

Like, here I am, I'm you, which is a monster,

but I'm gonna reflect back to you what you are.

- There is something very, very dream girls about it,

of showing up at somebody's doorstep and being like.

- ♪ And I am telling you ♪

- I am telling you I am not going.

- ♪ I'm not going ♪

- You are going to love me and if you're not gonna love me,

you are going to admit that you don't love me

and you are gonna tell me why,

and you will not be able to hide from that.

- My favorite part of Frankenstein

is that Mary Shelly was queer,

because as many historians love to argue against,

we have written texts from Mary Shelly to her friend saying

that she likes to get tousey-mousey with women.

- "April 8th, 1825.

When I return to Italy,

I shall not come without my Jane,

who is now necessary to my existence almost."

Girl, she's not going without Jane, so don't even ask.

"I never saw a woman I thought so fascinating.

Had I been a man,

I should certainly have fallen in love with her

and had she taken the trouble,

she might have wound me round her finger."

Oh girl, I bet.

"I was so ready to give myself away,

and being afraid of men,

I was apt to get tousey-mousey for women."

Tousey-mousey?

She was like, you know what?

Yeah, I was a lesbian for a while.

I was like dating a girl.

No, you know, that didn't work out.

I don't know.

I don't really like men.

She's so progressive.

I like her.

- Can you believe that bland

and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?

- Such an audience needs something stronger

than a pretty little love story.

So why shouldn't I write of monsters?

- She saw it as a gruesome story of what it was like

to create a version of yourself from nothing.

That's her through line, I think, through Frankenstein,

is she had to create herself from nothing.

It was like all the pieces just came together

and she was able to really, I mean quite literally,

all the pieces came together

and she was able to make this masterpiece.

- You wake foul dreams of sensual life.

- What a strange poem.

Who wrote it?

- Brilliant young Irishman out of Oxford.

His name is Oscar Wilde.

- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He's an extremely modern figure.

He became really a sort of self-made celebrity,

but as a writer, he became a phenomenon of the age.

- Oscar Wilde was so brilliant and so successful

and so capable with language and with the art form,

but he was keeping a secret.

- I like persons better than principles

and persons with no principles

better than anything else in the world.

Now I remember.

- Remember what, Henry?

- When I heard the name of Dorian Gray.

- What's beautiful about Dorian Gray

is he created the myth of what happens with repression.

Ultimately, repression will eat you up inside

and you will turn into a monster.

- Each of us has heaven and hell in him.

- But if this is true,

if this is what you've done with your life,

it is far worse than anything that's been said or done.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray

is one of those horror classics.

There's this guy who never seems to get any older

and it turns out he has a magic painting

that ages while he doesn't,

and it's becoming darker and more decrepit

and there is something horrible at the center of it.

- What is your secret, Dorian?

You don't look a day older than you did

when that portrait was painted.

- Perhaps I'll tell you someday.

- Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,

which is a much more queer take on this idea

of the multiple selves that are contained

within someone and our capacity for debauchery or evil.

- Dorian is sort of an amoral character

and a very queer character.

Beautiful, vain, consumed with pleasure.

If you're talking about the horror continuum,

I think you can draw a line from Dorian Gray

through a character like The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia High Smith,

all the way to Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray is very much about

the dangers of being in the closet,

of having a thing that you feel like you can't speak about

to anyone else.

- He is a wounded, deeply tortured queer character,

trapped in a narrative that he's desperately trying

to break out of.

- He's taking his and our collective experience

of being suppressed and repressed and punished

for who we are and he's birthing it

into this beautiful metaphor.

That, to me, is wildly powerful that he was able to do that

before it all came crashing down.

What's amazing is that he's also foreseeing where his life

is going to go once he actually gets caught and charged

and then placed into jail for his homosexuality.

- 1895 is two years before Dracula is published.

The sort of high water mark of so much of,

of what we associate is that,

that kind of gothic literature.

And that was the year that Wilde fell from grace.

Buggery had been a crime for centuries,

but it was rarely prosecuted until

a man called Henry Labouchère suddenly changed the rules

and Wilde was the first

and most famous casualty of the whole thing.

