10 Final Girls Who Don’t Get Enough Credit

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So lately, I’ve been digging into the trope of the Final Girl. One reason for this is that I recently guested on the great podcast, Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9, and the film we discussed was the 2015 eighties-summer-camp-slasher set dramatic comedy, The Final Girls. It was a really fun discussion, and I invite you to give it a listen. As an avid listener of horror-podcasts for years, it was an absolute treat to be on a really good one and I thank Jeffrey and Cecil for the opportunity!

And inspired by the movie under discussion (which I really like, but won’t detail here – check out the podcast for that!), I wanted to throw together a list of ten great final girls. So I started checking out what was already out there, and a quick google search yields loads of lists of the “best Final Girls,” but I noticed that I was seeing the same names over and over on list after list, and for good reason. Ginny from Friday the 13th, Part 2 is great (maybe my favorite), with her empathy, resilience, and no-nonsense demeanor. Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street is awesome (also maybe my favorite) with her book on booby traps and being so “into survival.” Ripley in Alien (a stretch to call it a slasher exactly, but she is certainly a final girl) is aspirationally tough and sensible (if they’d only listened to her and followed quarantine rules, it wouldn’t have even been a horror movie). And so many, many more.

But I felt I wouldn’t really be contributing much if I just listed famous movies that everyone, whether they watch horror or not, has heard of, if not seen. So I tried to dig a bit deeper to shine a light on final girls who don’t always get so much attention. I can’t guarantee that none of them feature on any other list (the internet is a big place), but these are at least somewhat deeper cuts – also, I can’t promise that all of their movies are exactly “good,” but each does have something to recommend it.

That said, I am no slasher expert. There are so many and I’ve but scratched the surface. Out of more than 200 that came out between 1978, when Halloween’s success kicked off the first cycle (between 1980-1982 alone, there were at least 72) until 1989 (because I have to choose an end-point eventually, and horror took a dip in the early 90s), I’ve seen maybe 30% – the most famous and then the fairly well known, with a small spattering of more obscure titles. So please accept this list with that caveat.

And now, without further ado, here is my list, in order of appearance, of great Final Girls who don’t get enough credit:

Courtney – Final Exam (1981) Cecile Bagdadi

Most of this film seems more like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, but with a killer on the loose (whose story we never learn). A bunch of frat guys are trying to ride out the year without doing any work by putting a lot of effort into elaborate pranks to help them cheat (one of which, featuring a fake mass shooting, is quite disturbing through contemporary eyes). In a world of rich, entitled brats who don’t take anything seriously, Courtney stands out as the only person actually studying for her “final exam.” She isn’t a prude (if anything, she’s trying to get a particular boy to notice her) but she has more consequential things on her mind. The boy is nice enough (though his obsession with mass shooters and serial killers seems like a red flag), and it’s a shame when he doesn’t make it as they’ve just had a sweet moment. It all builds to a solid chase where she acquits herself well, but in the final shot of the film she seems so traumatized by the experience. While this is a common image, it is still quite effective here. Courtney grounds the horror of these killings and her own survived ordeal in a way that the other victims in their frivolity could not.

Anne – Graduation Day (1981) Patch MacKenzie

Anne has a different vibe from the very beginning. She’s an active military member, coming home to honor her dead sister at what would have been her high school graduation, only to find everyone else on her late sister’s track team getting murdered. We first meet Anne in a truck where she’s hitched a ride and she capably and aggressively fends off the lecherous approaches of the driver, instantly endearing her to us. She starts as a tougher final girl than many, and that self-confidence is fun, but in the final reel, she still has to go through it, fighting to overcome this particular psycho. I think what prevents her from ranking higher on many lists is the fact that we lose her in the middle stretch of the film when she is one of countless red herrings (everyone in this town owns a grey sweat suit and black leather gloves – what we see the killer wearing). In one scene, she is even made out to seem crazy and threatening to a potential (and eventual) victim, distancing us from her even more. But by the end, when the killer is revealed, it is satisfying to return to this level-headed, tough-minded final girl to take him out. Plus, the film is fun and the rest of the cast is solid.

Pam – The Prowler (1981) Vicky Dawson

Pam is great. It seems like she’s studying journalism – at the top of the movie, she’s just published an article about the killing that happened 35 years ago which is why this college stopped having the annual graduation dance (isn’t that more of a high school thing? Anyway…). Thus, when she has to go back to her room to change and narrowly escapes the returned killer, who is dressed as a masked WWII soldier and carrying a pitchfork for some reason (in an exciting sequence that had me wondering if she was in fact going to survive to be the final girl), she can’t not investigate and see this through to the end. There’s a fantastic moment when her boyfriend, the local deputy left in charge for the weekend, tries to drop her off back at the dance so she can be safe. She is just not having it – the resolve with which she threatens him and then gets back in the car foreshadows the strength of character that will help her turn the killer’s own pitchfork on him before blowing his head clean off. Also, just in a connection to another great final girl, Pam finds herself hiding under a bed with a rat, just like Ginny in Friday the 13th Part 2, but at least this one didn’t pee (they were basically filmed at the same time though, so I think it’s a coincidence). In addition, while some elements really don’t make sense, this is one of the better slashers on this list – it’s tense, the killer’s costume looks cool and scary, some scenes are genuinely exciting, and the gore effects might be the best work that Tom Savini ever produced – really effectively grisly and horrifically realistic.

