Original subtitles

- Horror is traditionally the lane

where you can go to do anything.

- People who make horror, they're taking this real emotion

that affects people's lives and like bend it to their will.

- But movies are not just for the person who's making them,

they're for the audience too, and the things

that we bring to those movies.

- I'm asking you to set me free.

Don't confuse me any longer with this talk

of a big experiment.

I know who you are, and I know what you've done to me.

- When you don't really see yourself anywhere,

you look for the thing that feels closest.

- I feel terrible for people who can't see themselves

in the monster.

The monster was actually the most human one,

the most feeling one, the one that I related to the most,

because there wasn't a denial of who the monster is.

- Get away, get away!

- Please.

Go away.

- Don't look at me!

- I love to see monsters, because there's a power

in being a monster.

- What is the matter, Alice?

- In the great melting pot of creative endeavor

and the creative endeavor of queer people,

so many fascinating things come to the surface.

You present that to your audience,

and they go away clutching this little still-beating heart

of something other.

- I love you, David.

And that's why we we hold our monsters close.

- From the day we're born, there is a battle we must fight.

A struggle between what is kind and peaceful in our natures

and what is cruel and violent.

- What the hell is this, an editorial?

- That choice...

- Repression.

Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred.

We should never try to deny the beast, the animal within us.

- Horror films that utilize a transformation.

- I will kill all of you!

- This is all about fear, our own fear,

of losing our identity.

That there's something inside of us that we cannot control,

that will ultimately take over who we are.

- Any story that is about transformation and links

transformation with sexuality...

Has to be read as a queer story.

- Do you remember how you felt when you first realized

that you were a homosexual?

- Frightened.

Terribly frightened.

- The thing about transformative horror

is that it is so tied to a fear of the other,

but the other usually exists within yourself.

- I was terribly fighting by the homosexual feelings,

the guilt associated with having feelings

of attraction towards other males.

- Queer folks, we have to kind of be strangers

to even ourselves at times, about what it is

that we really desire and what it is that we really want.

That repression creates a great deal of fear

about what it is exactly that's down there,

and what's gonna happen if and when it bursts out.

- You have a need and of course a tension.

- I can't continue to to keep this thing undercover.

- I was always afraid of being found out.

As soon as the impulses came, I was terrified.

This impulse in you that is so dark and abhorrent

that needs to be let loose.

- For any queer person, unless you're very lucky

and just very confident from from the get-go,

it's like living a dual life.

- Transformation dates back to

"The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde."

The idea that we're trying to be one thing,

but we're really another, and which one's gonna win?

- Jekyll and Hyde hands itself to sort of

Freudian interpretations, because it's all about

this idea of the the multiple selves

that are contained within someone...

And what allows that to become unleashed.

- When I was younger, I thought that puberty

meant that I would become a boy.

That didn't happen.

For me, the binary never made sense.

I never thought I was going to be a woman or a man,

and I was always kind of both of them at the same time

and everything in between.

And so I've come to understand that I'm living

in the the ever-changing middle.

There's so many things about Jekyll and Hyde

that I love and identify with.

He isn't discreetly one person or the other,

he's often going back and forth and occupying

both of those positions at the same time.

- Man is not truly one, but truly two,

they are chained together.

That chain spells repression.

- You have a normal kind of everyday human character

that then something happens that unleashes

this kind of bestial sexuality, an appetite from within.

Most gay men and lesbians in the thirties and forties

and fifties had to pass, wasn't really an option to be out,

so they were kind of playing Dr. Jekyll

all through their lives.

- What you are about to see is a secret

you are sworn not to reveal.

- And then maybe once a week, if they got to

a secret club meeting at a gay bar in the urban area,

they could let their Mr. Hyde out.

- It has conquered you.

- No, no, no.

I'll fight it.

I know it will not happen again.

Oh, help me.

