Your eyes do not deceive you – I’m back, back, back, back again with more drag power rankings for you!
What rankings? Well, even though RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 does not debut until January, it’s no longer the only drag show you can stream to the comfort of your own couch.
Hennies, please let me introduce you to Season 2 of Dragula – the search for the next drag super monster! This new season is free to watch on World of Wonder’s YouTube channel!
I’ve loved horror even longer than I’ve loved drag, ever since the first chapter book I ever read was a children’s version of Dracula. Unfortunately, the modern horror landscape tends to be focused on gore and jump scares, and not a lot of the macabre suspense I dug as a kid.
Dragula brings that creepiness and sense of macabre – along with the heaping of camp that comes with a great drag performance.
Rather than preparing for an outlandish challenge in each episode, contestants prep a horrific look that adheres to a specific scary theme – like zombies or sea monsters. Then, rather than present the look on the runway, the queens bring their them to life on a genuinely scary floor show that’s sometimes in a challenging environment, like the middle of the desert!
Finally, and I do mean finally, there are no lip syncs for your life here. Queens are eliminated via Extermination! This season, they first face their fears in a frightening challenge against other low-ranking queens. Then, the bottom queen (or queens!) films her own creepy, campy death scene at the hands of hosts The Boulet Brothers!
The queens of Season 1 turned out some amazing looks despite the show’s low budget. This first Season 2 episode is worlds different – it’s shot in much higher quality, and the queens all bring highly-detailed horror looks filled with prosthetic make-up and practical effects.
Enough explanation – let’s get to the show and the rankings! This week each queen was tasked with turning out a horrific, Hellraiser-inspired Cenobite – you probably know the most-famous one as “Pinhead.” Cenobites are sadomasochistic extra-dimensional beings who take the shape of humanoids whose bodies are consumed in an endless state of half-torture, half elaborate art.
1. Victoria Elizabeth Black
Victoria Elizabeth Black is a special effects makeup powerhouse with a clear editorial vision who benefits from a set of very good bones under all her dressing up.
Victoria is reminiscent of Milk both in her make-up and her androgyny in the early segments of the show. We learn she isn’t a very fast blood drinker, but we see her doing decent make-up effects already in her confessional.
Then, her floor show is beyond. Like, she is truly a cenobite from another dimension.
From concept to execution, her look is marvelous. She’s brought her own face cut out and suspended on a spiked wheel, so that she can pull it away to reveal the musculature behind it, as well as a bared spinal cord behind her.
It’s movie quality make-up that is seriously terrifying, but she still sells a voluptuous female silhouette while she does it. I’m honestly a bit puzzled about how her massive bosom is engineered, though her rear-end padding is a bit suspicious. She loses this week to James Majesty purely on technicality of James’s transformation being grander. I think she’s our queen to watch.
2. James Majesty
(Instagram / Twitter (NSFW!) / Facebook)
James Majesty definitely shows the biggest range from all the girls in this episode even before we know she’s the winner, going from utterly glamorous to absolutely horrifying.
At first, James feels not too different than a regular Drag Race girl. In conversation she coming off as a wannabe Miss Fame, both in her affected speech and her glam makeup. Her confessional look is stun, which might lead you to believe she isn’t going to be willing to dirty it up enough to win this competition…
…until you see her runway.
It’s an unspeakable horror. Her body is in tatters and her over-inflated lips are held open with hooks, plus her jagged body movements are downright creepy.
It’s disturbing. I don’t really want to look at it any more. I can’t even bear to show you a close-up shot of it, honestly. The other contestants are going to have to be on their toes every week to keep up with this level of glamour and filthy horror.
3. Dahli
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
Dahli is a former scene singer who looks like a punk rock Yara Sofia.
I love love love both her entrance look and her confessional look. She sports a terrific goth/glam mug in the ghastly colors of a bruise that still sells her beauty.
She also seems pretty crafty. Dahli’s demented pig creature with a bare chest and yellowed teeth is ghoulish and not the same old bloody mess you might have been expecting. Yet, it’s just not the full horror that some of these other girls brought to the stage. It’s feels a little halfway-there compared to the very best looks of the night.
Dahli strikes me as someone with a lot of resources at her disposal and the wits to make it far in this race, but I’m just not sure if she’s creepy enough to be a Super Monster.
4. Abhora
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
Abhora is a demented demon clown with a lot of self confidence and a penchant for prosthetic noses. I have trouble picturing what her drag shows must be like! 
She’s a little overly-catty in the work worm for my tastes, but you’ve got to hand it to a bitchy queen who has the mug and outfits to back up her mouthiness. She’s also got the Laganja persecution complex any time anyone has the slightest comment to send her way, which is going to get old pretty fast (but probably yield some great catchphrases along the way).
By the floor show, it feels like we’ve seen her whole schtick already – pointy noses and baby doll heads. That said, her garment looks well-made, and her purple-accented make-up is strong. She knows how to do horror without going all black.
Furthermore, she knows how to sell horror. Her disconnected fashion model strut is the perfect combination with her unbloody look and somehow makes it even scarier.
