Interviews
“The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” Season 666 Winner Asia Consent Talks Horror, ‘Dead by Daylight’ and Season Drama
Last week’s finale crowned a new winner on the biggest season yet of “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” on Shudder – “Season 666.” The consistent season frontrunner, Asia Consent, amassed a number of challenge wins, including an impressive Dead by Daylight prize, and earned their place in Dragula history.
It’s easy to look back over the 10-episode season and see Asia’s trajectory from superfan to season winner; the drag artist delivered consistent, stunning looks and played the game more strategically than many of the contestants. While Asia’s artistry and talent did the heavy lifting, knowing the series better than any other competitor this season also gave her a leg up in the fierce competition.
“Oh my god, it was so surreal,” Asia Consent emphatically tells Bloody Disgusting of the moment she won. “Like I’ve said on the show, I’ve been auditioning for multiple years. You think you’re ready when you apply for it, and you think it’s your time. But I truly do believe that timing is everything. So, once it was announced that I was the winner, I just knew at that moment that this is exactly why I’ve been waiting for all these years. This is why. It was because Season 6 was my time, and I needed to go through certain things in my life to be able to be ready for this, so it couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time for me.”
Asia Consent has been a massive fan of “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” from the very beginning, and it made her more attuned to what, perhaps, series creators, judges, and hosts Dracmorda and Swanthula were looking for. Asia explains, “I feel like being a super fan really helped me because I saw what didn’t work out for other competitors, and how that maybe could have helped me. Really, I think what didn’t work out for certain competitors was just not being themselves. That’s what I take away the most from the experience, that I was rewarded the most when I was being myself and being just authentic with who I was.
She continues, “It was extremely validating, going through that experience and realizing, ‘Wow, if I’m just being Asia, that’s when I do the best. Being a super fan and seeing that through the show where people aren’t fully sure of themselves or aren’t fully confident in who they are as a person, that’s when they tripped up. Honestly, seeing that is what really motivated me to be able to be ready for Season 6.”
Watching a reality competition series is vastly different than competing in one, of course. It took some adjusting for the artist, especially when it came to watching the episodes as they aired. “Actually, I’m with Aurora right now,” Asia tells us. “I was telling her that watching the first episode, seeing yourself on TV for the 1st time. Nobody will ever be able to prepare you for that experience because it’s like, ‘Oh, wow! This is how I really am. Wow!’ I was shaking. Couldn’t breathe because I was like, ‘Oh, my god, this is so putting yourself out there for the world to see.’ It is really scary. But over time, eventually, I got more comfortable watching the episodes with my family and friends. But yeah, it’s definitely a jarring experience seeing yourself on TV. I was with my close family and friends when we first watched it. Even then, I still was shaking. Couldn’t breathe; it was crazy.”
Once past the hurdle of acclimating to appearing on TV, Asia wasn’t surprised by what she saw in terms of the competition. The performance artist was pretty attuned to what was happening, though she recounts how she surprised her fellow competitors when the episodes began airing. “I thought it was funny, though. My castmates really didn’t know about the alliance between Pi and me. I got a couple of texts from people in the cast of season 6. They were like, ‘You’re in an alliance with Pi, what the hell!’ I was sorry, but I was also playing the game, and that was part of it. I wasn’t going to spill the tea to them; I wanted to make sure that we got this going with me and Pi. Nothing really surprised me from the experience, for my castmates and everything. But I think, being a part of the show, the most surprising thing was just seeing how production ran and how you see the magic being crafted behind the scenes. It was a really special experience; I wouldn’t trade that for the world because it’s really fun making TV. It’s being a part of the drag history books, essentially.”
The competition naturally brings out some drama, but this cast is bonded for life. “We all actually love each other. And we can get crazy. We can fight and argue and everything. Usually, we’d argue, and then, like 5 minutes later, it was like, ‘Girl, do you want something to drink? Let’s hang out.’ We were able to make up pretty quickly. There was one specific moment I had with Gray Matter where they asked who we thought should not be in the competition anymore. I ended up saying his name for that, and he was very upset about that, behind the scenes and on-screen, actually very upset. But that night, we went back to the mansion, and he was just like, ‘You know I love you, Asia. I’m gonna make some eggs. Let’s have some dinner.’ It was super cute. I really love Gray, and like it was just such a sweet, tender moment, I’ll never forget that.”
The Boulet Brothers cited Filth as Asia’s strong suit when it comes to drag, but the artist nailed all the core tenets this season. “I’ve always loved like divine John Waters, like Pink Flamingos type of stuff where it’s very shocking,” Asia says of her drag style. “I want to be able to pull a reaction from the audience when I’m on stage. As a performance artist, I always want to try and shock the audience, and that’s what really inspires me. But as far as looks, I love club kid culture.
“I love high glamour, and honestly, just drag in general has been really inspiring. I was doing more traditional drag when I started, and then eventually, I started leaning more into horror. Especially when Dragula season one dropped. That’s when I realized I could take my love for drag, horror movies, and horror video games and combine them. That’s when I really started flourishing and coming into my own. I’ve been a drag fan ever since I was like 12 years old. I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race when I was 12, and then I just kind of grew up with drag and evolved from there. Also, shout out to my Portland community because they keep it weird up there. There’s a lot of weirdos. My community up there has been very inspiring as well and has been uplifting me this entire time.”
One horror video game that inspires Asia happens to be one that she’ll be immortalized in, Dead by Deadlight. “I cannot believe it because I’ve been playing Dead by Daylight for years. That’s how I connected with my friends and everything. I can’t wait to be in the game. I’ll be the first one to buy my skin for sure. I am planning on eventually streaming and making Twitch streams with video games and everything. I look forward to that. I might have some Dragula Season 6 contestants play with me as well.”
As for horror movies, Asia has a clear frontrunner for her favorite of 2024 and beyond. “One of my favorite movies of all time, I think, is The Substance. It’s such a Dragula-coded film for me because it was so glamorous, so nasty, and so horrific; the body horror in it and everything. Also, the message of, essentially, the expectations that are put on women in society. It was really beautiful to see that brought to film in such a nasty, demented way. Demi Moore gave an amazing performance. Another one I saw this year, too, is Smile 2. I was very surprised by that because the first Smile movie wasn’t my favorite, but the twists in Smile 2 were so good. I absolutely loved that one.”
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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