All photos courtesy of the Boulet Brothers.
It’s hard to describe the indulgent, sensation of fear. Whether you’re watching a horror movie or navigating a haunted house, there’s something singular, even pleasurable, about giving yourself over to fright in an otherwise controlled environment. The danger might not be real, but the adrenaline rush decidedly is, and when it’s effective, it’s so damn sweet. Just ask the Boulet Brothers —Dracmorda and Swanthula Boulet—drag artists who have carved out a special corner in the horrorverse where the art of drag meets the art of fear. Their reality competition series The Boulet Brother’s Dragula is celebrating its tenth anniversary this month, so in honor of spooky season I caught up with the pair to talk about their earliest horror memories, the intersection of drag and horror, and what’s been scaring them lately.
TUESDAY 3PM OCTOBER 13, 2026 BOULET MANOR
CAROLINE REILLY: As someone who watches a lot of horror and reads a lot of horror novels, I’m always curious with other horror-inclined folks, how early in your life did you feel drawn to horror?
DRAC BOULET: So for me, I have resonated with horror since I was a little kid. I remember the first movie I ever saw was the original Dracula , the black and white version. I was at my grandparents’ house and I was sleeping in the living room and they went to bed and they put on the TV for me and turned off the lights, and I was just obsessed. I used to get these Haunted Mansion –those little records that had a storybook with it, and I would listen to it over and over and over. This is before I ever went to the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. Horror has been a massive impact on me. It just feels like my happy place since I was a kid.
SWAN BOULET: For me, it started with Halloween and my obsession with Halloween. I just loved everything dark. I love magic, and fantasy, and that intersection. So Halloween was my absolute favorite holiday ever since I was a little kid. I was always a monster. It was a vampire, werewolf, mummy, zombie, ghoul of any kind. I worked in haunted houses when I was in junior high, around the puberty age, and I think when things start shifting around, I started dipping into horror movies and really getting into that side of things.
CAROLINE: I was talking to a friend, horror novelist John Fram , and we were talking about fear and latching onto that sensation as something that is exciting. As a little girl, we had a computer game in our house. I think it was a Rapunzel game, and she says at one point, “I’m afraid, but sometimes fear feels good.” And that always stuck with me. It is this singular sensation that’s kind of liberating.
DRAC: I think, for me, the fear is “I could be scared.” I would take mundane situations and imagine them in fantastical ways that were scary. I felt like I was writing horror novels as a kid in my brain before I realized what I was doing. I would be imagining the situation, and what does it smell like, and why is it scary, and what makes it scary? Is it the lighting? Is it the weather? I think anybody that really loves horror has to be kind of a scaredy cat in a way, otherwise you don’t get the full effect.
CAROLINE: That’s a great point. I love that. I hadn’t even thought of that.
SWAN: I’m totally the scaredy cat too. Even though I’ve seen 10,000 horror movies and we go through the haunts and stuff, I’m not necessarily jumping, but a movie could absolutely cast its spell on me and I feel the fear. My favorite thing though is what often comes right after it is laughter. Horror and comedy—writers will say they’re very, very similar in their tones and the momentum of how you write them. I often couple them together. So even at haunted houses or in scary movies, I’m laughing just as much as I’m jumping or screaming.
CAROLINE: You can’t really be a true horror lover if you don’t experience fear because it’s that adrenaline. But it’s also being able to experience fear in a contained or controlled environment, like a haunt, or a movie, or a book. There’s something almost freeing about it.
DRAC: This is kind of personal, but for me, I dealt with a lot of anxiety growing up. And so fear was a really repetitive theme at all times. You’re constantly on alert and you don’t understand why your brain works the way it does, but it makes you really examine fear and what is scary about things and what is not. I think that’s had a massive impact on me as a horror creator. Even with the show, in terms of that’s part of what’s behind making the cast do these crazy challenges. At the end of the episode, it’s like face your fear. My lessons on how to deal with fear and how to just face your fears head on inspired me to bring that to the table for the show.