But he was fascinatingly given the chance to go.

I think it's either a combination

of a very sympathetic magistrate

or actually the establishment not wanting

to lift the rug on an awful lot of stuff

they didn't want to come out,

but he decided not to go.

So he was arrested.

- It would've been very easy for Wilde

to have fled the country, to have become an expat,

to have run off to France to avoid the prison sentence.

But you know, he stood and fought.

That's a really great act of heroism that I don't know

that Oscar Wilde always gets the credit for.

- And then he was sentenced to two years of hard labor

and for a man like him, it was a death sentence.

The judge hideously said he thought

it was completely insufficient

for the gravity of his crime

of daring to love someone of his own sex.

He is conflated in the popular imagination with monstrosity.

- Heaven, forgive me.

- Once his identity was exposed

and it was out there and he was living with it,

it seems like it kind of opened up corridors for him to use

all of that brilliance that he had been sublimating

into a heteronormative structure

and then he kind of found his own, to me,

authenticity and queerness.

- Wilde was a brilliant writer

who actually put his genius into his life.

His life is why we really remember him.

- There's no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.

All influence is immoral.

Why?

- Because the aim of life is self development.

To realize one's nature perfectly.

That's what we're here for.

- I think he was a man who actually worried

that he was trivial,

that in the end he would be remembered for some funny plays

and some funny quips, and incredibly,

by not running away, he became immortal.

- There've been a lot of rumors about Bram Stoker

over the decades about what his actual sexuality was.

- First of all, Bram Stoker was kind of cute.

Like he kind of could get just a tad bit.

That's one thing I wanna say.

- Even if Bram Stoker was queer in some way,

my understanding is that he was not out.

And I think that that can be a very conflicted place

from which to create.

- A few years ago,

David Skal, a horror film historian,

found a letter that Stoker had written to Walt Whitman,

who was probably the most famous homosexual

of the 19th century.

- His letters to Walt Whitman are clearly love letters.

They sort of quake with the quiet longing

that I remember having

for my secret male crushes growing up

and he says everything but, you know,

what he wants to say and even then,

inferring that there are some things

that he would rather say in person.

I don't know, it feels pretty darn gay to me.

"My dear Mr. Whitman,

Do not think me cheeky for writing this.

I only hope we may sometime meet

and I shall be able to perhaps to say what I cannot write.

I have to thank you for many happy hours,

for I've read your poems with my door locked late at night.

You who wrote the words know them better than I do

and to you, who sing of your land of progress,

the words have a meaning that I can only imagine.

But be assured of this Walt Whitman,

that a man of less than half your own age here

felt his heart leap toward you across the Atlantic

and his soul swelling at the words or rather the thoughts.

How sweet a thing it is for a strong, healthy man

with a woman's eye and a child's wishes to feel

that he can speak to a man who can be, if he wishes,

father and brother and wife to his soul.

You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free.

I have the shackles on my shoulders still,

but I have no wings."

- Bram Stoker feels emboldened at some point to perhaps,

you know, start making his way out of the closet.

Talking about his correspondence with Walt Whitman

and then in light of cultural events,

suddenly does a full 180.

- We know that he was part of Oscar Wilde's circle.

He was another Irish expatriate.

- Stoker knew Oscar Wilde well.

They were friends and contemporaries.

Wilde's arrest and and prosecution detonated a bomb

in British society.

- After the Wilde trial, there was a lot more burrowing,

a lot more marriages, a lot more hiding

from what was obviously gonna be a very unaccepting public.

- Stoker married Oscar Wilde's ex, Florence,

which is a curious turn of events.

Stoker's passion was the theater

and his great hero was the English actor Henry Irving.

It was an extraordinary relationship.

Irving treated him appallingly.

It's very hard not to interpret

from our perspective as being sub/dom.

- Wake up, master.

- The character of Renfield in the book,

I think there's a kind of transference there.

- I will be one of those who benefits from your generosity.

- That Stoker is putting himself in the position

of this imprisoned madman enthralled to his master.

- Good evening.

