Film Deets:
Director: Lambert Hillyer
Screenplay: Henry Farrell
Actress: Nan Grey
Category: Coded Queerness
Themes: Queer Monsters, Vampires
Why do these screams matter?
As an early example queer coded sexuality, Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) initially troubled Production Code Administration (PCA) with its focus on the “abnormal appetites” of its protagonist (Worland 67). The film traces the struggle of Hungarian Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) who, upon learning of the death of her father Count Dracula, believes the curse of her being a vampire will be lifted. When her hope is not fulfilled, she enlists the assistance of psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Garth (Otta Kruger), who she believes has the power to cure her. When this too proves ineffectual, Marya flees to Transylvania intent on turning Garth into a vampire and her everlasting companion. Despite the PCA’s efforts to erase voices that countered heteronormativity by giving even the suggestion of queer desire, Dracula’s Daughter is widely considered an early precursor to the lesbian vampire films that would become especially popular in the 1970s (Barrios 151).
Unlike gay monsters who were typically used for comic relief, lesbian monsters were crafted to evoke pity by using a queer subtext to heighten the suspense of their narratives by casting these characters as victims of their own perversions (Lugowski 4). Their inability to internalize cultural norms resulted in emotional and physical suffering. This gender difference is attributable to the religious character of the Legion of Decency (LOD). Given that women were considered culturally to be the weaker sex, it stands to reason that this attitude would be reflected in film. Rather than making a woman an active participant in her lesbianism, and thus inciting the ire of the LOD, coding enabled the woman to be victimized by a nameless disease that, to a queer audience, would easily be read as homosexuality.
It is against this backdrop that we get our first scream. In this scene, Sandor (Irving Ptchel), Marya’s manservant, has forced the young and impoverished Lili (Nan Grey) into his mistress’s lair under the guise that Lili will model for Marya and will be rewarded with food. But as Lili undresses, she becomes increasingly wary of Marya’s intentions.
In a reflection of presuppositional textual silence in which silence is “exemplified by agent omission,” overt acknowledgement of Marya’s queerness is excluded from the scene (Huckin 349-350). Because these types of silences hinge on relevant information being omitted because it is assumed the receiver will already know the information due to cultural norms, they exclude people and groups not part of the dominant culture (Huckin 351). Marya is frightening because she is an Other, but the source of that otherness is more obviously attributable to her vampiric identity. And yet, the film is rife with subtextual nods that would be easily identifiable to queer audiences. The most obvious is a scene between Marya and her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel). Upon returning home after disposing of Count Dracula’s body, Marya confides to Sandor that her curse will be lifted and that she’ll finally be able to “live a normal life now, think normal things.” An audience in the 1930s would easily equate normalcy to heterosexuality, and the scene plays upon Marya’s desperation to be cured of her inner conflicts. Another scene of note occurs when Dr. Garth accuses Marya of “concealing the truth” about herself, to which Marya responds that the truth is “too ghastly.” While the audience knows the truth to be that she’s a vampire, they also understand that Sandor procures female models for her whom she undresses before killing them. This suggestion of a female gaze upon female nakedness implied a subtle perversion, never explicitly named, that would not have been lost on some viewers at the time.
What’s more, it isn’t only the dialogue that supports a queer reading of Dracula’s Daughter. The camera is used to great advantage in portraying the longing Marya feels toward her female victims. Unlike her treatment of her lone male victim, who’s dispatched with little fanfare, Marya slowly seduces her female victims with her gaze. The camera lingers on Marya as she looks upon Lili’s exposed body or when she appears more interested in kissing Janet than in killing her in the film’s penultimate scene. Lili’s scream cements the danger posed by Marya while also underscoring Marya’s inability to give voice to her desires.
What these coded instances point to is the creation of a new kind of monster in which lesbian undertones are used to increase the revulsion experienced by the audience. In his seminal work The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll sets up the criteria for what constitutes a monster. It must be an entity that exists outside of conventional scientific understanding, and it must be viewed by the audience as threatening and impure (27-28). Carroll contends that “an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless” (33). In other words, monsters result when two distinct forms become intermingled. In early horror, Universal monsters were the standard-bearers of these trespasses against the natural order and are often read as possessing queer subtext in addition to occupying contradictory spaces (Cook, 45-46).