CAROLINE: One of the things that I admire so much about what you guys do is I feel like drag is such a beautiful craft and such an expressive and honest art. Why does drag seem to be such an effective mechanism for you to explore horror?
DRAC: I think queer people resonate with horror automatically for the most part. I think if you grew up queer or as an outsider, you looked at horror movies as a safe space. You watch Carrie , and Carrie is bullied just like you probably are, then she gets to use her powers and kill everybody. That’s the fantasy when you’re a teenager. You see queerness in Frankenstein . Frankenstein’s the monster. The town hates him. They’re chasing him down with torches. You see Norman Bates who’s dressing up like his mom. So there’s a lot of queer subtext in horror, and I think that’s where it starts.
SWAN: There’s a lot of transformation too when it comes to drag and drag performance. Whether it’s the makeup aspect of horror or even just the monsters themselves, like werewolves and vampires, there is a transformation and maybe even a part of yourself that you hide as a monster in cinema. I think queer people can also relate to that. Some of our favorite artists, they’ll take that darker side of themselves or the monster as the drag monster and make that their superpower.
DRAC: And it is, right? It’s when the monster transforms, when the average guy becomes the werewolf or you find out that the girl is a vampire and she hisses at you, it’s all intimidating. I think that being a monster is empowering. And for a drag artist or someone that feels too feminine or masculine for the gender they’re assigned, I think accessing that monster may feel powerful.
CAROLINE: It’s like a way of expressing yourself without actually making parts of yourself vulnerable. You can say, “This is a character I’m putting on, but it actually helps me express a part of me that is really honest that I might not be able to express otherwise.”
DRAC: I’ll see cast members who come on and they’re very shy and they’re not very outspoken in the reality portions of the show. But then when they go on stage, they come alive and you can see them feeling like that’s who they are in that moment.
CAROLINE: What does it feel like to be entering 10 seasons of this? It must be such an affirmation that this really is a powerful corner of the drag world.
DRAC: I think less about the drag world and more about the horror world. What’s the impact on the horror community? I still don’t know what that is. I think other people can see it a lot clearer than we can because we’re so in it. We’re in the forest. We don’t know what the forest looks like from outside or from overhead. We just had our heads down working for 10 years on this and time has flown by. So yeah, I don’t know that I even acknowledge that yet.
SWAN: Yeah, that’s the honest answer I think for both of us. When it was pointed out, we were kind of like, “Wait, is it? Has it been 10?” Because we are always inspired by and very willing to take on the next project and how can we make what we’ve already created better, more interesting, scarier, or just more fantastic? Every now and then, we stop and look around, we’re like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, we are on the seventh season of this show with multiple spinoffs, and it’s the 10-year anniversary,” and all these things that people will point out.
CAROLINE: I think one of the hard things about being a horror lover, if you’re not a cis straight white guy, is a lot of times people who look, or sound, or live like you are not made particularly safe. Obviously, the tide is turning, but sometimes it feels hard to safely indulge your horror senses without worrying that you’re going to see yourself victimized in a way that takes you out of it. And I feel like you’ve created a space in the horror world where I can really indulge my horror, my love for the gnarly without that fear.
DRAC: I mean, even going off of that a little bit, I think about the idea of women in horror and what’s their place in horror, and then AFAB women performing on a show like ours, which in some people’s mind is traditionally a male dominated field and certainly dominated by drag queens versus drag kings. That’s really something we’ve tried to change people’s perception of because us coming up in the nightlife scene, the people that did drag around us were not all white guys in wigs. It just wasn’t like that. There were a lot of trans performers. There were definitely a lot of drag kings in New York back when we were coming up. So we really wanted to make the show feel like a place for the whole community to be, not to be safe in because it’s not safe. There’s a lot of drama and stuff that happens. The queer community is not perfect and they’re not all well-behaved. So it’s not to make a safe space, but it’s to make a space safe from those things you’re talking about.
