Original subtitles

- I think there's a great deal of

our astonishment when it is realized

how much homosexuality exists among women.

You know, I think it's something that people

just don't believe is a very great force at all.

- The notion of the predatory female

has been present from the beginning of cinema.

- It's fascinating,

the terror of women controlling their own sexuality.

- What are you thinking about?

- The same thing you are.

What else could I think about?

- It upends our notions of who is victim

and who is victimizer and who has the power

and what that power looks like.

- It's nice.

- When you start to explore female heroines

who might also be the monster.

We have to start asking ourselves

what's frightening about femininity?

- What's the biggest threat

that the women are sexually active,

that they're sexually active with one another,

that they're independent, right?

That you can't control them, you can't commodify them,

so what do you do?

You turn that into a figure of horror.

- Just because one person believes I'm the villain,

they're wrong, but I am the villain in their story

and they're the villain in mine and I'm right.

- There's something terrifying about movies

where a fragile femininity becomes something with teeth.

- Men are fascinated by it.

Even if they won't admit it, they're utterly fascinated

because they think, how can a woman prefer another woman?

They're not me. You know?

- It's a sexual attraction to a lot of men.

- Hmm. - They think the thought of

two women together is quite stimulating.

- The notion of dooming female alliances

is a kind of unconscious expression

of the fear of established power being taken away.

The dyke is a very selfish person.

She's out to get all she can and as often as she can.

The dyke often takes on unjust advantage of the young femme.

After feeding her drinks all night,

she becomes very receptive

to the dyke's suggestions and advances.

- The one character that we have been given

in bounty through the years is the lesbian vampire.

Which is great because I mean, listen,

who doesn't love a good lesbian vampire?

- Most lesbian vampire films are either based

on Carmilla or the story of Elizabeth Bathory

The Countess Elizabeth Bathory,

esteemed member of the royal family,

convicted by holy court of high crimes.

Was she true and malignant vampire

filled with a feted stench of death?

Poor Countess Bathory.

Elizabeth Bathory was the countess in 16th century Hungary.

She was put on trial for murdering 500 young women

from the surrounding villages.

Although how she could murder 500 women and get away with it

without anybody noticing

in a small Hungarian village escapes me.

- There is some controversy

if these events actually took place

or if this was really about noble men

trying to seize this woman's property.

- The countess is rumored to have murdered young women

to bathe in their blood

because she thought that would keep her young and beautiful.

I think of her more as someone who had

irrepressible hungers for women

and didn't really know how to express them

so she had to kill them and consume them.

Elizabeth Bathory inspired many vampire legends,

but I think of Carmilla as the grandmother of Dracula

and and subsequent vampire fiction.

- Carmilla. - Carmilla.

- Carmilla.

Carmilla.

- Carmilla is one of the most prominent

vampire novels ever written.

It's what inspired Bram Stoker to make Dracula.

- Carmilla.

Hold me.

I beg you.

Hold it me tight.

- The greatest vampire in literature would not exist

if it weren't for a lesbian vampire story first.

- I actually read "Carmilla"

before I saw any lesbian vampire films.

- "Carmilla" was one of my favorite vampire stories

and probably the one I've read the most.

- I personally love the story of Carmilla

because it was one of the first times

that I experienced a lesbian storyline

in a more classical setting

and I think understanding that this was a larger thing

made me feel less othered.

It made me feel seen.

- It's a novella about a very mysterious girl

who's rescued when her carriage crashes and she's taken in.

- But Carmella is actually this other worldly being

that's going to suck the life force out of our female hero.

- So like even from the beginning,

like the sort of the origin text of the vampire

is this like deeply lesbian book.

- Why do you look at me like that?

- How beautiful you are.

- Thank you.

- But it was also a novel of a predator

and of like someone sort of being hunted.

- It's ultimately this fear of the queer woman

that's on display.

- Come on.

Afraid? - Oh.

- In "Carmilla" we see the beginning tropes

of the obsessive lesbian friend.

- I thought this was another nightmare.

- You needn't worry now. I'm here with you.

- She has this very intense relationship

with the innocent virginal girl

who then is tormented by these fantasies of Carmilla.

- The main character experiences sex with Carmilla

in the form of a giant cat that comes to her

and sits on her chest.

The metaphor is very obvious, right?

Pussy.

Everywhere.

- My heart beat faster,

my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn.

A sobbing, that turned into a dreadful convulsion

in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.

- We were seeing a man write about female desire

without wanting to just say it was an orgasm.

- And it's also the first time that we see the woman monster

being associated with cats,

which should become a staple of the genre.

At the end of the novella,

she's defeated by the male protagonists,

which again is another trope that's going to carry into

almost all lesbian vampire films.

The first true lesbian vampire film is "Dracula's Daughter,"

which was one of the last in the first cycle

of original universal monster movies

that's outside of the Carmilla/Elizabeth Bathory narrative.

