[Pride 2022] Dracula's Daughter: Queer Subtext and Lesbian Longing in the 1930s

Without a doubt, Universal's Dracula is a legendary piece of horror cinema and an iconic piece of pop culture. Though Dracula would launch a whole slew of movies, its first sequel, Dracula's Daughter, is totally overlooked today. However, the film is a fascinating time capsule that lets us look at the history of queerness in horror movies and how queer subtext was handled in the 1930s.   

Hitting screens in 1936, the film was produced by Universal Pictures. The film is a direct sequel to Universal's Dracula, picking up right where the first movie ended. Surprisingly, the film doesn't see Bela Lugosi reprising the role of Dracula. Instead, Dracula himself appears only as a corpse portrayed by a wax model of Lugosi. The lead this time is Gloria Holden in the role of the titular daughter, Countess Marya Zaleska.   

The movie opens with the police finding Professor Von Helsing standing over Dracula's corpse. The police arrest Helsing, but he protests his innocence, arguing that it is not murder as you can't murder a man who is already dead. The police take a dim view of this and debate charging him anyway, forcing Helsing to call his former star pupil and psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Garth, to help him. At the same time, Countess Marya Zaleska moves in to steal Dracula's body. Marya hates being a vampire and hopes that performing a ritual on Dracula's corpse will free her from her curse. Accompanied by her manservant, Sandor, Marya steals the body and burns it. Alas, the ritual doesn't work. A chance meeting between Marya and Garth leads to Garth telling Marya that he advises clients struggling with addiction to expose themselves to the focus of their addiction and overcome their urges via force of will. Marya tries this by inviting a young girl called Lili to her studio to act as a model. However, Marya fails to fight her urges and kills Lili. This act begins her undoing, culminating in her death.  

The film had a bumpy production history full of stops and starts. After 1934, the Hays Code heavily controlled Hollywood's output. This meant that movies required the Production Code Administration (PCA) to approve them before release. Without approval, a film couldn't be shown in American theaters. However, by this point, studios were becoming increasingly savvy about the Code and were slowly working out how to get things past the censors. The film's production entered high gear when Universal acquired the rights to adapt Bram Stoker's short story, Dracula's Guest, from MGM, who had previously tried and failed to make a screenplay based on the tale.

Universal hired R. C. Sherriff to write their first version of the script, but the PCA kicked it back several times, demanding massive changes before they would approve it. Eventually, this script was scrapped, and Garrett Fort wrote a new script which did get approved. This new script bears no relation to the short story Dracula's Guest. However, modern viewers might notice similarities between Dracula's Daughter and the 1872 gothic novel Carmilla. This is interesting as Carmilla is regarded as the first novel to feature a lesbian vampire, and it's known for its surprisingly even-handed approach to homosexuality. James Whale, director of Bride Of Frankenstein, was originally meant to direct, but this fell through due to scheduling, leading to Lambert Hillyer taking the role.  

The issues with the PCA show that the subtext in Dracula's Daughter was clear to many people at the time. Even if their opinion of the subtext was miles removed from a modern viewer's opinion of the topic. For instance, records of discussions between Universal and the PCA focused heavily on the scene between Lili and Marya. Surviving records say that the PCA made Universal make several promises, including that the scene: "will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of a perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lili." Even some reviews commented on the film's subtext, with the New York World-Telegram noting that the Countess went around "giving the eye to sweet young girls." Other reviewers overlooked this element or, in the case of The New York Times, totally glossed over the horror elements before ending their review with the hilarious statement, "be sure to bring the kiddies."  

It is essential to acknowledge these mixed reactions to the film's subtext. The lack of surviving public records discussing the creation of these older films can often lead to people presuming that those involved were simply oblivious to the subtext or that queer subtext is restricted to modern works. In reality, this wasn't the case. These subtexts have always existed. But in the past, film censors suppressed these themes whenever they felt like they had found them. Knowing this, many studios would make sure offending content wouldn't end up in their screenplays. In the rare cases that these themes did slip through, some movie reviewers would comment on them in their reviews, even if they did so via implication and innuendo rather than calling them out by name. The passage of time has made this subtext more noticeable and made discussing it publicly more acceptable. However, we should never presume that contemporary viewers were oblivious to these things. Obviously, their reactions were different, but they could still notice and identify the themes.  

Countess Marya Zaleska is very much a product of the 1930s. At this time, most horror monsters and villains had homosexual coding or displayed tropes associated with homosexuality. Marya is no exception. Her appearance, while still feminine, is still more masculine than the other women seen during the movie, invoking the idea of the cold butch lesbian. On top of this, Marya is shown to have European bohemian tendencies, a common wink toward homosexuality in films of this era. This is most vividly seen when Marya's cover story for bringing Lili into her home is to paint her rather than something more traditionally feminine. Even Marya's apartment is surprisingly modern, contrasting with the gloomy gothic environments Dracula was seen in during the first movie. This European style also goes against the restrained, traditional upper-class British houses and parties Garth attends, further cementing Marya's otherness. 