- You see those same conflicts emerge

in the werewolf narrative, where the protagonist

has this side of him that is gonna come out

whether or not the sort of lead personality

wants to allow it to happen.

- Tomorrow night's the full moon.

You're gonna change.

You'll become- - I know.

I know.

A monster.

- The werewolf is the perfect allegory for coming of age,

for coming out in the closet.

- Whether we're trans or lesbian or gay or whatever,

we have to come to this period of secretly knowing

that we have almost like this like wolf-like curse

to where one day it's gonna be unleashed.

- It's starting.

- So it is.

- The eruption is physical, and it's happening

from within, and it's happening through the body.

So you're not just like in the thing,

but the thing is inside of you.

- Why are you doing?

- People are afraid of it, and you're afraid of it.

It's like you are the haunted house.

- The first like really great werewolf movie

is "The Wolf Man."

And "The Wolf Man" is so sad.

- I was caught in a trap tonight.

I don't know how I got there.

I can't help myself.

- Then I'll see to it that you can't go out to them.

Come on, Larry.

- In "The Wolf Man," becoming a more powerful,

more beautiful, more animalistic creature

in touch with your aggression and in touch

with your sexuality is considered a curse.

- The way you walk is turning,

through not fault of your own.

- The classic interpretation of that monster

is it's a metaphor for an erection.

You know, it's this transformation into this beast

that is like masculinity unbridled.

But there is a shamefulness that character felt

when he transforms into his normal, nice self.

I mean, he's just cowering in shame.

- Oh my god, what have I become?

Who am I, what have I done?

How many sexual experiences I've ended like that

for queer people?

Quite a few, I would bet.

- I was wondering if you think that there are any, quotes,

happy homosexuals?

- They may be gay, but they certainly are not happy.

They know how miserable they are

and they know how they got that way.

- The wolf man doesn't really accept who he is,

and he fights it at all costs, and I think that's

pretty much what's happening, you know,

when you first think you're gay,

and particularly for me growing up in a small southern town,

you know, gay was, I ran from it, I hid from it,

I tried not to be gay, I did everything I could,

I prayed it away.

- Doctor, can these sick people be cured?

- Not they.

An asylum's the only safe place for them.

- It was still there inside of me,

just begging to come out, very much like the wolf man.

"The Curse of the Werewolf"

that was laid on a baby who grew into a man

possessed by a monster.

- Films like "Curse of the Werewolf,"

where it is not even the traditional werewolf story,

it is a story about someone who is cursed from birth.

The holy water boils before the baptism.

There is a self-loathing we experience as queer human beings

because we're told that we are monsters.

We are told that we belong in the fringes of society.

So of course we're gonna be attracted to

monstrous characters and we're going to have

great empathy for them.

- Oliver's bride seems to be a very nice girl,

and a very pretty one, too.

Carla tells me she's a bit odd.

- 1940S horror movies like "Cat People"

make more complex what it means to be a monster.

Part of this is due to the rising interest

in psychoanalysis.

- You told me about your childhood.

Perhaps we will find this trouble stems

from some early experience.

- Freud I think introduced into popular culture

this idea that there are certain processes in our heads

that are kind of pathological, and that could be fixed.

- What do you think caused your sexual orientation?

- I know that inside now, I am sick.

I'm not sick just sexually, I'm sick in a lot of ways.

- Suddenly we had these monster movies

where the monsters were suffering

and then they wanted to heal themselves,

and they figured that they could actually

work themselves out of their monstrosity.

- I can't help you, you're not truthful with me.

- But I am, I've told you everything,

I have not lied to you.

- "Cat People" is a movie about

the dangers of queer female sexuality.

It's the lesbian horror franchise, in a weird way.

- Twice I've been followed by something that was not human.

Something that attempted to take my life.

- It's a horror movie from a female point of view,

and that doesn't happen very often.

- The main character becomes a cat monster

when she is sexually aroused.

- Never in my life have I seen a film

that allows women to be as horny.

