Children of the night

"Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make."

There's always been something more bewitching about the old movie monsters than the new, especially for queerfolk. Jason and Freddy Krueger seem distinctly the nightmares of straight boys, with all their blood in vivid-red Technicolor. Queers, however, seem to dream more often in black, white, and a thousand shades of gray - whether haunted by Count Dracula, the Phantom, or the hissing, vainglorious Bride of Frankenstein.

"The old horror films do have a certain resonance for gay people," says author and film historian David Skal, whose 1993 The Monster Show is already considered the classic study of the genre. "Monster movies are about sexual repression, among other things. And homosexuality is one form of sexuality that has traditionally been repressed."

The horror films made during the Great Depression by Tod Browning, James Whale, and a few others have become integral parts of American popular culture. Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, gypsy caravans, moonlit graveyards, torch-carrying villagers, and old dark houses staffed by grim-faced butlers are images indelibly stamped onto our collective consciousness, evoking particular responses that are both unnerving and reassuringly familiar. Jason in his hockey mask might scare us more easily now - triggering our fears of the sociopathology of modern crime - but the old monsters represent more primal, archetypal obsessions: life and death, beauty and ugliness, the fate of the soul.

As queers, we respond doubly to these films. They resonate deeper in us, because they entrance us with their sense of alienation, of living on the edge, outside accepted society. These movies repel us by their hideousness while intriguing us with their strange beauty. Is Elsa Lanchester, built up on stilts, swathed in bandages, her hair electrified like Queen Nefertiti, a thing of majesty or horror? It is an essential queer question: are we beautiful, or are we ugly? The answer, of course, reveals much about our attraction to the horror film: we define beauty as we choose.

"I think monsters are a lot like drag queens," Skal says. "They are very much like the female impersonator striving very hard for the sublimity of Maria Callas and ending up looking like Holly Woodlawn. What's Susan Sontag's definition of camp? 'Aspiring and failing.' Monster movies do that in spades."

Most of all, however, the old horror films ensnare us with their vibration of denied sexuality. When Frankenstein's monster reaches out to his newly created mate, even she rejects him. What is it that drives King Kong? Lust for Fay Wray. But actually to have her would certainly mean her death. The simple reason the Mummy rose from his tomb? He didn't get to fuck his fiancée in life.

It's perhaps this element of the old horror films that has brought them back with such renewed vigor in the age of AIDS and new campaigns against sex. Revival houses report record attendance for the classic fright flicks; books like Skal's have proven very successful. A new biography of director James Whale has recently been published by Cassell's, and Christopher Bram's acclaimed fictionalized account of Whale's life, Father of Frankenstein, has recently been optioned for a film. Skal's new book, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre, co-authored with Elias Savada and published this month by Anchor Books, is the first full-length biography of the director of Dracula.

There is a gay sensibility in many of Browning's films. Freaks, his infamous 1932 film, has always drawn a camp following attracted by the pinheads and other oddities in the picture, and the dynamics of scapegoating and social marginalization have proven particularly intriguing for queer audiences. Yet Skal says the director himself had antipathy for homosexuals. "Browning was misanthropic in general," Skal says. "He didn't like people very much."

Nevertheless, Dracula's immortal line on the music of wolves ("the cheeldren of the night") - as chillingly rendered by Bela Lugosi in the original 1931 film - is merely the prelude to what Skal calls the "homoerotic seduction" of the opening scenes of the movie. Renfield, quirkily played by the bug-eyed Dwight Frye, arrives at Castle Dracula to present the Count with his deed to a castle in England. Within a short time, Dracula has mesmerized him, and when he finally sinks his canines into Renfield's throat, his victim is on the floor, prone, with the vampire lying on top of him. "The whole scene is infused with gay undercurrents," Skal says.

Perhaps no other horror myth has proved as enduring or as potent as the vampire. Every culture in the world has its vampire myth of the dead who return to suck the life out of the living. Ours has gays who are out to lure little children into an unearthly world, living only by night. "The whole gays-in-the-military issue is a good example," Skal says. "Gays were cast as vampires, stalking and recruiting and attacking."

As Anne Rice discovered, the link between homoeroticism and vampirism is powerful. It is the story of Dracula biting Renfield all over again. When a male vampire attacks another male, he is kissing him in his queer fashion. There has always been an element of sexual desire associated between the vampire and his victim. Once bitten, the victim longs for the master's kiss yet again. Although Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt toned it down, there was no way to deny that basic fact in Interview With the Vampire. The bite of the vampire is as intimate as sex, and since it is bestowed upon both men and women, vampires are, by their very nature, bisexual.

