FRAGMENT I

The vampire is perhaps the most prolific and recognizable horror monster. In literature, theatre, cinema, and even video games, these creatures of the night have represented countless themes. From their beginnings as supernatural explanations for sickness and plague, to their branching out into further, scattershot allegory- for class, for race and ethnicity, for grief, for abuse, for religion, for addiction, and sex and sexuality. For what some might call perversion, for taboo, for the things too undesirable for the waking world. Indeed, one of the most common recurring themes in vampire fiction- particularly ones featuring female bloodsuckers- is gayness. Over the centuries, the lesbian vampire has been codified into a common trope, perhaps even a cliche, as authors and directors drank of their influences and further explored that which frightened them: the wicked night-deviants of society, at once alive and dead, at once sex-object and sexually unavailable, feminine and yet assertive and narratively, masculine, the bloodsoaked penetrator. Beautiful and disgusting. Attraction and repulsion. The weird, the uncanny, the lesbian vampire, a subgenre in its own right. (As a note: this essay uses ‘lesbian’ as a sort of catchall for sapphic desire. Many of the characters discussed can be considered bisexual, but are still included under this umbrella as I have constructed it.)

The trope’s roots may have begun with the real life Elizabeth Bathory, a countess rumored to kidnap virgin girls and bathe in their blood, a first association between female monstrousness and vampirism. The first fictional example of the lesbian vampire was most likely the unfinished poem Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wherein the titular Christabel takes in a girl named Geraldine and falls under some eerie enchantment, as it becomes increasingly clear that she is no mere mortal creature. Whether Geraldine is a vampire is never revealed (due to her large birthmark that frightens Christabel, I suspect the intention was that she was meant to be a witch, as old folklore about witches stated that they had some kind of birthmark or third nipple given to them by Satan that marks them as witches), but the basic plot is very similar to the later influential novel Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Christabel was praised by the likes of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and even Edgar Allen Poe. It is not unlikely that it also found its way to Le Fanu.

In Carmilla, the titular vampire begins staying with the family of a lonely young girl named Laura. While she feeds from her at night, the two have a burgeoning and romantically-inclined friendship in the day- even as Laura begins to connect the strange dreams she’s had since her youth to the strange and eerie girl she’s become so close with, and her health slowly declines. It is eventually discovered that Carmilla has repeated this routine multiple times, always seeking out young maidens to feed from, and switching around the syllables of her name to avoid blowing her cover- Millarca, Mircalla, et cetera. She is then killed and beheaded by a party of vampire hunters led by Laura’s father, as well as the father of the previous victim Bertha. The resolution to the story comes across as rather paternalistic, with the girls seduced astray by a powerful female figure that must be destroyed by their fathers to bring them back into the light. Indeed, Carmilla represents a predatory and yet enticing, tempting sort of feminine sexuality, and her victims are drawn into that realm of transgressive gender despite themselves, as they “don’t know any better”. However, the moral of the ending is somewhat complicated by Laura’s lingering love for Carmilla. The story ends on this note:

“It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.”

The idea of protecting naive girls from wicked sexual invaders is a common motif in real-life bigotry- from the lynch mobs formed around the racist fear of black men as sexual menace to white women, to the transphobic rhetoric of today casting trans women and trans men respectively as predatory, mentally ill freaks trying to sneak into restrooms, and wayward girls seduced into a life of deviance and ‘irreversible damage’. So too did the lesbian fall under this lens, the ugly, unfeminine vampire who hates men (because she is not sexually available to them)- how many times have teenage lesbians been told that their friends don’t want to change around them in the school locker room, in case they’re looking at them naked? It is the recurring spectre of the Predatory Lesbian, a trope that Carmilla is certainly based on. Horror reflects the fears of the society that creates it- be it nuclear war or the forward march of science- and so too is the repressive-paternal view frequently touched upon in these examples of early horror, where the monster runs off holding a beautiful woman in strong, terrifying arms. Carmilla easily fits into this motif.

