Black, Brown, and Queer Humanity in “The Twilight People” (1972)
This post has spoilers! Trigger/content warnings include racism, medical racism and experimentation, attempted suicide, and attempted sexual assault.
I love when queer people and people of the global majority get to tell our own stories. The Twilight People is…maybe not that, which is a little unusual for this blog. But I think it still raises several important issues that are, unfortunately, still very relevant for us today.
Movie Summary.
The film is an adaptation of the 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. Described as “The Last Renaissance Man,” worldly adventurer and hunter Matt Farrell (played by John Ashley) is diving alone in the South Pacific when he’s kidnapped in the wildest way possible by some other white men. They bring him to a boat that isn’t his, where he’s strapped down, drugged, and introduced to the white man in charge, Steinman (Jan Merlin). Steinman’s stiff blond buzzcut and sinister smile accompany most of the rest of the film. Farrell also meets a young, white woman doctor, whose name we later learn is Neva (Pat Woodell).
The boat is crewed by several Brown men, most of whom don’t have names or lines. They eventually dock at a large, remote island, dominated by dense foliage and a single mansion on an overlook. There, Farrell meets the man behind the entire operation, the quietly imposing Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay). We learn that Neva is his daughter and that he has some extremely disturbing plans to “remake” humanity — plans that directly involve Farrell.
Throughout the next few minutes of the film, Farrell meets another abducted man in the room next to his, explores the mansion after night falls (accompanied by some top-tier ’70s spy music), and learns about Dr. Gordon’s professional disgrace and the disappearance of his wife.
We also learn about the reality of Dr. Gordon’s “work” when we see a dirt-floored basement cavern full of jail cells that contain the people he’s experimented on. We also see more of Steinman’s very obvious attraction to Farrell, Steinman’s instability and lust for violence when he shoots a man from the experiments and kills him instantly, and some classic heterosexual sexual tension between Farrell and Neva. (I wrote in my notes, “Matt! Why are you worrying about seducing women when you’re literally being held captive??” Sigh.)
After an incident with Pam Grier’s character Ayesa (whose name we only learn much later), Neva challenges her father, to no avail. When blood spurts onto her from one of her father’s experiments during an operation, she has a crisis about their work and attempts suicide. Farrell stops her and wrestles her…then kisses her. It’s weird. They’re discovered by Steinman and Dr. Gordon, who lock Farrell in the basement cave with the people who have survived Gordon’s experiments.
Neva drugs Steinman’s pitcher of plain milk he’s always drinking, then frees Farrell and the others from the basement. Neva leads the captives, except one woman who’s too afraid to leave, in an escape to the forest. Meanwhile, Farrell forces Gordon to leave with him at gunpoint.
The rest of the film takes place in the jungle — Neva leads the group of former captives, Farrell leads Dr. Gordon, and Steinman leads a group of men in pursuit of Farrell. Almost all of the people who were experimented on die, including Ayesa, and several of the unnamed Brown guards do as well.
Eventually, Neva gets captured and Gordon escapes Farrell’s watch. Gordon makes his way back to the house and, as he’s escaping through the back tunnel that only he and Neva know about, he encounters his wife. We learn that she was the first person to be experimented on and that she’s been living alone in the forest on the island for years. She then stabs Gordon, killing him quickly, and disappears back into the greenery.
The film ends with Farrell and Neva reunited at the mouth of the tunnel, Neva cradling her father’s body and Farrell watching the man with bat wings fly off above the mountains into the sunrise. We don’t know what happens to him or if any of the other characters make it off the island. It’s a vague but still hopeful ending, full of hope and the potential for disaster.
Dehumanization and Why It’s Dangerous.
I’m going to pull a classic move and quote Merriam-Webster: their official definition of “to dehumanize” is “to deprive (someone or something) of human qualities, personality, or dignity.” (1) There’s a lot of that in The Twilight People, both literally and figuratively. Literally because Dr. Gordon’s experimentation process removes most mental and emotional semblances of humanity in his victims and alters their physical appearance of humanity as well: from bat wings to horns to panther fangs, the implication in their appearance and behavior is Dr. Gordon’s victims have lost what makes them human . A larger issue is that most if not all of Dr. Gordon’s victims after his own wife are Black and Brown.
This is a problem by itself, given the long history of medical experimentation on people of the global majority: the Tuskegee experiments (in which the United States Public Health Service lied to Black men to study untreated syphilis for 40 years), the testing of a birth control pill on economically disadvantaged women in Puerto Rico (also under false pretenses, and with an extremely high rate of side effects and three deaths), and the forced sterilization of Black and Indigenous women in the continental U.S., for starters. But in this movie, the visual equating of mostly Black and Brown people with animals definitely sends a certain message.
But something else that’s important to note is that The Twilight People was directed, co-written, and co-produced by Eddie Romero, a prolific Filipino filmmaker. I think it would have been a much different film if the leadership had been all-white, but in this context, I don’t think it’s a stretch to see the movie as partly an interrogation of colonialism in the Philippines.