It sets up this existential queer female vampire.

- Why are you looking at me that way?

Won't I do?

- Yes, you'll do very well indeed.

- The tagline of "Dracula's Daughter" is quote,

"She gives you that weird feeling."

So do what you will with that information.

- Do you like jewels, Lili?

I'll show it to you.

You have a woman

who's experiencing unnatural desires.

- Please don't come any closer! I...

She's trying to fight against it.

- Freud had been writing for a couple decades

so by the 30s and 40s

psychoanalysis is everywhere in pop culture.

- You'd all be interested to know what modern science

has to say about vampires.

- Like any disease of the mind, it can be cured.

All we have to discover is what brought about the obsession

in order to affect mental release.

- Release?

- Countess Zaleska is seeking out ways

to cure herself of her ungodly urges.

- The countess goes to see a psychiatrist

because she doesn't wanna be a vampire anymore.

- It came over me again, that overpowering command,

wordless, insistent,

and I had to obey.

- What was it?

- I can't tell you it's too,

too ghastly.

- It's sad but it is the story of like a queer person

who does not wanna be queer,

who's like really trying to fight

against their essential nature.

- I'm thinking about young people

kind of questioning their sexuality.

All of the things someone might try to make it stop.

- In the name of the all holiest

and through this cross be the evil spirit cast out

until the end of time.

- Dracula died so she thinks this curse,

I'm free, it's lifted.

- I can live a normal life now,

think normal things, even play normal music again.

Listen.

- It didn't work.

And then lesbian power move, gets a therapist.

- There isn't anything I won't do now

to enlist your aid in freeing me

of the curse of the Draculas. - Draculas?

- That doesn't work either. Why?

'Cause she's gay.

- The next time you feel this influence, don't avoid it.

Meet it.

Fight it.

- It's in you, baby girl.

Like nothing's gonna stop it.

- Stop!

Stop!

Stop!

- We saw queer people at the time of something to be fixed,

something to be cured and the parallel of that

with this blood curse of being a vampire is hard to ignore.

- The psychiatry from the 1930s has roots

in what we now see with conversion therapy.

They were giving them medication to feel ill

and then showing them what they desire

as a way to try to retrain their brain.

This is still being done today

to queer youth all across the country.

- I am somebody who went through conversion therapy.

I was sent to a pretty insane facility in the desert

and asked to change everything about myself

because I was "sick" and I needed to be reformed

and my queerness, my mental health struggles

were all used against me.

And it's pretty much as close to a real life horror film

as I think many people can get.

Films like "Dracula's Daughter" resonate with queer people

because growing up, most of us are told

that the space we take up is not valid.

Most of us are told that we need to change

or adapt or hide who we are in order to fit into society.

We know what it's like to feel like we're not allowed

to be ourselves and the monster is telling us

that we must change and we are wrong.

- So in 1936 when "Dracula Daughter" comes out,

Hollywood just started enforcing the Production Code.

- The Hays Code determines

what can and cannot be shown in movies.

So if you're going to show homosexuality,

the homosexual must be punished.

- Because of the Hays Code, the queer can't live.

The queer has to be dispatched with, has to be murdered,

has to be ended. - The woman is beautiful.

She was beautiful when she died

100 years ago.

- "Dracula's Daughter" is actually looking forward

to a lot of the 1940s horror films.

That start to soften or mitigate

what it means to be a monster.

- There's something evil in me.

- As far as the 40s go,

I think the defining event has to have been World War II.

If you are 17,

you can enlist in the Air Corps Reserve.

- With the bulk of men going off to war,

just imagine lesbian relationships flourishing,

all kinds of housewives finding themselves

when there's no men around.

- It really rearranged gender roles in America.

- After the war, Rosie the Riveter

had to go back into the house.

- It's coming from downstairs.

- It comes from everywhere and nowhere.

- Women are haunted by the specter of social expectations

or by their own desires or some combination of the two.

Twas a woman. I swear it.

A ghost of a woman.

- The horror films of that era,

they often figure around this central character

of a ghostly woman or a dead woman

as another way to nominate lesbian desire.

- You have these female presences

exerting control from beyond the grave.

If you look at it from a feminist perspective

or a queer perspective, 1940s lesbianism was just, you know,

something that didn't exist basically

and when it did exist, it was ghosts.

- Like if she doesn't have a body,

then you don't have to worry about her pursuing anyone.

- If a woman could get rid of her body,

which really is the sight of a lot of violence

against a woman, man, she could be scary

and dangerous and powerful.

- Historically, there's this tremendous sense

of lesbian invisibility.

- The invisible lesbian thing is huge,

but I didn't see myself represented

in anything ever growing up.

Like there was nothing even remotely close

that made me feel like, oh okay, maybe this is what I am.