Abhora really ought to be a front-runner, but I suspect we could be in for an earlier-than-deserved flameout for her based on her personality.
5. Kendra Onixxx
Kendra Onixxx is a fierce queen – likable, gorgeous, and with a fearless approach to the competition.
Right out of her body bag, Kendra looks like a horror movie witch. I’m over colored contracts in general, but her mug is BEAT every time we see her and I love her Stevie Nicks outfits.
Her barbed wire vinyl look is detailed enough – it sells a story, and doesn’t over-busy itself as some of the other looks do. Even if she was a relatively soft sell in this challenge, I think she still proved her point.
I worry that Kendra might be a little too visually low key to compete against the bombast of the queens above her on this list, but she’s also not going to give up on the fight.
6. Biqtch Puddin
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
Biqtch Puddin is the first queen out of the body bags, and that might be the only area in this competition where she will be first.
Biqtch feels like a over-accessorized, early-out Drag Race queen circa Season 4. She’s wearing an entire T.J. Maxx checkout line worth of accessories below a very “I am a drag queen” sort of mug.
Her confessional look isn’t much better. There’s simply nothing the least bit monsterish about her. The other girls seem to really feel this. They’re egged on by Abhora to bully Biqtch mercilessly during the group scenes.
That doesn’t stop her from bringing some majorly ugly (in a good way) prosthetics to the floor show. Her look didn’t sell a story as hard as the other queens, but she clearly knows how to bring the SFX horror to the stage.
She’s probably not our winner, but she’ll put up a good fight if she doesn’t get to down on herself from all the bullying.
7. Monikkie Shame
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
Monikkie Shame is a hot mess with a bag over her head, but she also brings a legitimate shot of terror to the competition.
Have you ever met a legitimately creepy person? Someone who is unpredictable and ever so slightly disassociated from reality, perhaps with a random streak of masochism thrown in for good measure.
That’s Monikkie. She can chug a mug of blood the fastest out of everyone, loves to staple her face, and delights in being pierced with needles.
She’s a sideshow geek, not a Drag Supermonster. Most of her ooky mystique owes to her wearing a mask at all times. There’s no reason that needs to be low effort, and we see in her confessional look that it can be a lot more than a sack with holes in it.
Yet, her floor show look is… a low-effort mask. Granted, she has a sort of explosion of blood around her mouth and neck, but the mask feels so basic compared to the faces some of these other queens are turning out. That it’s paired with a torn up red vinyl minidress doesn’t sell it any harder. She’s paying so much attention to trying to be a creep that she wasn’t very creepy.
I suspect she will play spoiler for a week or two, but she doesn’t have the range of some of these other queens.
8. Disasterina
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
The name says it all, no?
Disasterina has a sort of tacky fashion clown look to her entrance and confessional that doesn’t feel all that horrific. I’ll grant that her look has got a slight hint of Day of the Dead to it that suggests a colorful zombie, but I can’t help but linger on her seemingly-deliberate messiness in every detail.
Her tortured leather floor show feels like a somewhat pale echo of what we’ve seen from some of the other queens, though the judges liked her. There was some kind of theme of her own hair strangling her, but it didn’t really read for me. Also, the whole bloody disfigured crotch thing is starting to feel beat to death on Dragula already after last season’s finale.
What the judges didn’t enjoy was a sort of lumbering woodenness of Disasterina’s presentation, which stuck out in the midst of the presentations from all of the other queens. Even the dull Monikkie had more showmanship.
Disasterina has an interesting perspective that’s not right for Drag Race proper, but I’m also not sure that it fits in here. I sincerely doubt she’s our winner.
9. Erika Klash
(Instagram / Twitter / Facebook)
Erika Klash Feels like the Trixie Mattel of this group. She less about horror, filth, or glamour and more like a totally weird Japanime sci-fi Barbie.
Of course, Trixie is also riotously self-deprecating, while Erika has more of a passive, doll-like personality. In the work room, she comes off a lot like Jade Jolie: so fishy it’s hard to picture her as a boy! She’s also the peacemaker of the group, and it will be interesting if a non-shit-stirrer hits the challenges as hard as the other girls.
Her neon zombie doll in the floor show is cool at first glance, but it doesn’t really hold up under a lengthier examination. She doesn’t sell a story at all, and the detailing is seriously lacking compared to all of the other girls. She’s wearing a leotard with veins drawn on it under a glittery vinyl dress. There’s no there there.
Erika winds up being the weakest of all the girls.That’s a shame, because there’s a lot of awesome places to take neon monster (as Vander Von Odd showed us a few times last season) – but I think Erika is more neon than monster
It’s an absolute stunner that she isn’t executed at the end – probably down to her facing her fears in the needle Extermination Challenge, even if she was a wuss along the way. Maybe one of the next few weeks will cater to her day-glo mannequin aesthetic, but otherwise she’s not long for this world.
And the dearly departed…
Felony Dodger (Instagram / Facebook) felt like totally normal Drag Race girl, which was only exentuated by the the fact that her floor show look was very reminiscent of Sasha Velour. She was charming in the episode and handled the needle challenge well. While I would have kept her over Monikkie or Erika, it’s also not really a surprise to see her go.
