Interviews
“The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” – Dracmorda and Swanthula Preview Season 5’s New Chapter
“The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” has quickly become a Halloween season staple on the horror streaming service Shudder. Luckily, the brand new season kicks off right on Halloween, ushering in a new chapter for the series.
Season 5 debuts on Tuesday, October 31, on Shudder and AMC+, with new episodes airing weekly.
The fifth season promises to be the biggest and baddest yet, boasting a brand-new state-of-the-art set, an army of new talented crew members, the most diverse cast in the show’s history, and the Boulet Brothers‘ themselves, Dracmorda and Swanthula, taking over as the series directors.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with the Boulet Brothers just ahead of the new season, where they teased what to expect from the new chapter and the easy transition into directing.
Dracmorda says of the new season, “When we first started the show, we weren’t exactly sure what was going to happen with it. We made the show from scratch. It didn’t have a network, it didn’t have a production partner or anything, and we just made this dream out of nothing. The first chapter, we call it, evolved from that and morphed until now where we have a permanent home on AMC and Shudder, and it’s such a different beast. We did our Titan season, which was an all-star season, so it was the best of the best competing, and we found a winner there, so we feel like that was the winner of chapter one. Now, we want to move on to update the format a bit, so that’s what we meant by chapter two. Some of the things you’ll see that are a little different is how the floor shows are presented. In the past, it was very cut like a music video, very quick cut. Sometimes, people said it was hard to see the whole outfit. Well, now you’re going to see every single episode. You will see the competitors’ full looks, top to bottom, walking the runway. We actually have a Lazy Susan circular spinning device, so when they first come out, you get to see every competitor, full 360 top to bottom, so there’s no chance that you’ll miss the details of their outfit this time around.”
In other words, expect much of what fans already loved, but with an even stronger emphasis on the artistry and revelry with the Boulet Brothers now directing the series, too.
“We previously hadn’t directed the show in the past,” Dracmorda explains. “We’ve always produced it. We’re the showrunners, so we’re very hands-on, but we weren’t literally in the director’s chair directing everything. This year, we were able to do that. Part of that was this difference on the floor show. We’re putting an emphasis on the art, the crafting, and the drag. We wanted to make sure we were behind the cameras this time and presenting the competitors’ drag exactly how we wanted to.”
Swanthula adds, “I think another aspect of that is after some years of experience, we’re heavily involved with the editing as well. When we watch the floor shows now and when we see the competitors performing live on stage, it’s almost like we’re watching through the camera lens. We know what looks great, how they can best be featured, how they can highlight what they’ve created, their personalities, and how amazing their makeup looks. It’s just much more intuitive to direct them in that way because, hi, we’re on the camera a lot of times, too, but we also know what we like when it comes to the edit. To elaborate on what Drac said, that music video style is still represented in every floor show. It starts off in a very high fashion, turntable runway kind of way, and then it devolves into this punk rock bombastic expression and quick cuts, and I think it’s the best of all worlds.”
The emphasis on artistry doesn’t mean that the competitors won’t be put through the wringer when it comes to the Fright Feat, where the Boulet Brothers subject the artists to face their fears in the most intense ways.
“When we talk about chapter two, what we really have done is, I want to say, simmer down the fat to get the purest form of Dragula,” Dracmorda elaborates. “What you’re going to see is you’re going to see amazing, incredible drag on stage in full 360 view. You’re going to see a drag artist doing crazy stuff like eating bugs, jumping out of planes, things like that, and that’s really what the show is about. I think what you may see less of this season is less drama and squabbling about things that don’t have to do with the competition. That’s one of the differences, I would say, this season is we’re focused on what Dragula is. Dragula is about seeing insane drag, and it’s also about seeing drag artists doing crazy stuff, and so that’s what you’re going to see.”
“I want to also add that it’s also a celebration,” Swanthula says. “It’s back to the fun of watching the show. I laugh so much, even though, through the editing process, I’ve seen some of this stuff a million times. I still get off on it. It still makes me laugh and commiserate with these people or their struggles or cheer for them. It’s really fun.”
Dragula doesn’t just impress for its artistry, but in its casting, where the competitors are assembled from across the globe.
Swanthula tells Bloody Disgusting, “I think social media has allowed us to almost use it as a scrying mirror. We can look through and see on a worldwide scale what other artists are up to. There’s a competitor in this upcoming season from South America. This is our first time bringing someone from Argentina, originally Columbia, but they’re from Argentina now. I’ve had my eye on him for years. He was actually supposed to be cast in season four, but due to the visa and difficulty with COVID and everything, it just didn’t happen. But we tend to scan from different cities, different countries, and flag people that say, wow, this person has potential, or look at this young artist. What an amazing perspective. They need to be shown to as many people as possible. That’s when we really play our hands in the casting process.”
It’s clear that the Boulet Brothers aren’t slowing down anytime soon, either, with horror offering an endless creative well to pull from.
“I got to say the horror world is so vast from really highbrow serious thrillers, chilling, possession, and all kinds of stuff down to child’s play and ridiculousness and just high comedy in camp,” Swanthula reflects. “I think Drac and I speak all of those languages, and we actually love them too, so finding inspiration from the horror world or all of its adjacent genres is probably the easiest part for us. We are in this never-ending conversation. We’re always riffing and creating and talking. I think if there was a fly on the wall, we’d be annoying to them because it’s always this workshop process. There’s literally lists of potential challenges for even seasons to come.”
“I mean, if you think about even the horror genre, I go from Beetlejuice to Hereditary to Alien to Killer Clown from Outer Space. I mean, just those few movies give you so many challenge ideas. To me, I feel like we barely scratched the surface, and there’s a lot more to come,” Dracmorda adds.
“The Boulet Brothers’ Dracula” Season 5 premieres tonight on Shudder & AMC+ at 12AM ET / 9PM PST.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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