- Lesbians are sort of these specters

that when you look closely, like you squint,

it's like there, there's lesbians everywhere.

- Sometimes when I walk along the corridor,

I fancy I hear her just behind me.

That quick light step.

I couldn't mistake it anywhere.

Not only in this room, it's in all the rooms in the house.

- What makes "Rebecca" a lesbian ghost story

is it's just about women grappling

with the specter of other women.

- Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?

I don't believe it.

- Sometimes,

I wonder if she doesn't come back here to Manderley,

and watch you and Mr. De Winter together.

- Mrs. Danvers is completely obsessed

with the the dead Mrs. De Winter.

And you very much get a strong reading that Mrs. Danvers

is a homosexual and that there might have been

something between them.

- I keep her underwear on this side.

They were made especially for her by the nuns

in the convent of St. Clair.

- I don't know what it is with lesbians,

but we love nuns.

We're like, "That's hot. Thank you."

- I watched you go down just as I watched her a year ago.

Even in the same dress you couldn't compare.

- "Rebecca" is about not measuring up to femininity.

There's this figure that exists,

this high femme ghost or spirit

exerting all this will even though she's dead.

And then the new bride

who's never gonna measure up to this woman.

- Every day I, I realized the things that she had

and that I like.

Beauty and wit and intelligence,

and all the things that are so important in a woman.

- Rebecca needed someone like Mrs. Danvers

to feed the size of ego that she had.

And Dane was up for the job.

- You thought you could be Mrs. de Winter,

live in her house, walk in her steps,

take the things that were hers,

but she's too strong for you.

You can't fight her.

No one ever got the better of her, never, never.

- What is left if like the person is gone

and now the reputation and the narrative has shifted,

and you're left with just like a broken heart

and an empty shrine?

You burn it down.

- This is dangerous. She's gone mad.

She said she'd rather destroy Manderley

than see us happy here.

- Gothic drama is about the voiceless things

gaining a voice.

Like in "Rebecca" there's like a person who's bringing

the dead to life in this sort of metaphorical way.

And then you had a literal bringing of the dead to life,

you know, with actual ghosts.

- Does it come every night?

- No.

Just when you begin to think you dreamt it,

it comes again.

- In 1944, "The Uninvited" premieres

and you get to see just how wonderful

or horrible it would be to find out

that the ghost in your house is a lesbian.

- Do you think she wants you there?

- Yes, I think she does.

- And what she wants, I want.

- In "The Uninvited" you have these two female ghosts

who are vying for a living woman's attention.

There's the possibility that one of those ghosts

is the ex lover of another woman in the film.

Mary was a goddess.

Her skin was radiant and that bright, bright hair.

- The way that women are described by other women

is so sort of beautiful and singular,

and it just feels like this expression of desire.

- The nights we've sat talking in front of that fireplace,

planning our whole lives.

It wasn't flirtations and dresses we talked about.

We were no silly giggling girls.

We intended to conquer life.

- Repression is a theme that we see constantly

in films that are kind of queer coded horror.

- They shan't ever find out, my darling.

I promise you.

- And then as the 60s proceed,

these things don't have to be

as couched in metaphor necessarily.

- You married?

- No.

- In Robert Wise's "The Haunting",

you have these people in a haunted house

dealing with the paranormal.

- A haunted house movie is always about the subconscious.

It's always about facing the things

that you can only really see in the dark of night.

- The house.

It's alive!

- The haunted house represents the mind

of the protagonist,

and the haunted side of it is the shadow self.

But it's all up, it's all in here.

It's all doing battle with our own stuff.

- Stop it!

- Eleanor is a young woman whose mother has just passed

and she's never known anything else.

She's trying to figure out where she belongs in the world

and is like having a delayed adolescence in a way.

- I'd like to drink to, uh,

to just us, good companions. - Excellent.

To my new companion.

- Theo from "The Haunting" is like all fur

and leopard print and turbans and leather gloves.

She just comes out of the gate,

balls to the wall, hitting on Nell immediately.

- If you're feeling the least bit nervous

just run right into my room them.

- Thanks. Goodnight.

- She's on the rebound basically and is like,

I'm gonna pursue Eleanor in this really

like dogged and intense way.

- We're going to be great friends, Theo.

- Like sisters?

- Theo is a psychic.

She can see inside her and she knows what's up,

and Nell is not comfortable with it.

- How did you know I brought new clothes?

- You wear your thoughts on your sleeve.

- Anyway, that's better than my heart.

- What this movie is about underneath the surface

is frankly her inability to fully process

a version of herself that could be free

and dare to engage with the things

that she's been sheltered from within her own self.

- I'd rather be innocent than like you.

- Meaning what?

- There's another alternate way of being a woman

in front of her that she so desperately needs

to integrate and embrace.

It is literally killing her.

- The world is full of inconsistencies

on natural things.

