Horror is queer. The genre’s obsession with otherness; the questioning of a monster’s humanity; the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives; and the threat they represent to the living, decent society, and decency itself, is absolutely a queer representation of the world and what it means to exist differently.
The construction of queerness and horror films as we understand them today are firmly grounded in tangled, coded roots tracing all the way back to the classic monsters in black and white. It’s a cobwebbed queer primordial soup that has generated both the Halloween costumes we wear and the sexual identities we live.
Dracula’s first-ever cinematic depiction in the German silent film Nosferatu (1922) establishes the bloodline that disseminated horror’s queer DNA. Director F.W. Murnau called his vampire Count Orlok instead of Dracula (the role which would make Bela Lugosi a household name), but the story remains the same. A salesman—named Hutter instead of Harker—travels to an Eastern European country to arrange a real-estate deal with the nocturnal, rat-faced Count. Orlok returns to Germany, bringing with him a plague of rats and death, until Hutter’s noble wife, Ellen, sacrifices herself by tricking the vampire into drinking her blood past sunrise. As an unlicensed retelling of Bram Stoker’s classic text, the film was mercilessly hunted down by Stoker’s widow who sought to sever it from history. Luckily for the genre it helped establish, Nosferatu proved resilient and, like its namesake, returned from the dead.
Horror is queer. The genre’s obsession with otherness; the questioning of a monster’s humanity; the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives.
It’s important to recognise that Nosferatu was a product of the Weimar Republic—that golden era of German history where art, sexuality, and surprising liberalism flourished; where Magnus Hirschfeld studied and philosophised the twentieth-century identity of homosexuality. Succumbing to post-war economic collapse and Hitler’s scapegoated hatred for Jews and immigrants, the Weimar Republic eventually gave way to the Third Reich. And, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed in From Caligari to Hitler, multiple horror films of the era predict the country’s inevitable shift into darkness.
Der Golem (1915)—one of the cinematic Frankenstein’s foremost influences—depicts a ghetto of wizard-like Jews living underground in Prague. They create a monster meant to defend the ghetto until it begins attacking Christians, only to be stopped by a lone blonde child signifying the promise of an Aryan future. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) follows a carnival showman whose sleepwalking main attraction takes the blame for murder until it’s revealed the showman, like Hitler, has been manipulating his patrons’ fears—and his sleepwalker—to get away with murder.
In Nosferatu, Count Orlok emigrates from Eastern Europe and brings a plague with him, mirroring the real-world racist fear-mongering Hitler attributed to the Jewish and Romany people who sought refuge in the Weimar Republic. Even still, Max Schreck’s rodent-like Orlok demands to be seen as something more than a vile caricature. Spoiler alert: it’s queer. In a relatively suggestive sequence for its time, Orlok watches Hutter undress to bathe, pulling his nightgown down to his midriff. It becomes clear that this dandy, alone and half-naked in a vampire’s castle, is playing the ingénue role of the Count’s victim—all the way into a bed, no less. Murnau, who was openly gay despite Germany’s less-enforced criminalisation of homosexuality, exacts a male gaze on Hutter that is noticeably missing from Ellen’s sequences in the film. Inverting Jonathon Harker’s rescue of Mina in Dracula, Nosferatu’s leading lady saves her husband from the devious lifestyle that makes him sick. In the process Murnau uses the fear-mongering myth of the Eastern immigrant to convey his own coded monstrousness. This monstrousness that would later land homosexuals in concentration camps alongside Jews and more unwanted Others.
For all its flourishes Bride of Frankenstein functions as gay director James Whale’s sissy Sistine Chapel, a cathedral of camp.