Constance – Just Before Dawn (1981) Deborah Benson

I’ve written at greater length about this backwoods slasher before. Constance stands out as both exemplifying and subverting the still developing tropes of the final girl. Filmed in the summer of 1980, she really offers a different spin on the role. At the beginning of the film, she seems like a typical final girl – reasonable, capable, the only person appropriately dressed for hiking a difficult trail. But she feels that she’s too mousy, inadequate compared with her friends who are bolder than her, braver. And so, as the film progresses and things get progressively more difficult, so does she, changing her physical appearance in the process. In an inversion of the trope, she becomes more outwardly feminine and sexual, donning shorter shorts, showing more flesh, putting on makeup, letting down her hair. And she is more sexually aggressive with her boyfriend. In a way, it’s like she’s putting on the mask of a different role, one you might expect to get killed much earlier in a film like this. However, wearing her mask, she is freed – she can be the wild, primal figure she needs to be to take down this hulking killer in what might be the most satisfying moment of a final girl killing a slasher on film. You may see many final girls rise in violence to take down the killer, but no one quite does what Constance does – just watch it – I don’t want to spoil the fun. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the “Final Girl’s” will to life, her stubborn, desperate determination not to be erased. And the film itself, while a bit slow in the middle, is a pretty enjoyable watch as well.

Sandy – Humongous (1982) Janet Julian

I can’t really say this is my favorite of the bunch, but Sandy rises to the occasion in the final reel. The film starts strong (though quite disturbingly) and then falls into a long stretch of poorly lit muddling along on an island where some kids have been stranded with a killer. For a while I was wondering who the final girl would be – as it seemed that the one unattached girl with glasses was the first to open a photo album and start piecing together the back story, but she snapped under the pressure of it all and Sandy, evidently the most stable of the bunch, finally figures things out.  When things kick into gear in the last 15-20 minutes, Sandy leads a great chase, seems to rip off (not sure when it was filmed, but it was released more than a year after Friday 2) Ginny’s idea of playing the killer’s mother, races to the boat house where she traps him with fire and blows him up before finally staking him. Still, having learned his sad story, she feels sympathy for this poor, burned, deformed creature (no action or words, but there’s something in her eyes). He may have killed all her friends, but she can still pity him. In this, she balances all of the investigativeness, proactivity, ability to violently do what needs doing, and heart of a classic final girl, even if her movie is…just alright.

Valerie, Courtney, & Trish – The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Robin Stille, Jennifer Meyers, & Michelle Michaels

Is this the first “meta” slasher? I mean, no, but it is so self-aware – written as a parody, but filmed more or less straight, it subverts the tropes that by 1982 had already calcified, delivering in my opinion, a subversive, hilarious, effectively scary, feminist slasher classic. One twist here is that three girls survive by fighting back together: Trish, who had thrown the party to have one last hurrah with her childhood friends before adulthood pulls them apart (sadly none of those friends make it to the end), Valerie, a new girl who, for all of her beauty, brains, and athletic skill, is still an outsider, and Courtney, Valerie’s little sister, a boy-obsessed teen eager for more adult thrills than she is yet allowed. Each of them is granted personality and real feeling. Trish starts the film throwing away childhood toys and looking to the future, a future which, by the end of the day, she will have been thrust into too soon, too harshly. Valerie feels the most like a classic final girl, the responsible one, staying home to look after her sister instead of going to the party (until she has to). Courtney is a firecracker, funny, impulsive, insistent. And all of the other girls (or boys) who are murdered by the nameless killer with an improbably long bit on his cordless drill (what kind of battery does he have?) are also people whom we can like and root for. This is a fun movie, with sly, knowing shots taken at its genre and possibly its audience, but it has emotional weight. By the time the girls finally symbolically castrate and dispatch the killer, they are deeply traumatized by the horrific events – there’s been so much death, so many friends lost, so much horror. They’ve done what they had to do to live, but their lives won’t be the same after this. The degree to which they get to mourn, cry, be broken at the end makes this often funny, light slasher land harder than expected.

