Why Are We Still So Obsessed With Lesbian Vampires?

From Dracula’s Daughter to Vampire Diaries, the lesbian vampire has remained a potent symbol of sexual fluidity for decades. 
Elsa Martinelli and Annette Vadim in 'Blood And Roses' 1960.
Elsa Martinelli and Annette Vadim in 'Blood And Roses', 1960.Paramount/Getty Images

 

From the subtle lesbian storyline in Dracula’s Daughter (1936) to the outwardly queer leads in both Vampire Diaries spin-off series, lesbian vampires have existed within the American cultural consciousness for nearly a century. Her cultural footprint can be seen far and wide, especially among the queer folks who are embracing their spooky sides this Halloween season, whether it’s BDSM practitioner Daemonum X posing with pair of fangs, youths on Twitter casually calling themselves “lesbian vampires” with the #SpookyLGBTQ tag, or the Autostraddle writers who have written multiple posts about their favorite lesbian vampires in pop culture. But how exactly did the lesbian vampire become a queer anti-heroine and the ultimate symbol of thrillingly dangerous seduction?

In general, vampire lore has been a potent tool for humans to explore their deepest, base anxieties and desires. “Lesbians notwithstanding, the vampire has become a way to discreetly work out our curiosities with sex, death, and their overlap,” Sarah Fonseca, a film critic and associate programmer at New York LGBTQ+ cinema festival NewFest, writes to me over email. But because the way vampires prey is inherently erotic and performed in the same way regardless of gender — the fangs used for penetration, the exchange of bodily fluids, the seductive nature of how they lure their victims — the vampire figure also became a conduit for film and TV-makers to explore a more fluid sense of sexuality. Indeed, prominent gay screenwriter and True Blood creator Alan Ball believed most vampires to be canonically queer. “In the books, most of the vampires do seem to be pansexual,” Ball said in a 2008 interview. “Their thirst for blood really sort of makes them willing partners for any sort of sexual thing, and for them feeding and sexuality is combined.”

The very first instances of lesbian vampire legend date back to the 17th-century, with Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Transylvania, a real-life noblewoman who allegedly tortured and murdered hundreds of girls and was also rumored to be a vampire. (She is sometimes referred to as an early figure in queer history, although her acts were heinous and gruesome.) Then came Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 Gothic novella Carmilla, centered around the titular fictional vampiress, who seduces a young English woman. Fascinating due to the mere fact that they explored the taboo of lesbianism through the lens of the undead, these mythologies have stuck around, serving as the two main archetypes for many lesbian vampire characters on the silver screen.

Judy Holliday and Nan Grey in "Dracula's Daughter"Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

Ironically, the biggest explosion of lesbian vampire films in the ‘70s — typified the explicit B-movies of Britain’s Hammer Studio and the art-house erotica of European directors like Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco — was mostly born from a desire to please a heterosexual male audience. “The archetypal lesbian vampire rose to prominence at the exact point in time when the concept of lesbian identity was first coming into widespread public discourse, namely the early 1970s,” writes filmmaker Andrea Weiss, in an updated prologue to her 1993 book Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema. “Indeed, that particular image of the lesbian vampire represented a displacement of anxiety over the potential for the lesbian feminist movement.”

As she outlines in her book, many of the horror flicks of the ‘70s feature intimate scenes between a woman and a female vampire — both always thin, white, and high femme presenting — that seemed constructed for a “male pornographic fantasy.” In the end, the lesbian vampire would be killed off by the male protagonist, reaffirming that the heterosexual man reigns supreme and brings order back to the world. The final nail in the coffin? Hammer Studio’s screenwriter Tudor Gates has claimed that they used lesbian storylines as a tactic against the British Board of Film Censors: graphic sexual imagery was “considered more acceptable within the supernatural,” therefore more likely to slip past the censors.

Though many of these films were problematic, queer viewers who didn’t have access to any other lesbian representation in the media took what they could get at the time. Since then, many have begun to enjoy vintage lesbian vampire films as an act of reclamation. “While the vampiress may have once represented amorality, the perils of giving into queer desires, or lesbian predation, it now feels safe to reconsider,” Fonseca writes. “I personally think she can tell us a lot about the pitfalls of codependent queer relationships, harder truths about compulsory heterosexuality (ever notice how these vamps are almost always tied to a man of some sort?), and even our own kinky preferences.” Weiss also notes that lesbians have now enjoy these movies specifically because they watch them through a campy lens: “Camp creates the space for an identification with the vampire’s secret, forbidden sexuality which doesn’t also demand participation in one’s own victimization as a requisite for cinematic pleasure.”

Plus, there are a handful of films that sought to subvert the typical lesbian vampire trope. There’s Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), a cult favorite due to its high-profile allure: a stylish French vampire (Catherine Deneuve) seeks to seduce a more butch American (Susan Sarandon) outside of her existing relationship with a man (David Bowie). But it also includes a certain, more tasteful sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon’s characters that had lesbians rewinding over and over again in the ‘80s, Weiss claims. “There was something that had an erotic element for lesbians that wasn't specifically camp,” Weiss tells me over the phone. “[Viewers] weren't trying to subvert the intention of the scene. Lesbians were actually getting something from it that didn't require them to do these kind of cartwheels that they would do for scenes that were clearly made for the sexual titillation of men.”

'Lust For A Vampire' poster; lower right: Ralph Bates, upper right: Ralph Bates, Yutte Stensgaard, 1971.LMPC via Getty Images

Meanwhile, higher-budget art films like Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness had ambiguous endings that lended themselves to more feminist readings. In her 1981 review of Daughters of Darkness, critic Bonnie Zimmerman writes that the vampire’s spirit “occupies a new body once it is deprived of the old, suggesting that lesbianism is eternal, passing effortless from one woman to another.” In response to this kind of interpretation, Weiss says, “I think that has a romantic appeal for lesbians — this this idea that lesbianism can't be defeated.”

While vampire imagery is no longer necessary for lesbian representation to reach the masses, Fonseca assures me that we are now experiencing a wave of “by-queer-for-queer vampire films.” Most recently, the Carmilla story received a web series and film adaptation, which was lauded by queer viewers for its accurate and positive representation of the LGBTQ+ community. And she also points out Brad Michael Elmore’s Bit, a 2019 vampire horror film that features a lead played by a trans woman. “There is a newfound intentionality in making these stories satiating, or at least hospitable, to lesbians by writing characters whose sexual identities are unrelated to their dead/undead status,” Fonseca writes. Will we hopefully be seeing more lesbian vampires of color, as well? Weiss says that it’s inevitable, given the “digital revolution and democratization of access to the media.”

But on Halloween and beyond, queer folks have the ability to take matters of representation into their own hands. With every new person who dons a velvet robe to assume the supernaturally cool presence of the lesbian vampire, the trope is reconfigured and given new queer meaning. “I dressed up as a vampire because I’ve always been attracted to their elusive, thrilling, yet nurturing femininity,” said my colleague Wren Sanders after I asked them why they chose that costume. “Gender is in many ways a performance, and sometimes it’s easier to perform when you feel like you’re pretending. I realized as much hallway through the night, then decided my vampiric costume was now just a look. I felt monstrous. I felt powerful. I felt femme.” “Vampires are us,” Richard Primuth wrote in 2014 essay in the Gay & Lesbian Review. Every year, that turns out to be more and more true.

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