With these caveats in mind, Marya is clearly the monster of the film. Not only is she a vampire with a long list of victims in her wake but she is also aware of her “cravings.” What she desires is by her own definition unnatural, so these cravings mean that Marya partakes of the forbidden. The audience sees her continually attempting to resist her urges, but she’s unsuccessful because the vampire part of her overrides the human part. Interestingly, while she does engage in physical contact with her victims when she drains their blood, Marya uses hypnosis to subdue them rather than physical restraint. Her main physical interaction with her victims comes after they’ve been rendered comatose. Indeed, Marya is aroused by looking at her female victims rather than by touching them.
Lili’s scream here is a direct response to being confronted with Marya’s monstrosity. But it’s a monstrosity cloaked in seduction. The camera lingers on Marya as she gazes upon Lili’s exposed body and it’s clear that the sight of the undressed woman is awakening Marya’s appetites. As Lili’s awareness of what is about to transpire draws closer and Marya’s hypnotism begins to render Lili’s body immovable, a scream is Lili’s only recourse. It is a vocal rejection of what is about to transpire and that pronounced rejection is by design. It is intended to remind the audience that Lili is an innocent who has absolutely no interest in what is about to happen. But to queer spectators, it is Marya’s silence in the face of Lili’s screams that also functions as a presuppositional textual silence. For both its representation of the silence of the closet that becomes magnified when set against audible expressions of fear of the unknown and its exemplification of situational power and control, Marya’s quiet in the face of Lili’s scream suggests that Marya’s queerness is known in the narrative even if it is never expressly stated.
The next scream can be read as a continuation of the first. Having been rendered comatose from her encounter with Marya, Lili is subjected to hypnosis so her doctors can find out what happened to her.
Of particular interest to film historians are the ways in which the film engages with cultural marginality. Literary critic Bonnie Zimmerman positions the film as an important moment in the queer cinematic canon, noting that the film “includes a muted lesbian encounter between the reluctant vampire-woman and a servant girl, suggesting an important class dynamic to the lesbian vampire myth. When the seducer is another woman, she must derive her power from her class position rather than her sex” (431). Marya targeted Lili because she knew Lili would not be missed, and yet she is not the only character to use Lili’s marginality to their advantage. Certainly, class factors into Lili’s scream in the hospital. Given her economic class, she is seen as disposable by the medical establishment, a point underscored when the advice of the doctors results in Lili’s death and none express any remorse. Rather, they seem pleased at her deathbed revelation. Underpinning Lili’s scream is an awareness that the real perversion of the film is how certain characters are viewed as disposable simply due to their economic class.
Lili’s scream here does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is the climax to a queer narrative that the film has been methodically building in its dialogue. Because Marya has expressed her desire to “live a normal life now, think normal things” and because she responds to Dr. Garth’s concerns that she is concealing the truth about herself with an admission that the truth is simply too ghastly to admit, audiences of the era might begin to guess that the secret Marya is guarding more likely concerns sexual desire than vampirism. As such, the introduction of additional medical professionals in this scene is intentional. Their presence is designed not only to cure Lili but to return her to heterosexual normality.
The belief that lesbianism was an impulse subject to control permeated American culture in the 1930s. This was the period in which conversion therapy, ameliorative strategies designed to change a person’s sexual orientation, first gained national prominence. In this respect, Marya is ultimately seen as giving in to an impulse that is in fact controllable: she has embraced her life as a vampire and this choice now threatens those around her. Lili’s scream is a recognition of this threat and the long term danger it poses, a reminder to the audience that Marya’s “diseased” mind is not only a threat to her livelihood, but also to the virtue of young and impressionable women like Lili.
Works Cited:
Barrios, Richard. Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. Routledge, 2003.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 2003.
Cook, Patrick. “Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 27, no. 3, 1999, pp. 45-46.
Dracula’s Daughter. Directed by Lambert Hillyer, performances by Gloria Holden, Nan Grey, and Marguerite Churchill, Universal Pictures, 1936.
Lugowski, David M. “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood’s Production Code.” Cinema Journal, vol. 38, no. 2, 1999, pp. 3-45.
Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. “19 Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press, 2015, pp. 430-438.