Years later, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) resurrects the doomed romance between the vampire and his male prey. Dracula’s visits to the institutionalised Renfield evoke Romeo at Juliet’s balcony or Heathcliff coming for Cathy on the moors. This subtext is best amplified with Philip Glass’s score for the film, which was added to its video release. Glass scores the film as a romance, though not one between Dracula and Mina. Renfield has historically been read as a sideshow act providing comic relief through the plodding melodrama of an awkwardly-paced film. With Glass’s score, Renfield becomes an abused, neglected, and needful lover awaiting the return of his promised one. It’s a love you beat yourself up over; that you convince yourself is the end-all even though you’ll realise years later you could have absolutely done better and how could you have fallen so hard for someone so beneath you. When Renfield falls down crypt stairs to his death, one can’t help but feel the tragedy of his lost and manipulated love. Whether in stolen glances or fabulous fashion, vampires like Dracula, Orlok, and Anne Rice’s brats lend themselves to queerness. Perhaps it’s something in the blood?
Legendary gay director James Whale settled on a patchwork corpse to bring his own monster to life in Frankenstein (1931). Like Dracula, previous baddies in The Phantom of the Opera, Der Golem, and Nosferatu were monstrous murderers with little capability for instilling sympathy. But Whale’s Frankenstein carried the spark of something more. This monster knew he was a monster. He doesn’t become as well-read and well-spoken as Mary Shelley’s literary creation, but he marvels at life even as he unwittingly takes it. He doesn’t mean to hurt, and he can’t help it when he does. He was created by a madman – a god, according to the standard of having created life – but he never asked to be cursed with his existence, with disfigurement, disgust and revulsion, angry mobs and pitchforks and torches. Whale’s monster, like Murnau’s, is his queerness. But this monster also presents a request for understanding, empathy, and patience rather than reaction and retribution.
The horror films of the 1920s and ‘30s, and their queer makers, formed not just the visual and thematic arc for horror as we know it but also the cinematic codes for queerness.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is where it gets really weird. Having proved himself a visionary on Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man, Whale lets his imagination run wild. He amends Frankenstein’s ending so the monster survives to demand a companion from his creator. Victor, the monster’s maker, finds an odd companion of his own—an older, madder scientist named Dr. Pretorious. Pretorious, like Orlok in Nosferatu, comes for Victor in his wedding bed and encourages his unnatural obsessions. Whale directed Ernest Thesiger, the actor portraying Pretorious, to play the character as a ‘bitchy old queen,’ to paraphrase horror historian David J. Skal. He even came complete with a doll collection of tiny people created by the doctor himself. Including Pretorious’ living miniatures, the whole world of Bride of Frankenstein capitalises on the lush and lavish scenery of gothic horror previously established by Nosferatu, Dracula, Frankenstein, and even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). For all its flourishes the film functions as Whale’s sissy Sistine Chapel, a cathedral of camp. Even the titular Bride, played by Elsa Lanchester—who also played Mary Shelley in the film—is a common ancestor for every femme goth icon from Vampira and Lily Munster to Elvira and Siouxsie Sioux and countless drag queens in nightclubs the world over. Gloria Holden too, in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), enacted her own Carmilla-inspired queerness by having her manservant undress her female victims before she drank their blood.
The horror films of the 1920s and ‘30s, and their queer makers, formed not just the visual and thematic arc for horror as we know it but also the cinematic codes for queerness. These queer codes were readily acknowledged by a demographic which, until recently, could neither exist nor be openly depicted without the protective, condom-like barrier of coding, whether in the visual vocabulary of film or in literal code like handkerchief flagging or the gay Polari slang-language. Whether told via vampire or quilted corpse-man, these coded images inspired, drove, and were shaped by generations of queer filmmakers, authors, and artists. Think Patricia Highsmith, Daphne DuMaurier, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, The Haunting, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and Scream. As a queer person watching Fright Night, it’s impossible to hear the vampire tell Evil Ed (portrayed by future gay porn star Stephen Geoffreys) as he takes him under his coat, that he’ll never have to worry about being bullied again—and not feel pangs of familiarity and knowing. It’s as if something inside the camera itself is trying to reach out and say “I understand.” Not in secret, but as privileged information shared between queers, in a language made for us and for the continued telling of our stories.
Whale, through Frankenstein, proclaims “we belong dead.” We’ve already survived death. We’ve survived a plague. We’ve spoken through silence. And like our ancestors who still to speak to us from their century-old creations, we’ll never be silent again.