- Stoker's working out a lot of his own issues in Dracula.

There's this idea of sexuality

as being this enticing force and difficult to resist,

but one must, because ultimately you know it's monstrous

and it's going to destroy you.

- Welcome to my home.

- Dracula is largely more an expression

of a fear of queerness.

In that Dracula's modus operandi appears to be

to enslave women and torture men

with a kind of psychological psychosexual obsession.

- When the three vampire brides try and feast off Harker,

Dracula appears and he's absolutely furious and he says,

"This man belongs to me."

In Stoker's notes that is written constantly.

Every time he comes back to his notes over a period

of seven years, he writes it again.

It's very important to him.

Seems to mean something quite primal.

- After the publication of Dracula,

Bram Stoker becomes very vocally homophobic,

writing letters to parliament saying

that gay writers should all be put in prison.

One could argue that the existence of Dracula itself

is as much of a dodge as those letters to parliament were.

That Stoker is basically saying, yes,

I know that sexuality seems like something

that you really want to give into,

but you mustn't or you will be doomed for all eternity.

- And then obviously what Stoker is famous for,

he drew together over a period of several years

these myths and legends about vampires into a book which

is originally called The Undead,

featuring a character called Count Vampire.

It's very on the nose.

And then, brilliantly, he came across the legend

of a real life Transylvanian warlord.

Son of the Dragon, Dracula.

I've seen it, the actual page of the manuscript,

and he's crossed out The Undead and writes Dracula.

That's it.

It's a game changer,

the way that Shelley's Frankenstein is a game changer.

Something happens there

which pulls all these legends together

and starts to make the vampire into a popular figure

that we all understand.

- Dracula becomes the sort of heir text for vampires

and it's probably one of the most filmed stories

of all time.

- As we see literary storytelling giving way

to cinematic storytelling,

there are a lot of queer artists who are there

to make sure that that subtext survives

and in fact flourishes as presented on the big screen.

- So, F.W. Murnau.

- After fighting in World War I,

Murnau is existing in Weimar, Germany

and if we know anything from Cabaret,

it's that Germany was a great place

to be gay until it wasn't.

He got out when the getting was good

and came to the United States but not before, you know,

making obviously some singularly iconic queer horror,

including Der Januskopf, Faust, and Nosferatu.

- It's extraordinary to think

that he had his hand in Dracula with Nosferatu

and he had his hand in Jekyll and Hyde.

- Murnau made an unauthorized version

of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde in the early twenties

called Der Januskopf.

These themes of doubled selfs,

a self that is presented

to the world and a self that is secret and hidden,

that is the more libidinal, eroticized self,

appealed to him.

- In a film that is tragically lost to us,

the metaphors are all just kind of sitting there.

This thing inside me that I can't control

and it wants to come out

and I mustn't let it because if it does,

then horrible things will happen.

- We can't help but express

this sort of duality that we all feel.

And if you're aware of being queer,

that parallel is sort of unmistakable and delicious.

- The devil is almost always portrayed as a man

because, you know, the Bible.

And so in a story like Faust,

you are left with one man trying to show a man

all the possibilities that life might entail

if only he'll sign up for his dark forces.

You have the devil being the person who's trying

to seduce the central figure away from the beautiful

and wholesome love of a woman.

- There's always a neglected woman over there, isn't there?

Faust is having to choose between her and the devil.

And I think we might hope that he gets taken for good.

I don't know, at least a little part of me does.

To come up with some of that imagery,

I think it requires a willingness to play in the dark.

There are things that go on in the dark,

there are freedoms to explore in the dark

and Faust is very much like Nosferatu

in that the world of the so called devil,

enemy, evil figure, is so intoxicating.

It makes it so clear why you want to dance with the devil.

- Nosferatu is the one that changed everything.

- Where do horror movies really start?

They start with Nosferatu.

They start with this coded, phallic,

vampire cinematic image.

That's where our understanding of what a monster is begins

and it's no wonder that the monster is so captivating

and so seductive even as they're horrifying.

So much of that must have come from F.W. Murnau's

being a queer artist, from Bram Stoker being a queer artist.