Nature's mistakes they're called.

You, for instance.

- She does not understand what's happening to her.

It's like this thing that can't quite come to the surface

and so it's all about sublimation and silence.

- The house is coming down around me,

the house is destroying itself.

- Every queer person has to face

the weight of family pressure,

the weight to social pressure.

When we are experiencing something

that's not being mirrored back to us by society,

it's in our subconscious

and it's bubbling up in fleeting glimpses.

- Eleanor doesn't get to live long enough

to fully understand what it is she's experiencing,

which is really sad.

You know? It's like really tragic.

- Your house is haunted.

Her poor, bedeviled mind

wasn't strong enough to fight it.

- The ghost story gothic of these dead women

who won't go away, who keep bothering people

and don't they know they just need to

get out of the picture?

And so you have films

like "The Haunting" or "The Uninvited,"

literally "The Uninvited"

who are, you know, daring to make themselves known

and visible even though they don't serve the purpose

that straight men see for them.

- There was a gap really

between "Dracula's Daughter" in the 30s

and the lesbian vampire boobs of the 60s and 70s.

- You know, we don't get just the children's hour anymore.

- Oh, I feel so damn sick and dirty,

I can't stand it anymore!

- We don't just get like miserable lesbians

who kill themselves.

- Oh.

Oh.

- That is the major difference,

in the 1970s is we get sleaze.

- What are you implying, that Susan is a lesbian?

- No, but she's been dominated by a lesbian.

- When we've move into the 1970s,

we come back to these adaptations of Carmilla

or the story of Elizabeth Bathory.

- Pre-film school, I worked at Kim's Video

on Bleecker Street, this incredible video store.

They'd have all these bootlegs of every movie

and so I would watch all these 1960s and 70s vampire movies.

There was like a slew of those.

- We've got a whole bunch of films in France

from Jean Rollin making female vampires soft core.

We've got crazy films from Jes Franco.

Probably the most well known,

because they were done in English,

were the films from Hammer Studios.

- Don't you wish some handsome young man

would come into your life?

- Hm.

No, neither do you I hope.

- We no longer had the vampires

who were sexually repressed.

No. Sexy vampires.

It was sex, sex, sex.

Lesbianism was very tied in with being a vampire.

- You're so beautiful, Mary.

- Which was sexy but also like the Harbinger of Doom.

- Queer women were being used

to get people horned up.

- We must excite his desire. - He'll awake soon.

- Not only can they literally devour men,

but they can also seduce women to join their unholy cabal.

- Queer women's sexuality is so often tied to power.

- There's a cottage in the woods.

A young girl lives there alone, refuses to take a husband.

- And once you remove guys from the equation entirely,

it becomes something that we find

quote, unquote, "horrifying."

- They prey on young virgins,

put a spell on them.

Sometimes they woo them.

Slowly sucking their life away.

Sometimes they kill quickly.

One feast, one bite of their fangs!

- Well, that's alright. I'm not a young virgin.

- They're allowed to be titillating and horrifying

for ostensibly straight men who in most of these cases,

that's also who is writing and directing these movies.

- Why are the lesbians all feminine?

I would think largely because the people consuming them

are men, and men don't have much use for a masculine woman.

They have a lot of use for a feminine woman

and they have even more use for two feminine women together.

- I'm like you can't be a lesbian with those fingernails.

I mean you can, but like...

You're not gonna be finger banging.

- Lesbian sexuality unless it is specifically

filtered through horn aimed at men,

it is not visible to men

except as like a shadow on the wall.

- It's so interesting that, you know,

it's like men make these movies

thinking that it's like hot for them,

but sorry, you put hot women in it

so lesbians are gonna like it too.

- You can apply a read to these films

where they are the reaction against

the early waves of feminism that were emerging

in the late 60s and 70s.

- What we are talking about

is a revolution and not a reform.

- There has been proposed a constitutional amendment

to guarantee equal rights for women.

Male opponents in the Senate said it would destroy

traditional man/woman relationships, weaken family ties,

increased homosexuality.

- How do we fix that? Oh, I know.

We portray the actualized woman as being a monster.

- Kill him! Kill him now!

Get closer to him! Slash his face!

Find his heart and cut it out.

Silence him! Destroy his masculinity!

- This is what happens, men,

when women start having sex with other women,

it is devastatingly destructive to men.

- "Daughters of Darkness" is one of those

lesbian vampire films that really stands out.

- Who do you think I am?

A kind of ghoul? A vampire?

Oh no my dear.

I'm just an outmoded character, nothing more.

You know, the beautiful stranger,

slightly sad, slightly mysterious.

- The lesbian vampire goes on these

like feminist monologues.

- Stephan loves me whatever you may think.

- Stephan loves me whatever you may think.

Of course he does.

That's why dreams he making out of you

what every man dreams of making out of every woman,

a slave, a thing, an object for pleasure.