Laura’s reciprocation and lingering feelings for Carmilla are, in my opinion, what elevates the text somewhat beyond mere allegory, and what has made it linger in pop culture for so long- a touch of humanizing nuance. While Laura is her prey, it is clear upon reading that she does genuinely have some love for her, and Laura too returns those feelings even as she is repulsed by her. That cocktail of contradictory emotions, of internalized hate, is what allows the story to feel more real.

Carmilla was massively influential on vampire fiction, with it allegedly influencing the wildly popular and genre-defining novel Dracula. Carmilla has almost as many film adaptations as her famous son, beginning with Universal’s film Dracula’s Daughter- with its transgressive subject matter the perfect material for the growing horror genre of exploitation, films that thrive on gruesome and controversial topics and were often made cheaply to “exploit” curiosity and shock- lending to a gritty and raw feeling cinematic style. These were particularly popular in the 60s and 70s, and often in response towards the new wave of feminism that had come into vogue at the time. Films like The Vampire Lovers, Vampyros Lesbos, Alucarda, Fascination and more combined the trend of exploitation film, response to growing lesbian visibility and feminine empowerment, and the influences of Carmilla and Geraldine, allowing the lesbian vampire to become a full fledged genre of horror cinema. Almost any work that features a female vampire takes its cues directly from the vast shadow cast by Carmilla.

These films are not for lesbians. They are sexualized affairs, written and directed by men to shock and titillate, using the image of the predatory lesbian as something both desirable and perverse, forbidden, taboo, to the assumed straight male audience. It is indeed exploitative. Problematic. That is to say, Carmilla and her coven of vampire lovers are “bad representation”, undeniably so.

But what exactly is “representation”? Why is so much importance put upon it by the LGBT community? And who is it for?

FRAGMENT II

When you cannot have the experience of another person firsthand, it is easy to let your secondhand knowledge color your understanding. This secondhand knowledge can come from many sources, but in particular, fictional representations. An empathetic portrayal of someone alien to you can breed empathy and kindness, but one made to frighten or titillate can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and fearmongering about The Other. On the other side of that dynamic, it can feel hurtful, othering and isolating to be unable to see yourself in any fictional heroes or characters due to your minority status, or to see people like you cast as killers and monsters. That is the role that representation plays- a lens through fiction to view the other and the self, and it is an objectively good thing to represent a breadth of different people, demographics, and lifestyles on the screen and the page. Good representation is a good thing to aspire to, and much progress has been made on this front.

I spent my adolescence on Tumblr in the 2010s, and representation was of particular importance to that hub of online LGBT spaces. It is and was a very fandom-forward website with a leftist lean, and as such, fictional representation in fandom and media was a frequent topic, and much discussion was had on what makes representation “good”. And indeed, as outlined above, poor representation does exist, and can cause real harm to the demographics it aims to depict. (See: how modern transphobic rhetoric and stereotypes borrow heavily from films like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs where the villains are depicted as perverse, crossdressing murderers who fail to emulate womanhood and violently target cisgender women. It goes without saying that these tropes do not reflect reality!).

I agree that we should ruthlessly criticize films and stories that perpetuate hate and bigotry. However, I fear there was a bit of an overcorrection in these online LGBT spaces when it comes to the scrutiny placed onto representation. “Bad rep” went beyond hateful depictions, but was a criticism lobbed at just about any story with diverse characters. In my time in these spaces, these discourses, I saw much more scrutiny and criticism for new LGBT television and film than I ever did praise or excitement. A character dwelling on her past unrequited crush is cast as the “Predatory Lesbian”; two lovers on opposite sides of a conflict, a common trope in fantasy romance, are cast as “abusers”. Thus, they are “bad rep”. I had even seen the idea floated that “no representation is better than bad representation”. When everything is bad rep, what is good representation? What does it look like? Does every LGBT character have to function as an advertisement for our normalcy and acceptability? Why is the same level of scrutiny never applied to media with cis, straight, and otherwise normative characters?