Dr. Gordon is a white man who somehow took over this island that, while remote, has at least one village that may have been there before he arrived and built his compound. He and his employees terrify the ordinary people who live there — there’s a striking scene of several Jeep-like vehicles rampaging through the small cluster of homes and the villagers gathering up their children and running away. He also unapologetically kidnaps humans and conducts completely unethical experiments on them, sometimes without anesthesia.
Romero was born in 1924 in the Philippines and, while he came from a prominent family, he would have been intimately aware of how American involvement in the islands impacted residents. After the United States won the Spanish-American War in December 1898, Spain “sold” the entirety of the Philippines to the U.S. (2) I think most people aren’t taught that the U.S. was a major traditional imperial power around this time, and education around American control over the Philippines is especially lacking.
The battles that took place from 1899 to 1902 between Filipino nationalists and American imperialist forces stationed on the island are commonly referred to as the Philippine-American War (which makes it sound like more of an equal conflict than it was). According to PBS:
War soon erupted between the nationalists and the American troops stationed in the islands. The outgunned Filipinos adopted guerilla tactics; the U.S. army responded by rounding peasants into “reconcentration camps” and declaring entire areas battle zones, in which no distinctions were made between combatants and civilians. At least 4,200 American and 16,000 Filipino soldiers are thought to have been killed in the fighting. Historians have debated the scale of civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to almost 1 million. (3)
Accompanying this imperialist movement was the eugenics movement that was gaining strength at the same time and, going along with that, extensive campaigns of dehumanization. Black and Indigenous people had of course been dehumanized — structurally by governments and interpersonally — for centuries by this point, in addition to the Chinese immigrants who came to places like California and New York in the late 19th century. (Look up the series of anti-Chinese immigration laws passed by the federal government, starting with the Page Law in 1875 and including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act in 1892. Federal limitations on immigration from China continued all the way until 1943. Here’s a helpful summary from the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, but please note that the site uses an outdated term for sex workers).
The growing American involvement in South America, the Caribbean (places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti), and the Philippines led to an increased push in American government and society to dehumanize residents of places overseas. These efforts were often presented as organized endeavors to “civilize” Black and Brown people abroad. “Civilize” or “civilized” are terms that make my skin crawl, but that’s the rhetoric that they unfortunately used at the time. For an updated version of this concept, see the idea that it’s the United States’ duty to “bring democracy to the Middle East.”
We can’t fully catalog or grasp the extent of the damage that centuries of American administrations have wrought and continue to perpetrate against Black and Brown people on every inhabited continent. The Philippines are no exception: the U.S. military still operates there right now, with four new bases announced as recently as March 2023.
Black Women and Dehumanization.
But just because Eddie Romero was Filipino doesn’t mean that the movie doesn’t have flaws. The Twilight People is renowned actress Pam Grier’s fourth credited role (as listed on IMDb), and she definitely makes a strong impression as Ayesa, the “panther woman.” The audience doesn’t learn her name until about 47 minutes into the film, and the character doesn’t have any lines in Tagalog, English, or any other spoken language — she communicates through growls, snarls, and body language.
More importantly for our analysis, she also mostly communicates through violence. We start really getting to know her through her first major scene, when she escapes her literal cage in the dirt-floored basement cave and attacks Dr. Gordon’s daughter and assistant, Neva. Neva has brought her food, but Ayesa sees an opportunity and takes it. Importantly, though, she doesn’t try to get out of the cavern. She stays in the cave to go after Neva, indicating that her character doesn’t understand that Neva is “being kind” and that she prioritizes violence over either food or freedom.
I’m not sure if Ayesa is meant to be Black in the film — her hair is straight the entire time and we don’t get her backstory — but Grier as a Black actress is conflated in the film with “animalistic” stereotypes that had been leveraged against Black people for centuries.
To be clear, I don’t think Pam Grier did anything wrong in accepting the role. Plenty of Black actors have taken film roles that aren’t exactly complementary over the years because those were the roles that were available. I certainly don’t fault her.
I do think it’s important to understand how popular media like Hollywood films are partly responsible for either perpetuating or challenging preconceptions of marginalized people. This includes, as we’ll see, queer people in addition to people of the global majority.
“Hot Pants” and Queer Villainy.
This would be a bit of a tangent if we only talk about Black horror, but I think it’s important for a conversation about dehumanization.
In 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, was implemented in Hollywood. (4) A Catholic priest and the Catholic publisher of the Motion Picture Herald co-wrote the Code, so that should tell you a lot. (5) (You can read a full version of the Code from 1937 here.)
We’ve talked about the Hays Code in previous posts, but not in this context: the Code strictly prohibited explicit depictions of “sexual perversion” (as in, anything except obviously straight relationships). It was lifted in 1968 and, by the time The Twilight People came out in 1972, society had changed and rules were a little looser.