You will actually transform into this hungry,

thirsty panther that cannot hide who it is or its desires.

- You could use the word lesbian instead of cat people

and and it would play out logically,

because the movie is really this kind of metaphor

for hiding your sexuality.

- To the bride. - The bride.

- When Irina is approached in the restaurant...

She gets clocked.

This other woman sees her and immediately knows,

like her gaydar is like ding ding ding, this is my sister.

She says- - My sister.

My sister?

- Irina is mortified.

She wasn't even really out to herself all of the way,

but she was out enough to get scared.

- It's such a strong gay moment.

It's so erotic.

The exchange between them.

- So when you realize that "Cat People"

is written by a queer screenwriter, DeWitt Bodeen,

you get to find all of those themes of like,

I have this thing inside of me and if I let it out,

it's gonna be very bad news for everyone involved.

- In the name of God, leave us in peace.

- It's very sexy, it's very smart, it's very emotional,

it's very spooky.

- The story is so much about her trying to grapple

with this difference and with this other part of her

that she can't quite make work.

You see her want it, and you see her try to get there,

and she just cannot.

- You were saying the cats?

- Torment me.

I awake in the night and the tread of their feet

whispers in my brain.

- Queer people have a long and strange history

with psychotherapy.

- Do you sincerely believe that if your husband

were to kiss you, you would change into a cat

and rend him to bits?

- I don't know, I'm only afraid.

- Dr. Judd is this figure that you see

a lot in these movies, which is like the older

straight white man who is going to fix her

with psychotherapy.

- And if I were to kiss you.

- I only know that I should not like to be kissed by you.

- You have to throw off the structures of society

that are trying to bind you to be in some fashion.

And within that film it is psychotherapy

that is trying to bind her.

Ultimately, like, therapy's not gonna help her.

So she like kills him.

She eats him.

When I was a teenager, I went to a fundamentalist church.

There was just a thing about finding a way

to suppress these desires, to push them down so far

that you never actually looked at them.

You can't tamp it down, you can't get rid of it.

And that's presented within the films as kind of a tragedy

and like the monster has to be stopped.

"Cat People" is right in the thick of adhering to

the Hayes code, where queerness had to be coded.

- For a lot of these films, once the deeply dark secret side

becomes public, you pretty much have to be destroyed.

- Do you want your son enticed

into the world of homosexuals?

- Remember, my boy, it's in your best interests.

Do exactly as I instruct you.

- Or your daughter lured into lesbianism.

- What happens in this room must not go beyond this room.

- You can depend on me.

What do you want me to do?

- You must think of this as a trip.

On the way, we'll find out many

fascinating things about you.

- What am I doing?

A horrible urge comes over me.

- You don't really believe that your son is-

- No, no, I can't believe.

- Remember how wonderful it was when you sprang suddenly,

dug in with your fangs, the soft throat,

the gush of warm blood?

- No, no!

- The fifties is a decade of conformity and containment.

- Then it's all right to feel the way I do?

- Yes, under certain conditions.

- But at the same time, there was a fear of that pop culture

was turning kids into juvenile delinquents.

- Come on, Jimmy, hit him again, he's been beggin' for it!

- Teenagers, both cars loaded, back from a party I guess.

- And it set off a cycle of teenage monster movies.

- Look!

- In this big wave of "I was a teenage" films,

an older scientist of the same gender as the younger person

turns them into something completely monstrous.

- Through hypnosis, I'm gonna regress this boy back

and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within.

- You'll, remember that it's important to obey me, always.

- In the older transformation horror,

science is the thing that can keep the monsters at bay.

But in this slew of "I was a teenage" films,

science draws the monster out.

There's this fear of adults turning America's youth

into these just unhinged, sexual, prowling beings.

- What were perceived as films to cash in on a teen audience

now can be clearly viewed as something that is

addressing a fear of gay people.

- I feel as though I'd been drugged.