That stuff is kind of in the DNA of what a movie monster is.

- I love a lot of the Dracula films,

but the one that hits closest to home for me is Nosferatu.

All of the other depictions of Dracula tend to be

a dashing romantic hero and I've never seen Dracula

as a romantic hero.

I've always seen him as hobbled and made sort of,

despite his power, pitifully small by his monstrousness.

- Unlike in the book where Dracula begins

as a hideous old man and then gradually gets younger,

he stays hideous and Max Schreck's look is iconic.

- On my bucket list was always to play a vampire,

but the one I really related to was Nosferatu

because he looked, he was perceived to look as hideous.

He doesn't know that yet and I kinda love that,

I find the beauty in that.

- Nosferatu actually evokes this sniffling rodent

that is, I think in a way,

a truer expression of the character.

And then because of that also becomes strangely more human.

- 'Cause Murnau was a gay director,

I think he sort of plays up

some of the gay undertones in the story.

It features what some scholars called

the beast in the boudoir motif,

which is where the monster comes into the bedroom at night.

And in Murnau's version there's a bedroom seduction scene

between Count Orlok, as he's called in Noserfatu

and Jonathan Hutter or Harker.

- Having the monster out at the edge of town

is a horror idea that we keep coming back to,

but it also sort of spoke to the place

that queer people held in society.

- Nosferatu is sort of a cornerstone

of what we would see over and over again in vampire cinema

where there's the outsider,

and there's the sexual nature of the bites

and the entrancement and so yeah,

he is already, in the silent era,

bringing this very kind of queer coding

to this kind of storytelling.

- It's very simple to find antisemitic overtones

in vampire movies from Stoker

through to Murnau's film Nosferatu.

In the late 19th century,

many, many Jews arrived in London from Eastern Europe.

You can easily map the horror

of the Eastern European vampire

to this new cluster of immigrant communities.

- If I were sort of around at that time

and I was aware of that bias,

sort of seeing Orlok as anything other than a gay Jew

would be quite difficult I think.

- Conflating Jews and homosexuals as the evil, as the bad.

The fact that he utilized any of that

in his making of Nosferatu, of course it makes sense,

it's good to be good at your craft and to scare people,

but it's also really, really dangerous.

- This fear of the other,

whether that other is homosexual or Jewish

or just an outsider,

he is certainly relying upon that fear

as a driver of the movie.

- I just think, as a Jew and as homosexual,

I'm very aware and scared of these narratives.

- Nosferatu was the first adaptation

of Bram Stoker's Dracula and it was an illegal adaptation.

- He's basically doing unofficial Dracula fan fiction.

- Florence Stoker sued because it was just a rip off.

There was no royalty paid to Stoker's estate

for making this version of Dracula.

- The court ordered every print of Nosferatu destroyed.

One print survived the massacre of Nosferatu prints

and that one print gave birth to every print

that has been circulated around the world.

If it weren't for one person who hid that print,

we would not know Nosferatu the way that we know it today.

Nosferatu became, really the first cult film.

The Bram Stoker estate actively hunting down every print

of Nosferatu greatly contributed to the success of Dracula

because it created this buzz,

at first on Broadway and then at the movies.

- The early pillars of horror

were these Universal monster movies starting with Dracula.

- I am Dracula.

- When I was a kid, I started buying Aurora model kits

from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

And I remember my two sisters on the floor playing

with Barbie and Ken and I'm up there playing

with Frankenstein and the Wolfman.

Oh I love them, I love all the Universal monsters.

I like Dracula the best because even though

I was a little kid, I knew he was really sexy.

- Laugh all you like.

I think he's fascinating.

- Bela Lugosi's Dracula presents as like

if elegance was a gender.

- Is it cyclical?

There are sort of fashions in vampirism.

Bela Lugosi took over it from Max Schreck

and Dracula became much more urbane.

- Bela Lugosi's Dracula has a certain,

it's this like glide across the room energy

that I've always wanted.

- I once had said it was manic bisexual energy,

but it is manic, pansexual, omnisexual energy.

- Anything I can do, gladly.