SWAN: There’s another aspect to this though, because I’m listening and I’m kind of taking in what you guys are saying, but then I’m also acknowledging that when I look at our fans and I look at the people that come through our lines at meet and greets and come to the tour stops, so many of them are straight guys with tattoos and they’re like, “Hey, I got my wife into your show.” I think it’s because we’re not standing on the soapbox or in the space of creating a queer show—we’re creating a horror show. It happens to be queer. We are monsters in our own right. We also happen to be in drag. That stuff is kind of secondary, and I think just the celebration of horror movies, and kills, and gore, and effects makeup, it allows everybody, even straight men who oftentimes people will say have an ego that’s very bruisable, they would want to distance themselves from a queer show or guys dressing up like girls. But I think it allows everybody to experience this world and feel that kind of safety.
DRAC: Yeah. I think our show is less “guy dressing up like a girl” and more like everybody dressing up like a monster, and that feels welcoming. We’re horror hosts first who happen to be in drag versus we’re drag queens. The reason I think it matters is, let’s look at Rocky Horror [Picture Show] , for example. If you had said Rocky Horror is a queer movie, nobody would’ve watched it. They think it’s political, they think this movie isn’t for me. But when you don’t put a label on it and you just put it out there, so many people resonate with Rocky Horror . It’s like their awakening moment. It’s like Psycho . Psycho is a horror classic, but you could have said Psycho is a queer horror movie and it would not have been a classic. It would’ve been super underground and nobody would’ve watched it. So I think for us, it’s important that we lead with horror hosts as our distinction versus drag artists for that reason, because I think what we do could be consumed and enjoyed by everybody, and I don’t want it to feel limited to, “Oh, this is a drag queen. If I don’t like drag, I’m not watching this.”
CAROLINE: Do you want to talk a little bit about this new cast and what’s so exciting about it?
SWAN: I think one of the exciting things, and oftentimes we’re able to hit this mark on a season of Dragula , is that you see competitors from a lot of different places in the world. Yeah, we have a lot of people from all over our country, but there’s someone from Mexico, and Costa Rica, and Brazil, and Australia. You get these artists together and you can see a really rich array of the influences and what does fear and horror mean to someone in Mexico as opposed to someone in Australia. I think that’s one of the coolest aspects of the show.
DRAC: Their gender identity with the characters they portray switch too sometimes. Sometimes someone’s more femme, or sometimes they’re a mix, or whatever. So I think it just gives you permission to do whatever you want that day.
CAROLINE: Before I let you go, I do have to ask: What are you guys watching right now that’s really scaring you?
SWAN: Right now, I think the last horror movie we saw was Resident Evil .
DRAC: It was comedic. I was like, “Why is this movie funny?” But it’s also scary. I love that.
SWAN: We were just in New York, so on a plane is when I can pick whatever I want and I don’t have to compromise with Drac. But probably one of my favorite science fiction horror movies that I’ve seen in a really long time is Annihilation . It’s an all-female lead too. There’s four or five. They’re military and they’re scientists. Natalie Portman is the star, and the places that that movie goes, I mean, it goes so much further than you think it will. The concepts are super cool. An old movie that I recently saw for the first time is Possession , which is super body horror. Have you seen it?
CAROLINE: Yes, I love, love, LOVE that movie.
SWAN: Yeah, very bizarre, very singular. I thought it was great.
DRAC: We just saw Paranormal Activity in New York, the play. Totally incredible. We loved it. I highly recommend going to see that. That was a very unique experience. It’s like you’re in a horror movie in real life. It was great. Also, horror’s getting really big. Both DC and Marvel Comics are putting out these new lines of horror comics recently, and they’re actually really good. So that’s another untraditional market for horror that’s new and different.
CAROLINE: Well, and it seems like horror has been slowly becoming more mainstream, maybe since Parasite won the Oscar. For me at least, the level of horror I engage in is directly correlated with whatever I have going on in my life. The harder shit is, the darker I go. And sometimes I wonder if we’re seeing horror more and more in the mainstream because the world is so objectively cruel right now. It makes it feel like a more effective escape because it matches the intensity of how bad real life is.
DRAC: Well, if that’s the case, thanks to the Trump administration, I think we should all be watching Martyrs every night. The worst, most brutal horror movie you can think of is the only answer to that.
Source: Fashion
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