- But it did you a world of good.

How pretty you are after the night.

- It feels remarkably like those after school specials

that they showed to kids in the fifties.

- What Jimmy didn't know is that Ralph was sick.

A sickness of the mind.

You see, Ralph was a homosexual.

- Queers, we have been perceived sometimes

as people who could, who could destroy children,

who could create immorality in them

that otherwise isn't there.

- I remember my dad showed me "I Was a Teenage Werewolf"

when I was about six years old.

He looked back fondly on the movie.

- Dr. Brandon.

There's something I have to tell you.

I don't know if it really happened.

It's more like a nightmare.

- It was his connection to horror, that he played a monster,

you know, was something that he was really proud of,

'cause he loved the genre.

I imagine he was aware of the subtext of it all,

but I was never old enough to have

those conversations with him.

You know, my dad passed away when I was 16.

When I watched "I Was a Teenage Werewolf,"

I felt so sad for for Tony.

And how lost and confused and lonely he felt.

- Help me, Doctor, please!

I know they're gonna kiss me, but don't let anyone

see me like that, please, Doctor, help me!

- I was aware at a very young age

that I had these weird feelings

that I couldn't quite figure out.

I felt different.

Especially different from other boys my age.

There was an immediate connection, you know,

but it was just something that I emotionally

wasn't involved enough to understand yet.

- You'll only feel a scratch, believe me.

And in the end, you will no longer be disturbed

or troubled, because you will be you.

- Mad science in the monster movies

was not that far off from the kind of mad science

that people were actually using to cure homosexuality.

- Homosexuality at the time was being classified

as a mental illness, and something that through

certain revertive therapies, literally surgeries,

I mean, they were maiming people at the time.

- Aversion therapy had been proven

really successful with alcoholics,

so they got it in their minds that if we wanted

to rid people of their queerness,

of what made them monstrous, we should

try aversion therapy with them.

- Everything from lobotomy in the most sort of extreme cases

to you know, experiments with hormones,

experiments with glands, castration.

These are pretty barbaric, but they were considered

medical science in the forties and fifties.

- Quite, quite tense.

- In these movies, the fantasy was

you could be that thing and then be cured.

- I'll begin with 50,000 votes.

- And a lot of people wanted to be cured.

I didn't.

I wanted to get worse, and I succeeded.

- A flood tide of filth is engulfing our country

in the form of news stand obscenity,

and is threatening to pervert an entire generation

of our American children.

- Another thing that changes in the 1950s

was a new awareness of the male body

as something that can be on display.

- 14.

- 13.

- 13.

- 12.

- 12.

- 11.

- 11.

- Where are you now, Tony?

- We see that in a lot of the teenage monster movies.

In the case of Teenage Frankenstein,

there is a Dr. Frankenstein figure

trying to create a beautiful young man.

- Our main concern is with your physique.

- Sews him together from various body parts

and buys some barbells, and he gets him

to start working out.

- You know with your remarkable mental

and physical progress, and of course your obedience to me,

you've made me very happy.

- The teenage Frankenstein monster is played by Gary Conway,

who was an aspiring actor.

He had a appeared in the physique magazines of the era.

- These models that are in these movies,

they're posing for LA photographers,

who are selling pictures of them clothed

and later unclothed for this whole underground market.

Pre-pornography.

- The nakedness, the nudity of these magazines

is defended and foisted upon the people.

The vast majority of this material

is too obscene to show or to quote to you.

- The fifties is full of the contradictions, ain't it?

'Cause it's very domestic.

Everything is sort of gray and the same.

But on the other side you've got

the rise of the beefcake models.

It's expressing this real desire to objectify men,

which I am all four.

As the models become actors and then appear

in all these movies, the aesthetic spreads.

You start to see it in popular culture in all kinds of ways.

- In a lot of these fifties films,

there's all these muscle boys and these gorgeous women

in very revealing bathing suits.