If this was implied in the original Dracula, it was blatant in the first of its sequels. Dracula's Daughter (1936) starred Gloria Holden as the Count's conflicted offspring, wanting to find a way to rid herself of the curse. Here, there was no attempt to disguise the lust with which she approaches her female victim, a hapless waif she entices in from the street, plying her with sweet cakes and a promise to paint her portrait. It is a highly charged sexual scene, surprising for those sanitized Production Code years. When the Countess looms down on the girl just before the fade out, it is not only bloodlust that drives her: the sexual-predator aspect of the vampire is very clear.

"Vampires get to do everything we cannot," Skal says, referring to life in the age of AIDS. "Vampires are regularly exposed to blood. Blood is life to them, not death. And whereas the vampire represents death, he also is cheating death by living forever and remaining young."

Skal says that AIDS has made vampire stories particularly relevant again for queers, but says their attraction goes deeper. "The Victorian vampire stories came out during the syphilis epidemic," he says. "The tell-tale lesions the vampire leaves behind on the neck- they can be the marks of syphilis, or KS. It's fascinating [how] twentieth-century obsession with vampires can be superimposed over the one during Stoker's time."

If Browning was misanthropic, not so James Whale, the other great horror-film director of the 1930s. Bram, who departed from his more sweeping novels to concentrate on the last few days of the director's life in Father of Frankenstein, says that Whale was a genial, fun-loving man entirely comfortable with his homosexuality. "There was a deliberate gay sensibility to his films," Bram believes, "particularly in Bride of Frankenstein."

The centerpiece of that film's queerness is, of course, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, archly played by the effete English actor, Ernest Thesiger, a personal friend of Whale's. "Whale had a lot to do with the writing of the final script," Bram says. "It's clear he saw Pretorius as an old queen in love with Dr. Frankenstein. When Frankenstein's wife walks in, his nostrils dilate and he turns away."

Indeed, Pretorius interrupts Frankenstein's wedding night with an urgent summons for the conflicted scientist. He spirits him away, leaving poor Elizabeth to thrash out her frustrations in bed alone. Rather than conceive a child with his wife, Frankenstein is offered something far more interesting (to him). "Alone, you have created a man," Pretorius says. "Now together, we shall create his mate." Two men creating a new life, a queer twist on a very old theme.

In The Monster Show, Skal expounds upon this particular component of the Frankenstein films. "There is an overriding fantasy of male-male procreation," Skal says. In the original Frankenstein, the good doctor pieces together his creation with the help of his deformed male assistant Fritz (again played by the omnipresent Dwight Frye). "It is homoerotic, or at least, autoerotic," Skal explains. "There is the persistent undercurrent of men creating life without women."

Of course, the gay parallels don't end there. In the original Frankenstein, the creator-father rejects his creation-son for not being what he expected, for being too different. This keeps the Monster in enough of a rage to carry eight sequels, through the 1948 parody Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. But it is the first sequel, 1935's Bride of Frankenstein, Whale's last entry in the series and his most enduring legacy, that has the clearest gay sensibility. Skal calls it a "gay parable," and even without Thesiger, he'd still be on the mark.

Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein explores the queerness behind Whale's films. It is a poignant and gripping portrait of a man in the last agonizing days of his life. Whale suffered a stroke in his last months, and eventually committed suicide rather than live with its debilitating effects. For many years, it was believed he was murdered by one of the pretty young boys who frequented his swimming pool. He was found floating face down in his pool early one morning, a gash on his forehead. But Whale's former lover later revealed to a biographer a note Whale left, explaining his decision to end his life.

"Whale was weirdly dismissive of his horror films," Bram says. "He had fun making Bride of Frankenstein, really worked on it hard, but he wanted to be a prestige director." Yet it's for his Frankenstein films - along with his other horrors, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man - that he is remembered.

Today, the horror movie is one of the most profitable and popular genres in filmmaking. It's not pushing the point too far to compare classic horror films to their gay audiences: once marginalized, once considered less prestigious, once viewed as second class, and today, flexing considerable muscle. But what remains unchanged is the enduring appeal of the old monsters. Their allure has not dimmed despite the bastardization of their images on TV (The Munsters) and cereal boxes (Count Chocula). They have become as timeless as the drag queens at Stonewall. Are they beautiful, we ask? Are they tragic? Are they frightening? But of course, on all counts.