The vision of “good rep” as dreamed up by that era of queer discourse is fluffy (otherwise we risk implying that being gay is nothing more than suffering), normative, with only happy endings (as we must avoid Bury Your Gays), with little to no strife or conflict. But the experience of being gay in a homophobic society is hardly fluffy or normative, nor is it always happy, and these statuesque, sanded down, smoothed over, ideal depictions of the gay experience can be othering in their own way. While this style of criticism has mostly died out as Tumblr waned in popularity, the after-echoes of this milieu still linger. The common rhetoric that dark or adult subject matter is always harmful has continued to linger in online discourse around what media is allowed to depict, including any depiction of sex, sexuality or sexual violence.

It calls to mind the idea of “reparative and paranoid reading”, as coined by Eve Sedgwick specifically in regards to queer texts- with paranoid reading being any reading of a text that zeroes in on anything that can come across as harmful, bad, scary, whereas reparative reading is a more balanced approach to engaging with flawed work, but often pleasure-seeking. Which isn’t to say that paranoia is inherently bad, as skepticism can be justified and is often a method to protect oneself from feeling betrayed or hurt before it happens. Reparative reading is also not inherently good. However, it is healthy to be aware of which way you lean when it comes to how you interpret stories.

But is gay representation meant to function as a billboard for the straights, a reassurance to a normative audience that we’re normal too? Shouldn’t it be for us, to see ourselves in? Shouldn’t it represent something a little more authentic to real life, and all its traumas? Isn’t that what fiction is for? Is there really no room for girls who see themselves in the monstrous, the frightening, the undead?

I find myself increasingly othered by these ideas and this rhetoric, that our stories need to be so sanitized. Because, despite my history in these critical fandom spaces as a gay teenager, I have come to realize that I see myself in the evil of the lesbian vampire, problematic as she is, and her shivering victim, despite the authorial intent that brought her to the page and to the screen being less than empathetic to the lesbian experience. That which is transgressive, raw, bloody, filthy, and frightening feels much more like a reflection of life and its absurd terrors, and in its own way is cathartic and comforting to me.

FRAGMENT III

As I mentioned, I once was one of these critics. I dissected everything that sought to represent someone like me, ruthlessly dissatisfied even with the softest and most sanitized takes on the lesbian experience and unable to explain what it is I actually wanted to see represented, much like my peers. Such online discourses functioned as a sort of consolation prize for the teen social media user, a way to feel like you have taken action against bigotry when the totality of it feels impossible to fight without the agency granted by adulthood. It is to punch down on a smaller target when it is impossible to imagine punching up and actually landing a hit. I, too, “punched down” at up and coming queer projects, argued over representation, demanded perfection. But did I want it? It felt righteous, but was it any fun?

And then, the train derailed: I found my passion for horror cinema. In the middle of high school I began taking film classes and learning about the artistry behind movies, something I had always taken for granted as just another source of entertainment, leading me to a lifelong fascination with the history of film, and particularly horror. Fear is something base, instinctual, the fight-or-flight law that is shivering inside the core of every living creature. That we can capture this, bottle it, take it on our own terms, and understand that darkness within us is nothing short of miraculous. Horror brings to the surface the things that we repress. I devoured as much as I could find, expressionistic silents and the classics from Universal, and my absolute favorite, the works of the English studio Hammer. At the same time, I found myself enjoying the greats of gothic horror literature, imprinting on Frankenstein, enjoying Dracula, and of course, reading Carmilla. My enjoyment of Hammer’s stable of Dracula movies (urged on by my newfound obsession with the Castlevania series of video games) led me to their adaptation of Carmilla, The Vampire Lovers, and the other films of its genre and time period, like Alucarda on the recommendation of one of my online friends. I was becoming obsessed with the raw, bloody and objectifying films of the 70s exploitation boom. I was in high school and the whole world felt scary (and it still scares me now). I was realizing and understanding the full extent of my trauma, feeling betrayed by everything, capable of nothing, and discarded and used by the people I loved.