- It stars Delphine Seyrig,

European actress and an outspoken feminist.

She uses mad sensibility in her portrayal

of Countess Bathory.

- I am a man and she is mine.

- Was she yours last night?

Would he be yours if you let go of her now?

- At the end of the film, Elizabeth Bathory died

and you think, okay, it's gonna just sort of end

like a typical lesbian vampire film.

But Valerie has now taken on the persona of the countess.

- I can't tell you how much I despise this kind of place

this guide the place,

especially now when there's no one.

- So it really points to this shared legacy

of queerness being passed down

from generation to generation.

There really isn't another film like that

except for "The Hunger."

- It imagines the monstrous

as a kind of expression of high fashion sensibility.

- My favorite lesbian vampire movie is "The Hunger."

- It is so essentially 80s.

- First thoughts of "The Hunger" were just like, Oh my God,

this is so sexy, this is so hot.

I want to be in there.

- They are all just bisexual disasters.

- All this heterosexual drama doesn't matter anymore.

Like what's happening here? I want in on this.

- There's this premise of the scary bisexual

because they're out to get you,

but they're out to get everybody else also.

- Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve, come on.

Come, and David fucking Bowie!

Come on. That movie changed my life.

- What have you done to me?

- I've given you something you never dared dream of.

- What? - Everlasting Life.

- Miriam Blaylock is the culmination

of the lesbian vampires of the 1970s.

- Miriam does think at her in lesbian.

There's a scene, Catherine Deneuve

just kind of standing there in a veil looking amazing

and she thinks lesbianonic thoughts.

It's Susan Sarandon.

And then Susan Sarandon like, she looks up and she's like.

- I'm sorry, what did you say?

- And Catherine Deneuve's like.

- Nothing, but I would like to talk to you.

- Uh, uh, yes, I'd like that.

- I thought that was such a cool take on vampirism.

The seduction was just this kind of lesbian telepathy.

It was this idea of it's a mind thing first.

- I don't know why I'm here.

- Come in.

And then of course the really hot sex scene.

- What's that piece your playing?

- It's "Lakme" by Delibes.

- Can we talk about the Coloratura

Meso Soprano duet from "Lakme"?

- Is it a love song?

- I told you.

It was sung by two women.

- Sounds like a love song.

- Then I suppose that's what it is.

- Da, da, da, da, da.

Yeah. Every time a lesbian vampire has sex, they play that.

- "The Hunger" is the first lesbian sex scene I ever saw.

- There's like a moment where

like she's kinda sucking on her wrist

and it felt really like,

I know what I'm looking at here.

- Miriam, she really is like a vampire mommy

who's inducting Susan Sarandon into this world

through the exchange of blood and ritual.

- "The Hunger" is fascinating

because it purports to be celebrating homosexual desire,

but when you really look at it,

the straight men are duplicating this

for their own satisfaction.

Until you go into a lesbian bar and we see "The Hunger"

and we know that they're basically

just kind of ripping off our culture.

We've all been trained to find ourselves

in these narratives.

We found ourselves.

- We're damned to live forever.

With no release, no end.

And I need you to share it with me.

- "The Hunger", ugh, lesbian seduction at its finest.

And also, the reality that lesbians,

we are just gonna be stuck in eternity next to our exes.

- All of you, all my loves.

Surrounded by them.

Just forever.

What keeps coming up in each of these movies

is like once you go dyke,

maybe you'll start enjoying sex for once.

Like that's what keeps happening every single time

is that these women are like, oh, this is it.

- It's not nearly as difficult as you imagined, is it?

- "The Hunger" just took that genre

and went phew out to the, you know, just skyrocketed.

But my absolute favorite, "Lair of the White Worm."

Amanda Donohoe straps on the biggest dildo

I have ever seen in my life.

It was like a Buick. She strapped on a Buick.

There's this virgin quivering on the altar

as they do this, she's stepping closer and closer

with his Buick strapped on.

It's the campiest greatest thing I've ever seen.

- What vampire movies allow for

is a celebration of morality-free sexuality.

- Bet your girlfriend doesn't do this for you.

- Nah. Nor me Mum neither.

- Oh, I remind you of your mother, do I?

- And for the most part,

people are terrified of that notion.

- I give you

Katrina!

- "Vamp" is a very interesting gem of a vampire film

because it's set at a vampire strip club.

Sex work is a huge part of queer history

and what's interesting about "Vamp" is that sex work

and vampirism is linked.

That shows a sex worker being in control of the situation,

which is itself also very queer.

- Oh my God! "Vamp"!

- Wow.

"Vamp" and Grace Jones.

- Grace Jones.

Icon. - Oh, Grace Jones.

- Men love Grace Jones and women love Grace Jones.

What could Grace Jones really have done

if she wasn't an icon?

