The Boulet Brothers Have Turned ‘Dragula’ Into Truly “Combustible” TV

Drag is everywhere. Though the art form has existed in various shapes for hundreds of years, the recent crossover popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race has kicked open the floodgates with a platform-heeled foot. And it’s not just that every major city in America has blowout watch parties for each new cycle of the show, or that nearly a dozen countries have launched their own versions of the fabulousness-based reality TV competition. Queens are popping up in commercials for credit card companies and rideshare apps, while network sitcom characters can make mention of a “death drop” and fairly expect the viewership to know what they’re talking about. But for a creative tradition so steeped in outsiderism, in fostering a supportive and celebratory space for those rejected by society, what happens when the mainstream colonizes the underground? In other words: in a world where RuPaul inflates her multimillion net worth by profiting off the booming fracking industry, who can we turn to?

Enter The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula and its creator-hosts, a pair of bombshell creeps often appearing with whited-out eyeballs. Drag royalty Dracmorda and Swanthula Boulet have nurtured their show like a cherished mutant offspring, from humble beginnings on OutTV to a dedicated viewership on streaming home Shudder and an even wider fanbase in after-broadcast licensing on Netflix. The fourth season is now in full swing, offering up more of the glorious grotesquerie — in the looks combining horror, filth and glamour, as well as the death-defying “extermination” challenges for the week’s losers — that’s gotten them this far. Longtime viewers will see that the show is also growing, with the $100,000 cash prize for this season’s winner (as well as the per-episode budget) at an all-time high. That development is more along the lines of maturation than expansion, however, slicing right through the existential crisis of something made for freaks on the fringe getting too established for its own good. Their hell-baby is bigger and weirder than ever.

“Drac and I are the guardians of the gate,” Swanthula tells Decider. “People will say, ‘Oh, if they get bigger, I hope they don’t get watered-down!’ [Laughs.] We would — we will — never let that happen.”

They have maintained their commitment to fostering a loving, only occasionally homicidal home to performers who felt alienated by more conventional scenes. Past champions like Vander Von Odd, Biqtch Puddin’, and Landon Cider represent the alternative to the alternative, their getups too strange or outright disgusting to fit in with the ball-gown-clad pack. One week’s challenge may whisk the cast off to a “Nosferatu Beach Party” complete with a haute couture anglerfish and an old-timey changing-room perv; a visit to the “Weird Wild West” acquaints us with a cactus-human hybrid and a gunslinging Dolly Parton cyborg. Drac and Swan view the outré-outcast persona as the key genetic link between queer and horror subcultures. “They’re sisters, right?” Swanthula says. “They’re both about transgression, and there’s shared DNA in that. It’s a natural pairing.”

“You can see queer subtext in horror movies from the very beginning, going way back to The Old Dark House, Dracula, Frankenstein,” Dracmorda adds. “It’s all there, if you’re willing to peel things back. James Whale, who directed a lot of the early classics, was himself a gay man. But he couldn’t put that on the surface of his movies, so you can almost see these misunderstood monsters as his reflection on gay life.”

On a show where contestants can be found casually name-checking Jean Rollin or Alejandro Jodorowsky, a sincere love of horror and all things off-the-radar doesn’t just inform the spectacular creations. (For the record, Drac and Swan agree that if they could reanimate any corpse to serve as a guest judge, legend of depravity Divine would be the go-to choice, followed closely by Vampira.) The show itself adopts the genre’s spirit of scrappy ingenuity, assembling the scripted sequences called “cinematics” which bookend each episode with low-cost homage that nonetheless looks polished in its beautiful dirtiness. “The budget’s limited, but we can still thrive like that,” Dracmorda says. “We like to joke that Dragula is a show doing drag of TV. Many drag artists don’t have a ton of money or resources, but they’ve still got to appear in these glamorous nightlife events looking like a million dollars, even if it’s really more like two. The show is an extension of that style.”

While priding themselves on their hardscrabble ethic of craft, the Boulets have consistently leveled up the production and entertainment values from one season to the next. “We don’t want our show to lose your attention for a second,” Dracmorda says. “We want you on the edge of your seat with anxiety the whole time!” In some cases, hitting that delirious fever pitch is just a matter of tweaks to the format, starting with disposal of the bullshitty padding that’s made so many other reality programs flabby and sluggish. In others, the changes were more cosmetic; after season one, it became clear that conducting the confession-booth talking-head interviews with participants in full-face drag made it too difficult to keep track of who everyone was, so they switched to a dressed-down au naturale look from the sophomore year onward. Drac and Swan also learned not to tamp down their own magnificence just to avoid the perception of competing in the contests over which they lord, and soon settled into an ornate, “imperial” style all their own.