In these lesbian vampire films, the codependence, the draining, the monstrous self hatred, all held up a mirror to these complicated feelings, the relationships I had experienced. They gave me a reflection, even if it wasn’t “made for me”. And they let me partake in the erotic, something a bit more highbrow than straight-up pornographic, and without the sanitized- often sexless- nature of most earnest attempts to represent. The women of these films are often messy, toxic, strange, desirous, in a way I hadn’t truly seen depicted before. It was like a ticket of permission to be ugly, to hurt, to bleed, to desire, all those basic human emotions which can be called “problematic”.

Filmed in Mexico, Alucarda (1977) was the first real exploitation movie I had watched. It is a nightmare of a movie, one I found shocking when I first experienced it, the first step up I took from Hammer’s comparatively tame vampire films. It has nudity, blood, gore, and sex (and an unfortunate racial stereotype which bars me from recommending it wholeheartedly), but the themes of religion, the dark, arresting and bloody aesthetic, the setting of the isolated convent... all of it stuck with me, darker and more dangerous than I realized a movie could ever be. It all plays out like a nightmarish coming of age, with even the nun’s robes resembling bloody menstrual gauze. But there is genuine joy to be found in those early scenes of Justine and Alucarda, growing close in genuine and sincere love and friendship, and something heartbreakingly real in how they cling to each other in a world full of strange and threatening adults, of repression, and of supernatural terrors. Justine’s murder is Christlike, crucified and impaled in a horrifying failed exorcism, and Alucarda is framed as as much of a victim of her possession as the people she slaughters, and the only thing that briefly stalls her rampage of fire and death is her anguish at the death of another girl she fancied, Daniela. When Alucarda passes, reduced to dust, it is the film’s final tragedy, and the religious repression at its center echoes the reality of the queer experience.

When I first watched Alucarda, I was shocked by it. I immediately disavowed it, as it felt like I had to. It had so much sex and blood and ugliness. It felt sleazy. I didn’t feel like I was allowed to like something “like that”. But it was my first real and raw experience with exploitation film, and I couldn’t help but seek out more- my first taste of blood. And so I drank, of giallo and sexploitation and arthouse and eurosleaze and all the weird and uncanny things cinema is capable of. It took a little while to acclimate myself to that dangerous, shaking place, to let go of the scrupulosity that made Alucarda feel so forbidden and taboo to me, but I slowly became a “reparative reader”, as I previously outlined. I rewatched Alucarda for this project, as it was formative for me, and I enjoyed it all the more, captivated by its dark and demonic narrative.

However, my absolute favorite lesbian vampire movie is the French film La Morte Vivante (1982), which similarly has a more complicated take on the main dynamic than mere predator and prey. In this film, two childhood friends, Catherine and Helene, find themselves reunited once Catherine is resurrected from the grave by a cartoonish vat of acid. However, she is infantile, unable to speak, and must subsist off of human flesh to remain alive. Helene becomes her caretaker of sorts, finding prey and bringing hapless victims to her undead lover. But as Catherine gradually regains her personhood, she is horrified by what she must do- and the depths Helene has stooped to in order to keep her alive. The vampire becomes more human and the human becomes more vampire! It’s a truly beautifully shot movie with effective scenes and striking imagery, and the moral anguish at the heart of it is one of the most compelling conflicts I’ve seen in one of these films. The ending is both brutal and feels right for the characters, and the toxic relationship has such a unique and heartbreaking dynamic. It is simply a great movie, and one of many erotic vampire films by the director Jean Rollin. In this text we can find a sensitive, layered and nuanced example of the trope, elevated beyond the simple idea of predation.

I could go on forever about these lesbian vampire films, like The Hunger, Vampyros Lesbos, Fascination, Daughters of Darkness and more. But my hope is that I have convinced you that this “trash genre” is capable of genuine artistry, alluring, cathartic and shocking all the same.

FRAGMENT IV

Why do I find myself drawn to horror? And particularly, horror where female protagonists are victimized, put through traumatic events, and subjected to the male gaze? Why do we- broadly- find pleasure in horror at all?

