Voodoo Island (1957)

Jean Engstrom plays a stylish queer-coded interior designer in the 1957 horror flick VOODOO ISLAND.

VOODOO ISLAND
1957. USA.
Director: Reginald Le Borg
Screenwriter: Richard H. Landau
Starring: Boris Karloff, Beverly Tyler, Murvyn Vye, Elisha Cook Jr., Jean Engstrom, and Rhodes Reason

The film follows a group of people hired to scout a location for a new luxury resort on an island in the South Pacific - instead they find carnivorous plants and zombies.

Engstrom’s character Clair is queer-coded in the familiar ways of the past; she’s a fairly masculine interior designer who is uninterested in the men surrounding her. The only person she’s drawn to is Sarah (Tyler).

"I could make you become alive, dear!"

Clair flirts with Sarah, who then rejects her advances. Shortly after, Clair is approached by the handsome skipper Matthew (Rhodes Reason) who then flirts with her. She promptly rejects him and firmly tells him to stay out of her world.

“What is your world?” Matthew asks.

“Very private,” she responds. “Very exclusive.”

In his book “Screened Out,” historian Richard Barrios notes that Clair is one of the more overt lesbian characters of the 1950s and believes she was able to navigate past censorship because the Hays Office was already losing their stronghold on Hollywood – and also that they probably didn’t deem a B-horror flick as something that would reach a large audience.

Plus, being a lesbian character in a 1950s horror movie – you can probably guess how the story ends for Clair…

You can find VOODOO ISLAND streaming on FlixFling (Canada/USA), Daily Motion and YouTube, and also available on DVD.