Wait — Was Dracula a Gay Icon This Whole Time?
By Anne Gregg
“When you watch a horror movie and you find yourself intrigued by the campy villain and wondering — are they, you know, gay? The answer is kind of.”
Like any Halloween-loving person, this October, I’ve been watching horror movies under the cover of my blankets way late into the night. I started my binger with the classic Scream. As I watched the two killers embrace each other with knives, a thought crept into my head. “Wow this is pretty gay.” While I could chalk this up to my overactive lesbian imagination, it’s actually not very far-fetched that the performances could be, even unintentionally, queer-coded. Queer coding and horror often go hand in hand. So when you watch a horror movie and you find yourself intrigued by the campy villain and wondering — are they, you know, gay? The answer is kind of.
Queer coding monsters and villains has been around for a long time. Since I cannot pinpoint the first instance of queer coding in film, I will instead reference early examples of intentional queer coding that has probably influenced the way monsters and murderers are depicted in horror films. “Fear of other” has always been a popular trope in monster stories, but to ground this article we’ll start our history in the Victorian era, an era rife with queer-coded horror including Frankenstien and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Any queer person who has read Dracula may have picked up on the elaborate European mannerisms of Dracula and wondered if his meeting with Jonathan Harker was a bloody seduction. It has been speculated that Dracula is supposed to represent Oscar Wilde, whose infamous trial took place two years before the publication of Dracula and Bram Stoker’s fear of his own sexuality. Whether that is true or not, the fear that Dracula inspires is that of a “human” who is not entirely human.
Bela Lugosi’s Dracula feels similarly queer. The lavish abundance of his Dracula is portrayed on screen. While this performance may not have intentionally coded Dracula as queer, the film and performance are an attempt to create an “other” the audience will find thrilling and terrifying.
Dracula was made before Hollywood’s institution of the Hays Code, a code that banned the portrayal of homosexuality (which the Hays Code labeled as “sex perversion”) in films. Gay characters had been depicted in early Pre-code films. In Morocco, Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a suit and top hat, kisses a woman, Call Her Savage has a scene inside a gay bar, and Wings, the first ever best picture award winner, features a homosexual kiss between the two leads. After the Hays Code was implemented, writers and directors would code gay characters into the films to slip by the censors.
Many murderers and villains were queer coded, because they had to be narrative foils to the straight everyman protagonists that dominated the genre, especially the men of film noirs. If “good” is a serious, rough masculine man, then “bad” must be the effeminate villain, like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon who fiddles with a cane in such a way that the queer coding is glaringly obvious. Because of guidelines about women and sexuality in the Hays Code, older unmarried women became villains like Countess Marya Zeleska from Dracula’s Daughter. In fact, the coding in Dracula’s Daughter was so obvious Entertainment Weekly and Time Out London referred to it in their reviews.
Whether the coding in horror films made under the Hays code was intentional or not, stereotypical gay traits were used to create the monsters and villains that would haunt the big screen. The other is a monster who must be feared. For me, the most undeniable queer-coded murderers come from the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. Specifically from his movies Rope and Strangers on a Train. Rope’s screenplay was written by Arthur Laurents, a gay man, and Hitchock deliberately looked for closeted queer actors to play the lead roles. In an interview for the DVD release of Rope Laurents said, “Rope was obviously about homosexuals. The word was never mentioned… It was referred to as “it.” They were going to do a picture about “it” and the actors were “it.” The tension and horror in Rope comes from the “otherness”of the central protagonist and their lust for violence.
The popularity of these movies set the standard for how fictional murderers and monsters should act and taught aspiring filmmakers how to create monsters that frighten their audiences. When the Hays code was replaced with the MPAA rating system, queer coded horror and thriller movie characters like Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and the entire coven in The Craft continued to dominate film screens whether the intention behind them was to create a queer monster or not. The stereotype of what a monster should be had already been codified into the genre. So if you decide to watch a horror or thriller movie and something about the antagonist feels a little fruity, you are probably onto something. At this point, though, the queer coding is so deeply ingrained into the history of cinema that it may not have been the creator’s intent. To create an effective villain you have to create a foil, an “other” — something so similar yet so inhuman. And you must fear it.
The queer monster is a trope born out of fears of homosexuality but it is also born out of a desire for creators to put gay people in movies under intense restrictions. Some films and media that depict villains were created by queer creators so they could depict themselves on screen. While you could argue this was all internalized homophobia, I don’t believe it is. The queer monster/murderer trope can be harmful but it can also be liberating. Media evolves and queer creators get the opportunity to create what they want. We will see more horror movies and be able to say “wow that’s pretty gay” because the characters, the heroes and villains, can both be gay.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
