[Pride 2021] Reclaiming the Countess: Dracula's Daughter at 85

On May 11th, Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936) celebrated its 85th anniversary. The film centers on Countess Marya Zaleska, a mysterious and beautiful Hungarian socialite and artist who is actually a vampire turned by the infamous Count Dracula. Zaleska preys upon the people of London, with a particular appetite for beautiful young women, hypnotizing them with her gleaming red ring or sending her manservant Sandor to proposition them to seductively pose for her paintings. Zaleska is not proud of her exploits, however. After unsuccessfully removing her curse through the destruction of Dracula’s body, she seeks insight from a psychiatrist to cure her of her affliction. She is vague about her true nature, only confiding to the psychiatrist that she has an illness—a craving—she cannot shake. To a viewer with a keen “gay sensibility,” as coined by groundbreaking queer film historian Vito Russo, it is absolutely clear what her illness signifies: her undeniable queerness, of which she has a strong desire to be cured.

The 1930s were not kind to queer folks. Popular psychiatry at the time designated homosexuality or any queer variant as deviant and perverse. Queer folks were stigmatized with the mark of mental illness, and most psychologists believed that a person with homosexual tendencies could be cured through psychoanalysis, with some advocating for aversion therapy. The first documented use of electric aversion therapy, a method which used intense electrical shocks combined with arousing queer stimulus to create a mental connotation with pain and homosexual pleasure, was conducted by Dr. Louis W. Max in 1935, one year prior to the release of Dracula’s Daughter.

At a meeting of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Max said of his young gay male patient after intense electroshock had been administered, “That terrible neurosis has lost its battle, not completely but 95% of the way.” This form of treatment would gain momentum in the 1940s. Some “deviants” went willingly into therapy, bending to social pressures, while others were forced against their will. Whereas, in most cases, homosexual men bore the brunt of societal disgust, queer women were seen from a more psychological angle. Lesbian and bisexual women were painted as threatening seductresses in need of psychiatric help. 

The intersection of psychiatry and lesbianism/bisexualism during this era is perfectly packaged in Dracula’s Daughter through the film’s antagonist, Countess Marya Zaleska and her desire to break the vampiric spell that plagued her. She wished to be “[f]ree to live as a woman, free to take my place in the bright world of the living, instead of among the shadows of the dead […], live a normal life… think normal things.” The film studios facilitated the coded queerness of the film with taglines such as “She gives you that weird feeling!” and “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!” Therefore, there is little doubt that the film’s coded queerness went unnoticed.

The listless Zaleska encounters psychiatrist Dr. Jeffery Garth at a socialite party. She is intrigued by his theories of the mind’s will to cure obsession, and in Zaleska’s case, peculiar urges. Zaleska confides to Dr. Garth that “[s]omeone… something [Dracula, her queerness] … reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses…” These impulses lead her to encourage a young woman named Lili, posing for Zaleska’s painting, to remove her blouse before sucking blood from her neck.

Why would one have to remove their entire blouse to gain access to the neck?

The Breen Office, part of the Production Code Administration enacted in 1934 as a form of cinematic censorship, took notice of this scene in the final script. They advised the filmmakers that the seduction between Zaleska and Lili would “need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor… The whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of [Zaleska] or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lily.” Dr. Garth, after hearing of the vague illness Zaleska describes to him, demands Zaleska use her will power to cure herself.

Similarly, this frame of mind was part of Dr. La Forest Potter’s psychiatric methods in 1933. She states, regarding a lesbian patient who had no dedication to being cured of her lesbianism, that “no homosexual can be cured, or even relieved of his or her abnormality, who will not whole-heartedly cooperate towards this end.” It seems that Dr. Garth prescribes to this same theory.

Near the film’s end, Zaleska, now “out” to Dr. Garth that she is in fact a vampire, demands that he join her in eternal life by turning him into a creature of the night. She is resigned to the fact that she will never be free of her affliction after the attack on Lili, who is left comatose. No longer does Zaleska wish for a cure of her vampirism; her queerness. She accepts herself for what she is, and for that, she is vanquished and Dr. Garth is saved. The predatory queer is killed by none other than her manservant Sandor as revenge for not granting him the power of eternal life as a vampire. Zaleska’s demise allowed for the heterosexuals to survive. 

The queerness of Zaleska signifies the anxieties surrounding female sexuality of the 1930s, specifically male anxieties (Dr. Garth) of female sexual desire. However, despite the all-too-familiar demise of the evil queer in the film’s final moments, queer women can and should reclaim the Countess; if not for reclamation of once terrible connotations between queer women and mental illness, but for the power she wields. Andrea Weiss, author of Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (1993), posits the merits of the female vampire as a vessel for queer power: “The lesbian vampire is the most powerful representation of lesbianism to be found on the commercial movie screen, and rather than abandon her for what she signifies, it may be possible to extricate her from her original function, and reappropriate her power.” 

As a queer woman myself, I assert that the character of Countess Marya Zaleska can and should be reappropriated for her power as a queer woman. Such was the case for the reclamation of the word “queer,” as well as the pink triangle used by the Nazis to mark homosexual men, by queer folks. Significantly, a black triangle was used for female queer prisoners of the Holocaust, a signifier of both mental illness and/or lesbianism.

What was once a harmful vessel for horror and mental illness, the female vampire, inherently queer, can be used as a source of strength for women who love women, despite her “dangerous” powers given to her through vampirism. Unlike many women at the time of the film’s release, Zaleska had the ability and power to charm and have authority over others. It is a shame that she wished to be cured of such faculties, but of course, this was the dominant male fantasy of the era: control over perceived uncontrollable women. Zaleska was doomed from the opening credits. 

Since the release of Dracula’s Daughter, much has changed in the way psychiatry views queerness. Thanks to the efforts of queer activists, especially militant activists such as The Lavender Panthers, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. Additionally, beginning with New Jersey in 2013, twenty states have now banned conversion therapy on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, including two U.S. territories. 

Today, although science is much kinder to queer folks, significant progress still needs to take place with regards to social and cultural attitudes toward queerness. As with the progress in scientific attitudes toward queer folks, the horror genre, once fixated on using queerness as a signifier for villainy, has evolved substantially with empathetic storylines for queer characters, not to mention having more queer characters in general with greater complexity and autonomy. 

Countess Marya Zaleska can be remembered today not for her predatory violence or shame, but for her complexity as a queer woman and anti-hero. Queer folks like myself have felt the frustration of seldom seeing ourselves on screen. But in a representation once meant to harm us, we can reclaim it as a source of power. Zaleska is a reflection of her times, but she can be brought back from the grave to take her rightful place as the queer vampire queen of American horror cinematic history.

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