- In "The Creature From the Black Lagoon,"

who I really wanted to be was Kay in that skintight

white latex bathing suit being hunted by this like,

very muscular monster.

- "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" films

are just filled with beefcake.

- Mark.

All we're interested in right now is getting

the entrance to this lagoon cleared.

- I'll be the bait for him.

- Oh, Mark, get outta my way.

- You kind of feel the sexual repression of the era

slowly kind of reaching this boiling point

as our appetite for it becomes more and more normalized.

- Through this salacious material,

these abnormalities are corrupting the minds

and the hearts of our children.

Oh God, deliver us, Americans, from evil.

- Queerness is kind of like that.

No matter how you put it down, it finds a way to bubble up.

What's really going on underneath the surface

at some point always has to be known.

- Your new bodies are growing in there.

They're taking you over, cell for cell, atom for atom.

Suddenly while you're asleep, they'll absorb

your minds, your memories.

- You'll be born again into an untroubled world,

free of anxiety, fear, hate.

- One aspect of horror films that is used

over and over again is the concept of an invisible monster.

Something that you can't see that's always

imitating its host.

- Don't be afraid.

- Transformation stories are about the monster within it,

but in the body snatcher genre,

the monster isn't erasing and suppressing and denying

that part of our self which is authentic.

- These stories dark based in the invasion

of the normal by the abnormal.

- Can't you see?!

They're after you!

They're after all of us!

Our lives, our children, everyone!

They're here already.

You're next!

- In the fifties, there was this fear

that the homosexual threat, like the communist threat,

was all around us.

- And maybe as I'm here today that will be homosexual

in the future, and maybe some girls that'll turn lesbian,

we don't know.

They can be anywhere.

They can be judges, lawyers.

We ought to know, we've arrested all of them.

- American attitudes about sex and gender

really changed a lot at that time.

The Kinsey reports talked about the fact

that homosexuality in men and women

was a much higher rate than anybody had previously thought.

This gave rise to the notion that there's

homosexuals out there who are passing, they're invisible.

This sort of evil force that's lurking in your small town.

You could be at a supermarket and there might be

one amongst you.

Your child could be going to school with one of them.

They could be plotting to take over the world.

- You say there's no way of telling

whether any given man in town is a monster or not.

- Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness

which has reached epidemiological proportions.

- That realization was really terrifying

for a lot of people, 'cause America

wanted to be the wholesome, put-together country,

and anything that undercuts your American dream,

you immediately have to kind of squash it,

and that's exactly what they did

over the next course of the next five to six years.

McCarthyism.

- Question is have you ever been a member

of the Communist Party?

- What a shit show that was.

- Anything that remotely smacked of communism

or socialism was immediately flushed out and demonized.

- This moral decay weakens our are resistance

to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit.

- The subversive culture of homosexuality

was very directly tied to communism at the time.

- Policy of the department is that we do not employ

homosexuals knowingly, and that if we discover homosexuals

in our department, we discharge them.

- There was this idea that both communists

and queer folks would be living double lives,

and therefore would be security risks.

- Subversives, homosexuals, in the Air Force

and in the Navy.

- There also was purge in Hollywood

of anybody on the left, and a lot of people on the left

were gay, a lot of them were Jewish also.

- Suddenly they're trying to route all of the queers

from Hollywood, which would've been impossible,

but still they were trying to do it.

- Listen to me, there's still a way.

- Is there?

With a mob after us?

- I'll try and hold off the mob.

- No.

We'd rather have it end here than fall into their hands.

- It was a legendarily conservative time in the US.

- Tonight's program will deal mainly

with the male homosexual.

The scenes were photographs from a hidden vantage point.

- At the same time there, was also vibrant subculture,

and there were gay bars, and queers being gay together.

- So much culture was being made,

and it was out of the eye of the mainstream.

The bar culture became the way that gay people

actually found each other.