But it was still the 1970s, and most people’s attitudes toward queerness weren’t exactly positive. A trend that continued in Hollywood well after the Hays Code was abandoned, and that was still pretty damaging for a lot of queer people, was the queering of villains. We can see this even in Disney “Renaissance” films from the 1990s, with “bad” characters who are men but whom the filmmakers feminized, like Scar from The Lion King, Hades from Hercules, and Jafar from Aladdin. It’s also well-known that Ursula from The Little Mermaid was based on real-life character actor and drag queen, Divine.
But back to The Twilight People: I was not expecting this movie to be this gay. Throughout the first half of the film, Steinman consistently positions himself close to Matt Farrell, the macho “Renaissance man” hero, in ways that I thought were flirtatious. I also thought that that was just me projecting — I would have loved to see Steinman abandon Dr. Gordon and help Farrell escape in the gayest way possible. I really didn’t think it was anything more than that.
But at one point, after Neva drugs Steinman’s milk (of which he chugs an entire glass, plain, with no food) and she’s wrestling with him, waiting for the substance to kick in, Steinman says, “You’ve got a good case of hot pants for that guy” (meaning Farrell). Neva responds, “That makes two of us.”
Y’all, when I tell you I was floored.
Steinman, of course, does not respond well, letting the misogyny often associated with queer and queer-coded men on screen run wild. It’s a classic Hollywood twist on denial of one’s sexuality: hostility toward straight women based in jealousy and self-loathing.
I wouldn’t say Steinman is the most complex queer villain, and we know next to nothing about his backstory: his upbringing, how he got mixed up with Dr. Gordon, why he’s so loyal to him, or anything else. I’m not sure if the filmmakers’ intention with Steinman’s sexuality was shock value or something more significant, but I would have liked to see him treated with a bit more depth and compassion.
Maintaining Humanity in Our Own Work.
I don’t think it’s our job, as creatives and/or queer people and/or people of the global majority — to educate our oppressors or seek their empathy. I do think that we should live and create art while being as community-minded as possible, whatever that looks like for us. Art authentically created for us, by us, will always be relevant, important, and meaningful.
To do that, it helps if we can build meaningful connections with people of our own communities and with those of different cultures. Connections not based on preconceptions or stereotypes we’ve been taught by teachers or the media. Because let’s face it: the people in power are the only ones who benefit from a lack of solidarity among people of the global majority. We can see the fruits of these inter-cultural, cross-community bonds in relationships like that of Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X. They came from very different backgrounds, but their dedication to collective liberation brought them together.
We all have more to learn about practices, beliefs, cultures, and cultures other than own: about the Tibetan struggle for independence since China’s invasion in 1950, for example, or the ongoing but centuries-old occupation of and genocide in Palestine.
I know some people ask why we, as Black Americans, should bother ourselves with the causes of people and places overseas — people we might never meet and places we might never go. Don’t we have enough to worry about? Yes, we do, but the American government’s investment in oppressive, terroristic regimes like that of Israel is one side of the coin: we’re the other. Black and Indigenous people in the U.S., as well as immigrants documented and undocumented, are on the cultural, economic, social, and political front lines here. But the ways that white supremacy and the white people in power in the U.S. dehumanize victims of the multiple genocides happening abroad are the same ways they talk about us. They don’t give a damn about us any more than they do the people they’re actively bombing, so why shouldn’t we be on the same side?
We share a common oppressor, a common enemy: we should share a common goal.
The Twilight People brings together a lot of actors and characters from a variety of backgrounds and, along with their physical presences come the stereotypes and prejudices of the 1970s and the decades before. It’s a wild film with a fascinating, extremely disturbing, eugenicist premise, and I would love to have seen more camaraderie and solidarity among the Black and Brown characters. I’m not sure Hollywood or theater audiences or the “powers that be” were ready for that conversation in 1972, but I think it’s time they get used to the idea.
More to Think About.
Below are some questions to ask yourself and prompts for further research. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and the newsletter here on Medium — I’m sending out “extras” on the Tuesdays between posts with things that didn’t fit into the main entry.
And email me at blackhorrific@gmail.com and follow me on Tiktok (@domi_aaaaaa) if you want to talk more!
- What’s one region of South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, or Oceana you want to learn more about? If you find something interesting you’d like to share, feel free to email or DM me!
- If you’re a creative person, how do you practice authenticity and connection in your work?
- Are there any queer or queer-coded villains who are close to your heart?
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in two weeks!
Sources.
(1) Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, “Dehumanize,” accessed July 14, 2024,
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dehumanize.
(2) Frontline World, PBS, “Philippines — Islands Under Siege, June 2023: A Conflicted Land,” accessed July 14, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/philippines/tl01.html.
(3) Frontline World, PBS, “Philippines — Islands Under Siege, June 2023: A Conflicted Land,” accessed July 14, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/philippines/tl01.html.
(4) Hunt, Kristin, “The End of American Film Censorship,” JSTOR Daily, February 28, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/.
(5) Hunt, Kristin, “The End of American Film Censorship,” JSTOR Daily, February 28, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/.