When I see people discussing the ethics of enjoying horror, there is often an assumption that the viewer takes on the role of sadist, the voyeur, delighting in the violence, with the subjects of that violence being ornamental meat. While this can be true, I find that horror audiences are just as often at the intersection between empathetic and masochistic. Death is a terrifying inevitability, and so too are hatred, violence and sorrow a part of our current existence, but horror allows us to contextualize those fears and understand it in a safe environment. To feel that pain in a way that cannot truly touch us, to make it not quite so incomprehensible.

Horror is play, in a sense. Play is how we learn and understand the world around us, grapple with new concepts, grow and change. From the wolf pup learning to fight, and to control her bite when her littermate whimpers, to the little girl orchestrating elaborate ritual sacrifices with her collection of Barbie-dolls, long have we living beings been using play to contextualize death, violence, the terrors of life. It is explorative, introspective. So too is fiction play, a sandbox, for both the writer of the text and its audience. Horror allows us to see and experience through the lens of people we are and are not: to see through the eyes of the killer, the victim, the bystander, the hunters, the prey, the stalked and the stalker. To understand why someone would do violence; to feel what it is like to be subjected to it. Indeed, the play of horror is sadomasochistic.

So too does the lesbian vampire represent something sadomasochistic. To be gay in a hateful society often comes with self-hatred; both the vampire and her victim, Laura’s repulsion and attraction, inadvertently creates a toyish representation of this self-hatred, making it safe to “play with” and thus understand. The fear of being predatory/being predated on is made into alluring hyperbole, the pain of a bite made literal and real. She dwells in the realm of ambiguity and codependent female friendships that blur the lines between companionship, love, victimization and hatred. She is a creature of contradiction. She repulses and attracts. So too does her tragic end call to mind the inherited weight of queer tragedy. To deny these things, to write them off as unrepresentable, would be to deny the queer experience as it currently exists, to deny the breadth of human experience. Inadvertently, unintentionally, despite the straight gaze of her author and director, the lesbian vampire represents something very real. And indeed, these examples of the trope are some of the first attempts to depict lesbianism on the page and in film on a wider scale. That step is significant, flawed as it is.

While writing this essay I thought back to one of my favorite analytical pieces on youtube, the anime critic Hazel’s video “Why Did We Like Elfen Lied?” and this particular quote:

“Looking back on it, it feels so obvious that there was a side of her that I had never seen- that maybe none of us had ever seen, but that was present in every member of that group. There was an inherent darkness in all of us that we didn’t know how to express in words. The most we could do was gesture toward it in our choice in clothes, and the kinds of art we were drawn towards, and in how we treated ourselves behind closed doors. We needed something- anything- that reflected that darkness back to us. It didn’t matter if it was hyperbolic. It didn’t matter if it was empathetic. It didn’t matter if it was good. We just needed something in front of us that we could see ourselves in.”

To deny pain is to deny catharsis. To write off the whole subgenre as “bad rep”, “predatory lesbian”, “problematic”, would be to deny queer catharsis, to limit art, to sanitize lesbianism- sexual, messy, and wonderful- into something acceptable. It is a layer of scrutiny that will constrict works made by LGBT creators just as much as it seeks to censor those made for the male gaze. The Carmillas, Alucardas, Elizabeth Bathories, and Geraldines of the vampire canon will not appeal to everyone, and do not represent every experience. But even if she isn’t for you, I invite you to open your heart to her, to nuance and discomfort, and to recognize her value and weight, and what she has meant to so many. It isn’t so fun being a “paranoid reader”, after all.

And the lesbian vampire cannot be killed. Every beheading, every staking, every garland of garlic, cannot keep her from her fearsome love and powerful immortality. And in times like these, we are like vampires, immortal lovers, exchanging whispers and bites in the shadows. Our pain doth grant us strength. Every day, we transgress the boundaries set for us simply through our existence. We are impure, we hurt, we thirst, we hunger.

To reject that transgression is to reject ourselves. Instead, we should celebrate the challenge we pose to the world of daylight, revel in the blood and love that gives us life, and seek companionship in dark places. Life is often dark, scary, “problematic”.

Let the lesbian vampire be an invitation to be ourselves. To be undead. To be immortal.