There's one bar, there was like a postage size dance floor

somewhere in the back.

And you were fine for a while until the red light went on.

- Back in the fifties, everybody was a total closet.

It was frightening.

- And why don't they come out in the open?

- Because they don't trust us.

Because what we don't understand, we want to destroy.

- We went to this club in Chicago,

and there were all guys in there.

So what?

I didn't even know it was a gay club.

Suddenly, the police came in and screaming,

"Okay, you bunch of fucking faggots.

This is a raid."

We went to jail that night.

The newspaper would publish lists of people

who were arrested in gay bar raids.

Is there any other charge that would destroy

a person's reputation as quickly

as the charge of homosexuality?

- No, I can't think of any other charge.

The stigma of such an arrest, whether true or untrue,

continues with the individual throughout his whole life,

I'm sure.

- It was terrifying to be identified as a gay person.

- "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

becomes this fascinating Rorschach blot

for whatever period that they made one in.

- I've been wandering among 'em for hours.

They can be fooled.

- How?

- Don't show any emotions.

Hide your feelings.

- Just don't show any emotion.

They can be fooled.

- Keep your eyes a little wide and blank.

Show no interest or excitement.

- The fifties body snatcher sort of comes up

in a time where the idea of being outed

really could end your life in a kind of literal way.

- Everybody's terrified of being branded

as a communist and also as a gay person.

- It's downtown.

And all the towns around us.

It's a malignant disease spreading

through the whole country.

- You can either read it as a metaphor

about the encroachment of communism

and the group think that that instills.

- There's nothing to be afraid of.

We're not gonna hurt you.

- Remember how Teddy and I fought against it?

Well, we were wrong.

- Or as a critique of the red scare and the conformity

being championed by people who were, you know,

finding communists and queer people and beatniks

under every rock.

- Look out! - Oh my god.

Lock the door.

Lock the door. - They're coming.

Help, they're coming, they're coming, listen to me!

You're next, you're the other!

They're already here!

Come, you're next!

- The Philip Kaufman version of the late seventies

was about neo conservatism.

At that point in time, people were kind of

forgetting about the sixties and the seventies

and saying like, let's all act straight,

be preppy, and make money.

- Please, come on.

I just wanted to be nice.

- What's matter with you?

- Nothing.

- The bodies who were to get snatched

and replaced by the pod people,

they are a specific late-seventies west coast archetype

of eccentrics, and when they lose those eccentricities,

it hits you a little bit harder.

- Jack.

Jack, Jack.

Jack, wake up.

His eyes.

Oh, Jack, it opened its eyes.

- For queer audiences, we respond to that movie

as like the this terror of conforming

to the straight agenda.

What society tells us we're going to be.

- There's something really relatable for me

in "Invasion of the Body Snatcher,"

like someone walking around amongst the pod people

and trying to present and pass as a pod person.

- Conformity is particularly threatening

for trans people who aren't out even to themselves yet,

and maybe don't yet understand why they might feel

like the world is trying to force them

into a prison of their own body.

- There is a sense that passing is integral to survival

as a trans person that is really present

in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

- We gotta go, we gotta get outta here,

we gotta go right now!

- Where you gonna go?

Where you gonna run?

Where you gonna hide?

Nowhere.

'Cause there's no one like you left.

- We return to this material with Abel Ferrara

in the early nineties.

He's setting it all on a military base.

Coincidentally or not, the film comes out

the same year that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is implemented.

- When all things are conformed,

there'll be no more disputes, no conflicts.

- There's just a sense of fear and danger

and sneaking just inherent in the queer experience.

From the time when you got your first crush

all the way until you're an adult, it's just there,

it's just baked into the experience.

- Six-10 proceeding south to airport.

Carrying two passengers.

Type H.

Repeat, type H.

So when those themes come up in horror movies,

they hit us differently.

- It's such a cruel game to convince people

that assimilation will save their life.

