Mahoney says that sadomasochism, homoeroticism, and homophobia are highlighted in Bryan Singer's retelling of Stephen King's novella. In "Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film", Caroline Picart and David Frank write that the face of evil is represented in the film as Nazism, oft labeled as "quintessentially innate supernaturally crafty", but also "in a more subterranean way, dangerously blurring ... the boundaries between homoeroticism and homosexuality". The Nazi monstrosity in "Apt Pupil" is structured through sexual "abnormality", where a series of binary dichotomies are introduced: "normal versus monstrous, heterosexual versus homosexual, and healthy versus sick". An additional dichotomy, victimizer (masculinized) versus victim (feminized), reflects the film's "hidden tensions" in which Bowden and Dussander's roles of powers are reversible. While the "set of perversions" that unfold in the novella are misogynistic, the film unfolds the set as "ambivalently homoerotic and homophobic". The film removes the novella's misogyny and leaves intact the underlying homoeroticism of the central characters. The film also expounds the connection between homophobia and how male Holocaust victims are portrayed.