Hiding behind monsters: spotting the queer in Hollywood’s horror movies Premium

Films on vampires and monsters have often represented the anxieties that normalisation of homosexuality posed. At the same time, the genre of horror has been used by openly gay filmmakers as a way of coded self-expression

In a secluded opera box in 1931, Bela Lugosi as Dracula looms over Mina Seward, Jonathan Harker, and Lucy Weston. Weston recites a toast in jest, “Quaff a cup to the dead already, hurrah for the next to die,” and Lugosi is quick to respond: “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious…there are far worse things awaiting man, than death.” When Tod Browning directed this film, Hollywood truly believed that far worse things than death awaited our screens: the queers.

Tucked within Lugosi’s flamboyant cape, hiding beneath Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments, and threatening to erupt from teenagers turning into werewolves, the depiction of queerness in Hollywood has been pushed into the nooks and crannies of horror films. The monster and the homosexual, both an ‘othered’ entity, have existed in a conflated relationship. Without explicitly addressing homosexuality, Hollywood created a coded language. The foreign Count Dracula who brought moral corruption, sucking away at society’s pure blood, and the unnatural creation of Frankenstein that stood jarringly in contrast to God’s natural creation, represented the anxieties that normalisation of homosexuality posed.

It is also why openly gay filmmakers like James Whale found this genre to be a way of coded self-expression. Collaborating with other queer artists of the time, Whale directed Universal Studios’ slate of horror films including Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He infused them with an eccentric mise-en-scène that spoke the secret shared language of queerness. Queer filmmakers of the time, who could not openly address their ostracisation, created monsters that shared their pain onscreen.

To identify a hero, we need a villain, and to validate our humanity, we have created monsters, of which the most constant has been the vampire. From folklore staple to guaranteed blockbusters, vampires have died and come back to life to occupy prime entertainment position. Carrying the fear of being hunted, alongside the dread of an eternal existence, vampires have presented society with an almost blank canvas on which it has cyclically painted its conservative fears.

Following the implementation of the Hays Code in 1934, Hollywood further marginalised the vampire, divorcing the creature of any complexity. The late 1950s up to the 1960s saw a surge of Dracula films by Hammer Film Productions which relied on morally simple plotlines featuring a rudimentary monster.

Later, as American morality walked the tightrope of the Watergate scandal, its psychological fears were reflected in the 1979 series of Salem’s Lot. Adapted from a Stephen King novel, it doubled down on the familiar premise of a small town being run over by foreign vampires.

Eventually, on the heels of the feminist and LGBT movements of the previous decade, Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), marked a turn in vampire media. Casting an envious eye on the prospect of eternal youth, Scott located the drama between a trio of explicitly queer vampires played by David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve.