Wood was most likely transfeminine. She went by the chosen name of Shirley, which she used in many of her screenplays, and regularly showed up femme presenting or in genderqueer attire in public and on set. Her movie Glen and Glenda is an early example of trans lesbian representation (back then trans women where assumed to be exclusively interested in men). Her gender identity was explained away by her contemporaries with pseudopsychological nonsense like "a neomaternal comfort derived mainly from angora fabric", but it's pretty obvious to me she was one of us.

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

The dialogue between characters after the dances gets me. It could be fun banter and Statler and Waldorf style quips but they just go nowhere.

That's why I could see a modern version working so well, but a bit of that magic would be lost

This is a classic example of a B film. Theatres back then had double features where you got two films for the price of one and the second movie was usually low budget stuff, and often relied on being a bit edgier than the usual fare to make up for the cheaper production. Video tapes only started to become a thing a decade after this, and didn't get really big until the 1980s.

I think they still got shown in a cinema because back then there was no other way to watch a movie. I remember listening to Eli Roth on a podcast saying the quality of slashers really dipped in the 80s because of direct to VHS.

Before then, studios had to consider schlock real movies because they'd get shown in cinemas and the people making the movie tried to do their best with the resources they had. Perceptions changed and budgets were slashed with vhs and you had so fewer resources to work with