- There's nothing to be afraid of.

They were right.

It's painless.

Come.

Sleep.

- But at the end of the day, you aren't ever able

to actually assimilate.

It only takes one person for you to not pass,

and that one person could mean your life.

- The pointing out and the scream...

Alerting all the normies that there's a pervert among us.

There's a real alive human among us, we gotta crush it.

That just feels like being outed.

- Wait right there, Mr. Bennell.

- How do you know my name?

- Hang up Matthew.

- I didn't tell you my name. - Hang up.

- I didn't tell him my name.

- You're all a part of it.

They're all pods, all of them.

- "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the 1950s version,

the 1970s version, is particularly terrifying

to queer people, 'cause I feel, speaking for myself,

that we had just gotten okay with our own freakishness,

and I was just like, don't take it away.

- Nothing changes, you can have the same life,

the same clothes, the same car.

- But what happens to us?

- As a gay man, I'm looking at that like

what is the thing that makes me me?

I don't want that part of me that is so

ineffably me to be snuffed out.

- "Body Snatchers" of course deals with

the pressures of conformity and sort of

hiding out in plain sight and all that.

Back in the fifties, "I Married a Monster From Outer Space"

is so much more blunt and ridiculous.

A beautiful, innocent girl of her honeymoon,

her passionate dreams of perfect romance

turned into a living nightmare.

- It's about a man who commits to the lifelong bond

of heterosexual marriage.

- Bill.

- I'm sorry I'm late.

- And then starts acting different.

- Well, you big idiot, you say something,

I'm running out of small talk.

- Why do we have to talk?

- The night before the marriage,

the husband is replaced by an alien lookalike.

- You see him with his wife, and he's just very stiff,

he's very uptight.

She's clearly more in love with him than he is with her.

But then the first time you sort of see him

with another man alone...

- How about a drink?

- He just feels like he's just swinging with it

in a different way than he was before.

- Well.

Congratulations.

- The actor who played the husband was Tom Tryon,

who was a gay actor in Hollywood at that time.

- Here you've got a film with a closeted gay leading man

that's about an alien creature that isn't interested

in sex in the traditional way that we know.

- Maybe you've guessed, but I've never been

on a honeymoon before.

- Neither have I.

- These aliens had to pass as humans

in much the way that gay people and queer people

in the fifties were forced to conform

and pass as straight.

- Even in times when there has been pressure

or there has been direct danger and you aren't able

to be honest about who you are,

you can feel your desire popping up in unexpected places.

So he sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night.

He meets other men in the woods.

- The exteriors where the men go off to meet one another

were filmed around Griffith Park,

which, you know, for decades was known

as a sort of gay male cruising area.

These seemingly average-looking dads

were congregating in the woods for community.

- Plot-wise it's certainly a close cousin

to "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

In some ways almost kind of a send up of that concept.

- Bill.

- These movies kind of captured something that was

really happening and at that time,

which was this fear of queers.

- I saw them, man.

I saw them as they really are.

Horrible.

Fear of anything that challenged

the systems of power.

- He's in here!

Get him!

Get him!

- There is a danger to intimacy for queer people.

- Thing about queerness is that it shows itself

no matter what.

Even society trying to put all of it,

sort of force us to keep it repressed,

can't keep it from exploding out of us.

So there is something quite dangerous about it,

especially when you realize it

and acknowledge it within yourself.

That's a source of power.

- Hello, Karen. - Eddie.

- You said on the phone then you wanted to get to know me.

Well, here I am, Karen, look at me.

- In the eighties, we see a series of monsters

who accept their monstrosity.

- When I was first bitten, I fought against it, q

and so did Jerry, and then we found the doctor.

He helped us.

He helped us to adjust.

- In Joe Dante's "The Howling,"

the werewolves are are this like little club,

they live in this colony.

- If you fellas don't mind, I think I'm gonna

borrow Karen and just give her the rundown on the colony.