IMAGES: Dracula, 1931 & The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935
Horror is queer. The genre’s obsession with otherness; the questioning of a monster’s humanity; the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives; and the threat they represent to the living, decent society, and decency itself, is absolutely a queer representation of the world and what it means to exist differently.
The construction of queerness and horror films as we understand them today are firmly grounded in tangled, coded roots tracing all the way back to the classic monsters in black and white. It’s a cobwebbed queer primordial soup that has generated both the Halloween costumes we wear and the sexual identities we live.
Dracula’s first-ever cinematic depiction in the German silent film Nosferatu (1922) establishes the bloodline that disseminated horror’s queer DNA. Director F.W. Murnau called his vampire Count Orlok instead of Dracula (the role which would make Bela Lugosi a household name), but the story remains the same. A salesman—named Hutter instead of Harker—travels to an Eastern European country to arrange a real-estate deal with the nocturnal, rat-faced Count. Orlok returns to Germany, bringing with him a plague of rats and death, until Hutter’s noble wife, Ellen, sacrifices herself by tricking the vampire into drinking her blood past sunrise. As an unlicensed retelling of Bram Stoker’s classic text, the film was mercilessly hunted down by Stoker’s widow who sought to sever it from history. Luckily for the genre it helped establish, Nosferatu proved resilient and, like its namesake, returned from the dead.
Horror is queer. The genre’s obsession with otherness; the questioning of a monster’s humanity; the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives.
It’s important to recognise that Nosferatu was a product of the Weimar Republic—that golden era of German history where art, sexuality, and surprising liberalism flourished; where Magnus Hirschfeld studied and philosophised the twentieth-century identity of homosexuality. Succumbing to post-war economic collapse and Hitler’s scapegoated hatred for Jews and immigrants, the Weimar Republic eventually gave way to the Third Reich. And, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed in From Caligari to Hitler, multiple horror films of the era predict the country’s inevitable shift into darkness.
Der Golem (1915)—one of the cinematic Frankenstein’s foremost influences—depicts a ghetto of wizard-like Jews living underground in Prague. They create a monster meant to defend the ghetto until it begins attacking Christians, only to be stopped by a lone blonde child signifying the promise of an Aryan future. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) follows a carnival showman whose sleepwalking main attraction takes the blame for murder until it’s revealed the showman, like Hitler, has been manipulating his patrons’ fears—and his sleepwalker—to get away with murder.
In Nosferatu, Count Orlok emigrates from Eastern Europe and brings a plague with him, mirroring the real-world racist fear-mongering Hitler attributed to the Jewish and Romany people who sought refuge in the Weimar Republic. Even still, Max Schreck’s rodent-like Orlok demands to be seen as something more than a vile caricature. Spoiler alert: it’s queer. In a relatively suggestive sequence for its time, Orlok watches Hutter undress to bathe, pulling his nightgown down to his midriff. It becomes clear that this dandy, alone and half-naked in a vampire’s castle, is playing the ingénue role of the Count’s victim—all the way into a bed, no less. Murnau, who was openly gay despite Germany’s less-enforced criminalisation of homosexuality, exacts a male gaze on Hutter that is noticeably missing from Ellen’s sequences in the film. Inverting Jonathon Harker’s rescue of Mina in Dracula, Nosferatu’s leading lady saves her husband from the devious lifestyle that makes him sick. In the process Murnau uses the fear-mongering myth of the Eastern immigrant to convey his own coded monstrousness. This monstrousness that would later land homosexuals in concentration camps alongside Jews and more unwanted Others.
For all its flourishes Bride of Frankenstein functions as gay director James Whale’s sissy Sistine Chapel, a cathedral of camp.