- Grace Jones, can I please talk, oh my God.

When she comes out.

- In the middle of that film was this performance art piece.

It seemed like Grace Jones came in

and did that part of the movie.

When you see her, she's white,

like she is white, white, white and with blue eyes.

Then she starts to strip,

she's doing a strip tease of her whiteness to blackness.

She's basically like exposing

actually you've been watching a black woman

doing this dance for you.

It was such an arresting, provocative

piece of performance art that just seemed

totally out of place in the best way

in this super goofy movie.

- I remember walking into the dressing room

and there was Grace Jones,

and she was completely naked

and Keith Haring was drawing white lines all over her body.

I got a chance to just sit and watch them draw

and I always remember that moment.

Keith Haring was a artist, an AIDS activist,

and he was really fundamental in bringing out the issue

when everybody was dealing with aids.

- We have this incredibly important piece

of queer art history with the Keith Haring body painting

on Grace Jones that elevates the film

into an artistic space.

- She's, I, I...

- There's not a lot of women that I've seen

that are my color complexion

and chocolate like me in a strong role.

She was also androgynous.

She was kind of fucking with gender.

- Grace Jones might as well have been a gay vampire

in real actual life.

She moved through the world with that confusing blend

of masculine/feminine energy.

- She had very powerful feminine but very powerful male.

She had both of those entities to me.

- There's these almost monstrous

but kind of beautiful displays of genderless queer power.

- As a young person,

I felt very out of my element gender-wise,

like I felt like, hey, I really like being a girl,

but like sometimes people don't think I'm a girl

and that makes me feel really scared or ashamed.

There was something about the way

Grace Jones carried herself.

It made me feel like I was less weird.

- She has the testosterone of like 10,000 men

as well as the estrogen of maybe 9,000 women.

- Does that make you bisexual?

- I think that it's ridiculous trying to categorize

people's feelings or saying what does one prefer.

There's no comparison.

You can't just say one's better than the other

or one's worse than the other, I prefer one to the other.

It's just do what you feel

when you feel like it if you feel like it.

- Black widow.

She mates and she kills.

- In the late 80s/early 90s

you see this reemergence of the film noir heroine

or the vamp if you will.

But you see her from the perspective of female rage.

- Really starting to piss me off.

- The overarching conservatism of the Reagan era

was bad for queer people in general,

but bad for women specifically.

- There's this real concern in the backlash of feminism

that women are essentially too angry.

- You watch your mouth, buddy.

- So suddenly it was like, well,

we'll make the lesbians the villains for a while

and see how that goes.

- The 90s were kind of vicious.

Lesbian chic vicious.

- Lesbian chic, for those of you that don't know,

is when lesbians became very, very popular

within pop culture in America.

- All of a sudden everyone's doing a lesbian thing.

So it was sort of exciting but at the same time

it was like, what's happening?

- The characters were supposed to be lesbians,

but they weren't written by lesbians,

they weren't directed by lesbians

and they certainly weren't being played by lesbians.

So we were raised from our own narrative.

- Like there had been some thievery.

- There was some desire to see bisexual women

and see an expression of a kind of sexual liberation,

but there also had to be a villainizing of that liberation.

- What's your new book about?

- A detective. He falls for the wrong woman.

- What happens?

She kills him.

- "Basic Instinct" comes out in 1992,

and in that film we see the lesbian vampire

transformed into the dangerous femme fatale.

The character of Catherine Tramell is this shifty bisexual

who pierces men with her phallus.

- I remember seeing "Basic Instinct"

and getting really excited 'cause oh, finally,

there's like a, you know, a bisexual on the screen.

- You get to see this character

who seems complex and in a relationship with this woman.

Hi.

- But that relationship is clearly

just meant for the male gaze.

And is very throwaway.

Roxy?

- There's a depiction of heartless bisexuals in in the movie

that seemed to me actually kind of reactionary at the time.

- You didn't feel anything for him,

you just had sex with him for your book?

- In the beginning.

Then I got to like what he did for me.

- I actually remember having to cross a picket line

to go see "Basic Instinct"

and having very conflicted feelings about it.

But I also really wanted to see this movie.

- My friends were protesting outside of screenings,

so I actually snuck with another friend of mine

to a different neighborhood to go see it.

- Even if it's this sort of unflattering portrayal

of who we are, we're just so excited

to see ourselves that there's no way

you can't identify with it.

- Not that we can't also be murderers.

I know some perfectly horrible homosexuals.

It's just that there's not a movie playing in the cinema

next door where Catherine Tramell and Roxy

just like have cute dinner parties, you know?

Meh!

- We just need more representation.

- People really love to get mad about queer villains,

but I find queer villains

to be tremendously powerful and interesting.

- Somebody has to die.

- Why?

- Somebody always does.

- "Basic Instinct" is very successful.