Joan – Silent Madness (1984) Belinda Montgomery

Joan is great, a breath of fresh air – something really different – and she’s surely the most highly credentialed final girl on the list. A doctor at a psychiatric hospital which has accidentally released a psycho killer because of a computer error, Joan is surrounded by men who just refuse to do their damn jobs, (other doctors, administrators, the sheriff, even her reporter love interest). Either no one believes her as she investigates this major screw up which is getting kids killed at the college where the psycho was long ago arrested for a massacre, or they are all just covering their butts, hoping that if no one talks about it, no one will notice the pile of dead sorority sisters. Either way, Joan has to take care of everything all on her own, both hunting after the killer, navigating bureaucracy, and avoiding the murderous orderlies from her hospital, hot on her trail to shut her up.  Along the way, she uncovers buried truths, tries (and generally fails) to protect the sorority girls in question, and finally takes out the ‘bad guy,’ only to then discover a deeper cover-up. She is a self-assured, mature adult, bringing the final girl’s typical responsibility, but with full confidence from the beginning. However, while she is a self-assured professional, she is not some kind of fighter, so exploring creepy basements where a killer lurks is still effectively terrifying for her. This was a really fun watch and she rises above the crowd.

Allison – Chopping Mall (1986) Kelli Maroney

This may not be a slasher, but Allison is a great final girl. And though the threat in this case consists of a set of killer robot security guards in a mall, the film follows the classic slasher pattern of a group of kids partying somewhere and getting picked off until only one girl remains (who knows if she’s ‘virginal,’ but she’s the only one who doesn’t have sex that night) – who overcomes adversity and triumphs. Played by Kelli Maroney, a mainstay of 80s B-movies, Allison balances being really sweet with also being a tough cookie who’s a crack shot with a firearm (apparently because her dad is a marine). The set-up is that a group of young people, some of whom work at a mall, stay after hours to party in the furniture store where one of them works (and try out the beds). There are two couples (one of which is married, which is a rarity in this kind of thing) and then Allison has been set up with a nice, dorky boy with whom she actually hits it off (the two of them bond while watching old horror movies while everyone else fools around). They are really cute together and it’s easy to root for them. The film can be silly and fun, and also exciting, but by the end, it of course comes down to Allison and the final killbot. By this point, she’s in full trap-setting, robot-exploding, badass, final girl mode and she even gets to blow up the last bot with an action star quip. Otherwise, the film is just a blast: a great cast (including Barbara Crampton and Dick Miller), a really cool score, and a bunch of killer robots.

Kit – April Fool’s Day (1986) Amy Steel

This is a really fun, different spin on the whodunit-slasher (though its twist may be the most famous thing about it – if you can go in cold, it’s worth it) – spring break happens to fall on April first and Muffy invites all her friends, about to graduate college and with no idea what to do next, to her island mansion for the week. Being April Fool’s, she’s got a lot of pranks in store, but soon the practical jokes become a series of murders and we’re off to the races. Everyone is so well played that it took me a while to peg who the final girl would be, but it should have been obvious that it would be the one played by Amy Steel. Her Kit is a solid, investigative final girl who solves the mystery of the killings (though still having one big surprise in store), and who also really cares about her friends, even if some of them are kinda jerks. There’s one moment when she could get away, but she has to go back cause she can’t leave Muffy behind (even though it’s been implied that Muffy might be the killer). Amy Steel brings a similarly grounded, clear headed, empathetic quality that she did to Friday part 2 – which helps the terror land, and it gets exciting when she’s put through the paces in the final act.

Stretch – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) Caroline Williams

This is also not a slasher, but it’s a sequel to one of the most influential proto-slashers, and Stretch undergoes a true final girl experience, just without much of a body count. (Also Clover referenced her when defining the role, so she surely counts). A tough talkin’ Texas rock DJ who is pulled into the Sawyer family’s shenanigans after fielding a call from some kids getting chainsawed on her radio show, Stretch is just cool. She really doesn’t fall into any kind of bookish, innocent little “virgin” role – rather, she is an adult woman who wears short shorts, navigates a world of pushy, aggressive men, brings the rock ‘n roll, and chooses to court danger in order to get the story, to do something important. As a result, she almost literally goes through hell, suffering in a similar fashion as Sally before her, experiencing debilitating terror, seeing a friend’s face skinned off before having it draped on her own and being made to dance in order to pacify a chainsaw wielding man-child before climbing out, grabbing a chainsaw of her own and eviscerating the man who’s chasing her, and subsequently dancing around crazily with her chainsaw in the air, mirroring Leatherface at the end of the first film. The fact that Stretch starts the film so together and tough means that her descent into violent, triumphant madness is all the more intense. It’s a weird movie – funnier than the first, but that comedy brings its own horror. Plus, it features Dennis Hopper, fresh out of rehab, screaming maniacally and running around with a chainsaw in each hand. What’s not to love?