But the show’s most significant evolution concerns its always-broadening notion of who has the right to engage with drag. The misconception that drag belongs to gay, cisgendered men with a uniformly trim body type dies a violent death on the Dragula stage, where people of any and all genders are welcome to experiment with their self-presentation. Season 3 winner Landon Cider proudly represented the drag king community, joined by trans queens, non-binary performers, and “female impersonator impersonator” Sigourney Beaver. Newcomer ‘mask queen’ Formelda Hyde marks the first entrant from a predominantly digital, Twitch-streaming background, and Korea’s own Hoso Terra Toma takes the game global as the show’s first overseas queen. As long as they can make for what Swanthula refers to as “combustible” television, they’ve got a seat at the blood-spattered, viscera-strewn table. 

“That’s been in the forefront of our minds from the beginning,” she explains. “All of our clubs have always been inclusive. The drag scene has a lot in common with a Rocky Horror showing, in that everyone’s invited to dress up and come have some sick fun. Limiting this, being exclusive, goes against the spirit of that. But I do want to say, at the same time, it’s important for us not to cast from a tokenized point of view. If we make it as simple as needing one drag king, one AFAB queen, one this and one that, you end up with people who might not be ready for the opportunity yet. We want to put people on the show who are ready to compete, with a solid, equal chance of winning. It’s all a matter of who’s out there and who’s auditioning.”

That generosity of spirit forms the cornerstone of a show with stronger moral backbone than your average reality competition. The queens snipe and throw shade and give the folks at home the drama we so crave, but underneath the pettiness, there’s a foundation of mutual acceptance and respect. “As queer weirdoes or misfits, we didn’t always get that ourselves,” Swanthula says. “So you be the thing you wish you had. It’s painful, too. Sometimes I self-reflect and it’s like, [sigh]. Not to come from a place of ego, but I wish I had someone like me when I was younger, rather than people telling me what I couldn’t do. It’s so crushing for someone who’s creative, to have someone saying, ‘I’m going to shut this door in your mind.’ Fuck the door! We want to rip the whole wall off!” This come-as-you-are mindset extends to the viewership as well, their horror convention meet-and-greets packed with hetero horror-enthusiast couples, the boyfriends having often converted their girlfriends. (I number among this subset.)

“I wish I had someone like me when I was younger, rather than people telling me what I couldn’t do. It’s so crushing for someone who’s creative, to have someone saying, ‘I’m going to shut this door in your mind.’ Fuck the door! We want to rip the whole wall off!”

If this has started to sound a little too warm and fuzzy for its roots in the repulsive, don’t worry. The maggot-eating, flesh-stapling, and overall bodily peril that fans have come to expect aren’t going anywhere. It’s enough to make a person wonder how all the legalities shake out. “Oh, darling, don’t bother your pretty little head with all that,” Swanthula cackles, before Dracmorda lays the deal out. “These are things that anyone can do,” she says. “You can sign up to get pushed out of a plane, you can get pierced at a shop. As gory and gruesome as we make it all look, there’s nothing illegal going on. Everyone agrees to do it, and everything is explicitly spelled out when we start the show. There’s a whole list with hundreds of things, so that we have no issues going forward. We just don’t want to coerce anyone into doing anything.”

With razor-sharp teeth and a heart of gold, Dragula has established itself as the most gratuitously enjoyable fashion show (not) on the air. No matter how large the ranks of the diehards known as Uglies — Swan on Drac’s play on the Wicked Witch epithet of “my pretties!” — might get, the show in which they’ve found a haven won’t cater to the middle. It’s got individuality spurting from its ruptured veins.

“This whole concept started out of a need to provide something for ourselves, regardless of whether or not anyone else liked it,” Swanthula says. “We wanted to create something made out of the things we love, purely: punk aesthetics, John Waters, horror and glamour, everything. But at the same time, we always want to shoot higher. So as the DIY thing goes, it’s not that we’re gonna shoot for the stars. We’re shooting for the next galaxy, and the budget doesn’t always provide for that, so we still get to do what we need to in order to create our visions. If we don’t have special effects, we figure something out and get it out there. People seem to like us for that.”

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Watch Dragula on Shudder