- The Dracula costume kit is basically drag.

You have face paint and then you have blood red lips,

and then you slick your hair back, you put on a cape,

you put on fancy antique jewels.

- I bid you welcome.

- And then you go live in a castle

and you can turn into a bat.

So like, this to me is the experience of being a gay man.

- I hope you will find this comfortable.

- Thanks, it looks very inviting.

- I think if Bram Stoker were alive,

he'd probably have said Bela Lugosi was his favorite

because he was strange and exotic.

- The spider spinning his we for the unwary fly.

The blood is the light, Mr. Renfield.

- He had a quality to him.

You didn't think he was that monstrous.

I mean, when the wolves are baying and he says.

- Children of the night.

What music they make.

- It's kind of like, oh.

He has an aesthetic soul.

- When Dwight Frye, as Renfield,

first meets Bela Lugosi's Dracula,

he practically gets the vapors.

- It's really good to see you.

- Dwight Frye commits kind of a fruity,

over the top, excessive performance.

- Yes, master.

- And how did he get to be so over the top?

- It's just a scratch.

- He is bitten by Dracula

in the opening sequence of the film.

And again, it's quite pronounced

that this is a homoerotic act

because he sort of passes out

and then Dracula enters the scene

and then he bends down in almost sort of like

a spider like crouch as he moves

in on the supine Renfield.

- Dracula?

I never even heard the name before.

- It is a hysterical over the top performance

that is perceived today perhaps as being camp.

- Who wants to eat flies?

- You do, ya loony.

- Not when I can get nice fat spiders.

- It is absolutely a feeling of connection

that many gay people have for that character

because it is being marginalized,

it's being told that you're crazy,

it's being told that you don't fit in.

- Come along, now.

Come along.

- Yet absolutely having a conviction

that nobody else shares.

Why, he's mad.

- The queerness of that performance,

that's Todd Browning's reaction

to the world outside of Universal Studios,

which was really embracing the Pansy Craze.

- Tod Browning's Dracula came out to the 1931

at the height of the Pansy Craze.

- The Pansy Craze referred to drag entertainers

who performed in mainly nightclubs.

Some of the most significant pansy clubs

were very close to Universal Studios

when these horror films were being made.

At that time, there was a celebration of gay life

in a very big way in Tinseltown.

All the intelligentsia of Hollywood came to these clubs

to hear these different performers and see them

because they were witty, they were smart, they were fun,

they were outrageous, and they were daring.

- The wonderful thing about the Pansy Craze

in cities like New York, in Los Angeles and London

is this invitation for the normies

to engage with the queers.

A lot of that had to do with prohibition and it was one of

the only places where straight people could get a drink.

- I never drink wine.

- Tod Browning used a lot of gay actors.

David Manners,

who plays the romantic interest in Dracula

- Mina.

You're so, like a changed girl.

- Who retired from films because he was gay

and he couldn't be cast as a leading man

when people knew that he was queer.

- What's he done to you, dearie?

Tell me.

- He came to me.

He opened a vein in his arm and he made me drink.

- There is this kind of tragic subtext for Dracula

because he's never fully in that life

that he's been dealt.

He becomes a perfect metaphor in many ways,

I think, for queer people.

- What's always worked for vampires,

even when they're monstrous,

is there's something that we shouldn't like about them.

- He is meant to be the plague and so it's very interesting

that there has been adaptation after adaptation

after adaptation of the Dracula myth

in which he becomes the central character.

But in fact, that's not the story of Dracula.

The story of Dracula is ordinary people visited

by this terrible force.

- How long have you had those little marks?

- Marks?

- The interesting thing is to me,

he has always been a ambiguous sexual figure.

He is the sort of definition of forbidden desire,

whatever that may be.

- I think what made Dracula so timeless

as a character is sex.

- I felt it's breath on my face.

And then it's lips.

- Something tapping at the window is frightening,

but it's also quite sexy

'cause you never know what it's going to be

and it's massively tied up

in all these kind of oppressed desires.

It's representing something very,

very powerful inside us all.

That actually, one night with Dracula is worth dying for.