And unleashes a slew of bisexual killers

in films like "Poison Ivy",

"Wild Things",

and "Single White Female."

- You've gotta be kidding.

- In the 90s you see queer characters

wanting to take over the bodies

or the lives of the protagonists.

You can track that back to Carmilla,

the stranger that shows up at the doorstep of our hero

and begins to suck away her identity.

- I love myself like this.

- I really wanna do that.

I just wanna move in with someone and become them.

- Anything of mine that you want, just go ahead.

Share and share alike.

- There's this push and pull of do I wanna be with you?

Do I want to be you?

Am I in league with you or am I in competition with you?

- Ah! - And how painful

the confusion of that is.

- No.

- I mean, I remember watching "Single White Female"

and thinking this is the most homophobic movie

I've ever seen in my entire life.

How could you do that?

Everything I've done, I've done for you.

Don't you understand that?

- But it also feels real in this like very interesting way

where it's like this desire as this like obliterating force.

- When I first sought "Mulholland Drive"

I was 20 years old

and I left that theater thinking

I'm a lesbian.

And then I didn't come out for 14 more years.

- Camilla.

- Like "Basic Instinct", "Mulholland Drive"

comes out of the Carmilla narrative.

It's very much a contemporary perverse re-imagining

of the mysterious woman crashing by the side of the road

and being taken in by an innocent.

- Where were you hurt?

- "Mulholland Drive" is a series of scenes

that happen twice.

Once in an idealized dream life and once in reality.

- What are you doing? - What are you doing?

- We don't stop here. - We don't stop here.

- As viewers, you're second guessing your own experience.

I can't think of a better analogy cinematically

for what it's like to be gay and not know yet.

Have you ever done this before?

- I don't know.

Have you?

- You have the one experience

of externally walking through life.

- Hi, I'm Diane Selwyn.

- And then there's also the internal life.

- My name's Betty. - No, it's not.

- That is in constant conflict with the world around you.

What I think is so deeply touching about the film

is the idea that there is this idealized

female relationship.

- Good night, sweet Betty.

- This moment of recognizing deep love for one another.

Good night.

- As we go from one reality to another one,

the two lead characters kind of swap places.

- When the film switches into that new gear

and we wake up essentially into Diane Selwyn's reality,

the Naomi Watts character.

- Hey, pretty girl.

Time to wake up.

- We realize that the first part

was a sort of dream like construction of a reality

that she would like to be living.

This is all

a tape recording.

It is

an illusion.

- As opposed to the actual reality she's living in,

in which her girlfriend is ignoring her

and hooking up with a more powerful man.

And she's plotting to kill her.

You got the money?

This is the girl.

- Diane and Camilla's real life relationship is fraught

and clearly at the end of something.

- You want me to make this easy for you?

No.

No fucking way! It's not gonna be!

It's not easy for me! - Diane!

- But the fact that the film spends most of its time

in her dream life of what she wished

that relationship could be.

It's less a negative depiction of a queer relationship

and more a depiction of a human relationship.

- "Heavenly Creatures" is Peter Jackson's film,

co-written with Fran Walsh and based on the true story

of two teenage girls who become friends

and lovers

and murderers.

- It's Mummy!

- There is this terror at the idea of like

teenage girl friendship tilting over into romance.

- Homosexuality.

- But she's always been a normal happy child.

- Oh, it can strike at any time

and adolescents are particularly vulnerable.

- When I was 18, I moved in with my best friend

in New York and I was in love with her.

I was truly in love with her.

And we went to see "Heavenly Creatures."

And it changed everything.

I took the step and I was like,

"I want to be with you.

Let's just live the way we wanna live."

It was life affirming.

- When I was younger, I think I knew I was queer

even though I didn't have language for it necessarily.

- I think I'm going crazy.

- No, you're not, Gina.

It's everyone else who's bonkers.

- I was very adept at operating in the world

and then running this elaborate movie in my head

where things were different.

So I totally connected with that idea

of having this fantasy life that you could escape to

and wanting to make that real.

- Oh God!

We have a son, and heir.

You're such an incredible woman.

- I couldn't have done it without you, Charles.

- Any young woman who ever even had an inkling

that they might like other girls,

sees that relationship and it just feels good.

It speaks to being a young girl

trying to figure out how the fuck she wants to live her life

and who she wants to live it with.

- We felt satisfied indeed.

We have now learned the peace of the thing called bliss.

The joy of the thing called sin.

- It's this thing we come up against over and over again.

Everyone is like this attachment is very passionate,

therefore it is bad.

- Your daughter appears to have formed

a rather unwholesome attachment to Juliet.

- When straight people have like intense, passionate,

emotionally volcanic relationships, that's aspirational.

And when queer people have like intense

emotionally volcanic relationship, it's dangerous.

- It's the intensity of the friendship that concerns me.

I think we should avert trouble before it starts.