Years later, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) resurrects the doomed romance between the vampire and his male prey. Dracula’s visits to the institutionalised Renfield evoke Romeo at Juliet’s balcony or Heathcliff coming for Cathy on the moors. This subtext is best amplified with Philip Glass’s score for the film, which was added to its video release. Glass scores the film as a romance, though not one between Dracula and Mina. Renfield has historically been read as a sideshow act providing comic relief through the plodding melodrama of an awkwardly-paced film. With Glass’s score, Renfield becomes an abused, neglected, and needful lover awaiting the return of his promised one. It’s a love you beat yourself up over; that you convince yourself is the end-all even though you’ll realise years later you could have absolutely done better and how could you have fallen so hard for someone so beneath you. When Renfield falls down crypt stairs to his death, one can’t help but feel the tragedy of his lost and manipulated love. Whether in stolen glances or fabulous fashion, vampires like Dracula, Orlok, and Anne Rice’s brats lend themselves to queerness. Perhaps it’s something in the blood?
Legendary gay director James Whale settled on a patchwork corpse to bring his own monster to life in Frankenstein (1931). Like Dracula, previous baddies in The Phantom of the Opera, Der Golem, and Nosferatu were monstrous murderers with little capability for instilling sympathy. But Whale’s Frankenstein carried the spark of something more. This monster knew he was a monster. He doesn’t become as well-read and well-spoken as Mary Shelley’s literary creation, but he marvels at life even as he unwittingly takes it. He doesn’t mean to hurt, and he can’t help it when he does. He was created by a madman – a god, according to the standard of having created life – but he never asked to be cursed with his existence, with disfigurement, disgust and revulsion, angry mobs and pitchforks and torches. Whale’s monster, like Murnau’s, is his queerness. But this monster also presents a request for understanding, empathy, and patience rather than reaction and retribution.
The horror films of the 1920s and ‘30s, and their queer makers, formed not just the visual and thematic arc for horror as we know it but also the cinematic codes for queerness.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is where it gets really weird. Having proved himself a visionary on Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man, Whale lets his imagination run wild. He amends Frankenstein’s ending so the monster survives to demand a companion from his creator. Victor, the monster’s maker, finds an odd companion of his own—an older, madder scientist named Dr. Pretorious. Pretorious, like Orlok in Nosferatu, comes for Victor in his wedding bed and encourages his unnatural obsessions. Whale directed Ernest Thesiger, the actor portraying Pretorious, to play the character as a ‘bitchy old queen,’ to paraphrase horror historian David J. Skal. He even came complete with a doll collection of tiny people created by the doctor himself. Including Pretorious’ living miniatures, the whole world of Bride of Frankenstein capitalises on the lush and lavish scenery of gothic horror previously established by Nosferatu, Dracula, Frankenstein, and even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). For all its flourishes the film functions as Whale’s sissy Sistine Chapel, a cathedral of camp. Even the titular Bride, played by Elsa Lanchester—who also played Mary Shelley in the film—is a common ancestor for every femme goth icon from Vampira and Lily Munster to Elvira and Siouxsie Sioux and countless drag queens in nightclubs the world over. Gloria Holden too, in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), enacted her own Carmilla-inspired queerness by having her manservant undress her female victims before she drank their blood.
The horror films of the 1920s and ‘30s, and their queer makers, formed not just the visual and thematic arc for horror as we know it but also the cinematic codes for queerness. These queer codes were readily acknowledged by a demographic which, until recently, could neither exist nor be openly depicted without the protective, condom-like barrier of coding, whether in the visual vocabulary of film or in literal code like handkerchief flagging or the gay Polari slang-language. Whether told via vampire or quilted corpse-man, these coded images inspired, drove, and were shaped by generations of queer filmmakers, authors, and artists. Think Patricia Highsmith, Daphne DuMaurier, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, The Haunting, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and Scream. As a queer person watching Fright Night, it’s impossible to hear the vampire tell Evil Ed (portrayed by future gay porn star Stephen Geoffreys) as he takes him under his coat, that he’ll never have to worry about being bullied again—and not feel pangs of familiarity and knowing. It’s as if something inside the camera itself is trying to reach out and say “I understand.” Not in secret, but as privileged information shared between queers, in a language made for us and for the continued telling of our stories.
Whale, through Frankenstein, proclaims “we belong dead.” We’ve already survived death. We’ve survived a plague. We’ve spoken through silence. And like our ancestors who still to speak to us from their century-old creations, we’ll never be silent again.