Marya's key character element is her hatred of her vampirism. Fueled by her desire to escape this curse, her first escape method involves destroying Dracula's body in an unexplained ritual. When this fails to solve the issue, she attempts to use modern psychiatry to cure herself. This can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for fighting homosexual urges. Marya only describes her curse in the abstract, rarely mentioning specific vampiric traits, leaving her condition wide open to an alternative reading. In fact, when Marya first destroys Dracula, she tells Sandor that she is "free to live as a woman, free to take my place in the bright world of the living." Later, she says that she can now "live a normal life and think normal things," heavily implying that full compliance with all heterosexual norms, both in thought and action, is the only way to be accepted in society. Any deviance from this is a "curse" that must be stamped out if you wish to be happy.  

Many of Marya's other actions can be read with this queer subtext. For instance, like many vampires, Marya displays an aptitude for hypnosis. Unlike Dracula, who performed this via eye contact, Marya uses an ornate ring worn on the finger traditionally reserved for a wedding ring. Marya frequently removes and puts the ring back on throughout the film, something one doesn't usually do with a wedding ring. This can be seen as a metaphor for her homosexual status. She is not married and is not intending to get married. But, she uses the symbolism of Christian marriage as a tool of deceit, only to remove it when she no longer needs to fool people. Notably, she is never seen wearing the ring in private or when she's displaying her true self. 

The film's final act makes this reading clear. In this act, Marya stops trying to fight her curse. Instead, she kidnaps Garth's secretary (and love interest), Janet Blake. Marya tells Garth that Janet will be freed if he allows Marya to turn him, becoming partners for eternity. It seems almost like Marya, accepting that she can not be truly free of her curse, attempts to get as close to normality as possible by imitating a heterosexual relationship. She substitutes her obedience to her vampiric desires with submission to the patriarchal figure of Garth. However, before this can happen, Sandor shoots Marya, killing her. Reynold Humphries sums this up best in their book, The American Horror Film, where they point out that the film's climax is two men coming together to enforce the will of the patriarchy on a woman determined to subvert it. 

Marya resorting to psychiatry and Garth's status as a psychiatrist also plays a crucial part in the film's subtext. In this period, many horror films started to feature the idea of modern psychology "curing" conditions that make people act outside of social norms. This, of course, was a reflection of the mistaken idea that homosexuality could be cured as if it were a mental illness. So, pitting a vampire desperate to free herself from her curse against a psychiatrist, especially one specializing in hysteria cases, is a clear reflection of the period's attitude to those who subvert the social order or buck the status quo. In many ways, Dracula's Daughter works as a damning portrayal of society's attitudes to mental health in the period. Psychiatry was seen as a cudgel to be wielded rather than a tool for growth.  

The infamous painting scene is one of the film's most remembered sequences, and it's easy to see why. There is noticeable sexual tension between Marya and Lili which feels very unsubtle to a modern viewer. However, this scene isn't just interesting for its sexual undertones. Its power dynamics are also fascinating. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff draws attention to the fact that in the 1930s, homosexual relationships were not seen as two equal partners working together. In fact, most literature of the time would always categorize these relationships as strict hierarchies, reflecting the strict gender hierarchy that permeated society at that time. Thus, homosexual couples were defined as butch/femme or dominant/submissive. 

As Barry Keith Grant notes in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Marya's standing as a cultured countess preying on the poor service girl makes Marya seem more manipulative while adding a class element to their hierarchy, reflecting this era's view of queer relationships. One where the dominant always exerts hierarchical power over the submissive even if the submissive is unwilling.

However, it should be made clear that the film is not kind to Marya. While modern viewers may love Marya, she is portrayed as a predator and a murderer despite her sympathetic plight. She is, without a doubt, the film's villain. And, as the movie goes on, she becomes gradually less sympathetic, acting more like a regular movie monster. In modern times, queer people have worked to reclaim and embrace the queer subtext of many classic movie monsters. In fact, even mainstream media has accepted the inherent eroticism of Hollywood vampire lore, making it a central part of many modern works. Thus to many modern viewers, Marya is, like the Bride Of Frankenstein and many other movie monsters before her, a tragic heroine whose innate power and sexuality are worth cheering for, even if we all know how it ends. But when the film hit screens, it was about a monster who could not be redeemed in the living world. 

Dracula's Daughter is a fascinating time capsule. It comes from a period when Universal Studios, the horror genre, and society were shifting. Through its production history and storyline, we can see how culture changed and how now-standard tropes and depictions of queer themes were cementing themselves in the medium. While Dracula's Daughter is overlooked now, it is a great movie to show people who suggest queer narratives and subtext are modern inventions. In reality, they have been there since the dawn of cinema, though they were obfuscated by both censorship and the social pressures of the time. Maybe someday someone can remake Dracula's Daughter and give Marya Zaleska the respect and ending she deserves. Until then, Dracula's Daughter exists as a fun vampire film where, unlike their 1930s counterparts, modern audiences will cheer for the villain.

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