- I was rooting 100% for those girls to be together.

We're not going to be separated. We're not.

They can't make us!

- You didn't watch society to interfere with their lives.

- You're not going anywhere.

You're 15 years old, Yvonne!

- Anger against mother boiled up inside me.

As it is she who was one of the main obstacles in my path.

- The film, it's quite sympathetic

to the killers.

Is the message if you just let queers be, they won't kill?

I'm not so sure.

I think it's more indicative of the dangers

of escaping into this fantasy world.

It is because we are mad!

We are both stark raving mad!

- The psychic damage of forbidding someone

from being who they are is so profound that, you know,

you end up with these like very bad situations.

- Look. Mother.

- If we wanna be us, we wanna be us.

And if you don't want that, it could get ugly.

- Oh my God.

- You're asking me to help you fuck over the mob.

I can fuck someone I've just met.

But steal? I need to know someone like I know myself.

- You think you know me like that?

- What a gift it is to be a lesbian and watch "Bound."

- Touch it.

- What are you doing?

- Isn't it obvious?

I'm trying to seduce you.

- Before they made "The Matrix,"

The Wachowskis directed this really hot movie

about two lesbians.

Queerness aside, it's just this great noir pot boiler.

Caesar's gonna get the money, he's gonna bring it-

- How much money? - Shelly said it's over

two million dollars.

- "Bound" was one of the best scripts I ever read.

But they went to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers said,

"We'll make it, you know, if you make Corky a man."

- Do I make you nervous, Corky?

- Curious, baby. - It's funny.

I'm feeling a little bit curious myself.

- The Wachowskis said to me,

"You would not believe how many actresses refuse to come

and read because they thought

it would be detrimental to their career.

- Inside of you, there's a little dyke just like me.

- No, she's nothing like you.

She's a whole lot smarter than you are.

- My character in "Bound",

she's just a really brilliant woman,

stuck in a bad situation and she happens to be gay.

- I can't let you leave, Violet.

Now if you're not with me

then I have to assume you're against me.

- "Bound" has taken the murderous villainist lesbian.

Turn around.

You?

- But made them the star of the show

and made them who you are rooting for.

- You gotta be fucking kidding me.

- So when "Bound" was initially released,

we just thought it was a movie about lesbians

made by straight men.

Wake up, you fucking dyke.

- 'Cause I was so stuck on the, you know, said gender

that I just was like that's it, that's it.

All I need to know is that men made it.

It's corrupt, it's wrong.

Then I finally watched it and I was thinking

it actually gets a lot of les stuff really right

and it feels really queer.

- It was like, how can The Wachowskis

make such a beautiful, sensitive movie about women

and how can they know so much about

what's in a woman's heart?

- But as it turns out,

this was a movie about lesbians made my trans women.

Corky.

I wanna tell you something.

I know.

- Maybe that has something to do with why

it feels different when you're watching it.

Kiss me.

- The Wachowskis bring in Susie Bright as a consultant

so that when there is a lesbian sex scene,

an actual lesbian sexpert is coming in

to coach the actresses.

- Things like that specifically lesbianonic moment

when Gina Gershon like smells her fingers.

- Hmm. Corky. Corky.

- Or when she goes to the bar.

it was kind of giving a window into lesbian life

and it was just a genre movie.

Where's our money?

It reset

the calculus in my brain over what was possible.

- "Bound" really subverts that like dangerous women trope

because we finally get to see these lesbians as heroes.

- You don't want to shoot me, Vi.

I know you don't.

- Caesar, you don't know shit.

- You couldn't believe it because it hadn't happened before.

I was like wait, what?

They're the heroes?

- There's never a sense that these women

are being demonized.

We want them to get away with it

and we want them to get away with each other.

- You know what the difference is

between you and me, Violet? - No.

- Me neither.

Both alive, both together and with all the money.

And that's a radical act for a Hollywood movie.

- There's always been the terror of women with agency

finding other women with agency

and rebuilding a culture or a society.

And I think we see that central tension in horror

day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

- Part of me is embarrassed

that I love to see these horribly offensive, misogynist,

yet delicious female villains

but with the dearth of any kind of powerful women characters

on screen when I was growing up,

those women were weirdly aspirational.

I wanna be like the sexiest person in the room

that everyone's afraid of.

There's something there

that's sort of accidentally empowering.

- There are people who still do not have

even one single safe person

that they can talk about their queerness with.

So with watching a version of ourselves on screen,

it has profound effects in helping people feel less lonely.

- These films are very, very important

because they shape the way people look at the world.

Films make you realize what your desires are

or what your prejudices are or what you want.

Do you feel like an outsider?

Do you feel like an outcast? - We are the weirdos, mister.

- Do you feel that people should be accepted

and loved for who they are?

That to me is what queerness represents,

a fuck ton more than whether or not you eat pussy.