- Don't leave out the juicy stuff.

- These characters revel in their transformation.

And relish the sexuality that they experience

when they're transformed.

- The tensions in "The Howling"

are built around the slow understanding

that queerness has always existed and has always been

on the edges of, you know, society, whatever society means.

- We should have stuck with the old ways,

raising cattle for our feed.

Where's the life in that?

- It's a group of werewolves who find

a place with one another in order to be safe,

which is completely analogous to ultimately

what happened with queer people

figuring out where other queer people were.

- A secret society exists and is living among all of us.

They're neither people nor animals,

but something in between.

- And they can express themselves,

their true queer identities, outside of

any persecution from society.

- You can't tame what's meant to be a wild dog.

It ain't natural.

- I was never particularly interested

in werewolf films because they're so masculine.

But in "The Howling 2," we get more fluid representation.

We get this really sexy werewolf queen

in resplendent kink gear.

The werewolves transform to have sex,

so they're celebrating their wolfen form.

- "The Howling 2" has a very specific

Eastern European kind of horniness.

Where women are hairy and horny and men are hairy and horny.

- There's a real lust for rolling around,

howling, salivating.

They are just proud and loud about exploring

their like true animalistic sexual feelings.

- Cat people films have always been associated with women.

But in the Paul Schrader film from the 1980s,

Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell

are kind of like both really feminine.

And the entire focus...

Is on the inherent sexuality of the large cat.

- Oliver doesn't love you, he loves the panther.

He wants you because he fears you.

- Malcolm McDowell takes it upon himself

to liberate the cat people, to sort of lead them

to what they should be and to be their true selves,

which is a complete 180 from the original story.

- Free me.

I want to live with my own.

- They're seeking to embrace that part of themselves

instead of rejecting or trying to fit in.

- If I had to change into a panther

every time I was horny...

Would it have taken me as long to come out?

- Oh, fuck.

Fuck!

You like it.

- It feels so good.

- "Ginger Snaps," oh, she's a horny werewolf girl.

Like that happens, like surprise, it happens for girls too.

- It's like touching yourself.

See fucking fireworks.

Super Novas.

I'm a goddamn force of nature.

- "Ginger Snaps" might have been

the first werewolf movie I ever saw.

Was like 14 so I was like, you know,

beginning the processes of my own body

like, getting away from me, as bodies do.

There was something really like,

campy and fun and violent and weird about it.

- My best case scenario, Eleanor,

is hair everywhere but my eyeballs,

elongation of my spine till my skin splits,

teets, and a growing tolerance, may be even affection,

for the smell and taste of feces, not just my own.

- When I started taking hormones,

I totally turned into a monster.

I became this horrible, beautiful,

overly sexualized goddess as a 14 year old girl.

I really related to "Ginger Snaps."

As a trans woman, I tried my hardest to make sure

that I had the most non-looking dick ever in the world.

You know, 'cause girls' clothes is really tight.

My mom unknowingly treated me like I was a bad person

for exploring my identity and being comfortable

with who I am as a woman.

- You don't have anything I haven't seen before.

- That's what you think.

- I personally took it as if I'm the problem,

when in reality it was always society

for not knowing how to handle just a normal woman

growing up in blossoming with tits and shit.

- Werewolves transform under the light of a full moon.

I always considered that to be like the disco ball.

You know, that they come alive at night.

- Once that shadow self comes out,

there's suddenly a new understanding of who you are.

There's actually a lot of really good,

valuable, fascinating, vital life force in there

that you just tucked away because society told you

it wasn't appropriate.

- I think that those transformation stories

are superhero stories for gay people.

They allow us to see that this thing inside of us,

our sexual preference, our gender identity,

that bubbles up and is natural and has

all this power and is super exciting,

is okay, because nature created it.

- Eventually it's gonna work its way out,

and if you don't come to terms with it,

it will destroy everything in its path, mainly you.