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And so, there we have it, ten final girls that don’t always get mentioned.  As I said at the beginning, I’ve only seen about a third of what’s out there, so I’m sure there are many others worthy of inclusion who I am overlooking, but perhaps that’s fuel for a future list.

And for a fun discussion of a funny film which revolves around the concept of the final girl, check out the podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Final Girl Feedback Loop

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So, I sometimes wonder when the term “final girl,” first coined by Carol Clover in 1987 in her essay, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” later collected and expanded on in her influential book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” entered common parlance. The idea was certainly not new when she detailed it, based on her observations of gender-genre tropes in slasher films (primarily of the late 70s and 80s), but rather, she put her finger on something that had arisen naturally out of a confluence of storytelling trends and business assumptions. And it is successful coinage – when someone sees the phrase for the first time, they immediately get to what/whom it refers: the last girl standing in a body count film, who probably didn’t party as hard as all of her friends and is more clear headed and responsible, who we probably haven’t seen have sex, who possibly has been investigating the odd things going on and has thus had to discover the bodies of people she knew, who probably isn’t blonde and might have a gender neutral name such as “Stretch,” “Jess,” “Ripley,” or “Chris,” who has had to run and hide and scream and survive until finally she turns and finds the strength to fight back and kill the killer, though she may end up a broken, traumatized husk by the end of it all – the name carries a lot.

Now, in discussing the trope, I always feel it’s obligatory to point out that Clover had a focus other than just describing a trend in horror, and she certainly wasn’t trying to prescribe how people should be making movies. In short, in my understanding of her text, she questioned why this female character, this recurring role was so foregrounded in a genre conventionally understood to be targeted at young males, a genre often thought to be misogynistic, offering the vicarious thrill of looking through a masculine coded killer’s eyes as he stalks and murders young women (again, this is the common perception, and the data doesn’t support the characterization – men die about as much as women in these flicks). The theory she offered was a case of cross-gender identification, wherein the femaleness of the role allowed it to exhibit traits of vulnerability and fear which would have been uncomfortable for the audience in a male figure, or even rejected and mocked (a supporting example might be Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2, which features a final boy (Jesse, played by Mark Patton) and which was not well received, Patton being outed and ridiculed for his portrayal). This enables the (male) viewer to masochistically enjoy being terrorized, just as by identifying with the killer, (he) can sadistically enjoy terrorizing. The final girl abstaining from sex meant that the young male audience didn’t have to take the leap of watching their viewpoint character be penetrated before them. Quite the opposite, by the end of the film, she would take the weapon (his symbolic, penetrating phallus) from the killer and be the one doing the penetrating, in her rise to action, to wielding the investigative gaze, to violence, to rage, taking on more and more “male-coded” traits.

Now, this reading of the trope is not without critics. Isabel Pinendo, in her “Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing” from 1997, criticized how in reducing femaleness to traits like terror and victimhood, and ascribing traits like aggression and violence exclusively to maleness, this paradigm results in “nothing less than the impossibility of female agency,” herself seeking to discuss what pleasure experience female viewers can find in this material (which can also take on a sadomasochistic flavor – as Clover had theorized for young males), without having to accept the relegation of all power to the boys. Beyond that, it has been pointed out how some of the elements that make up the “final girl” are not so set in stone. There are many examples (going back to Laurie Strode, the ur-final girl) who drink or do drugs. There are many who are at least in long term relationships and even if it’s not explicitly shown, one can assume aren’t ‘virgins.’ There are many who don’t initially have any hint of coded-male qualities, but just happen to be the last one left – are just lucky to have enough plot-armor to survive to the final showdown.

But the trope does exist (if anything, over the years, the more known the trope is in popular culture, the more fully it has come to embody Clover’s description, even when a given film is purportedly ‘subverting’ the concept), and this brings me back to my initial question. When did horror film makers become consciously aware of the role as such? When did they become aware of Clover’s reading? When did descriptive analysis become inadvertent, prescriptive instruction? I wish I had some data here – I can only guess at people’s intentions and influences.

I assume that in the beginning, it was merely a case of financially motivated imitation. Halloween turned an impressive profit (more than 70 million on a budget of about 320 thousand) and everyone wanted to repeat that success (another obligatory note that Halloween wasn’t really the first of the genre, but it’s success did kick off the first big slasher cycle, running until 1982), launching what might be the most formulaic of horror genres – whereas a ‘vampire movie’ features a vampire and a ‘ghost story’ features a ghost, a ‘slasher’ doesn’t even have to include a slasher killer – but it’s got to stick to the formula: a group of (probably young) people, wanting to party and getting killed off one by one until one girl (probably a girl) is the only one left, who then uncovers what has been going on and dispatches the killer.  In the beginning, I think a lot of people were just seeing that something was selling and they repeated it. Of course, there were variations, and from early on, there were attempts to surprise by disrupting the pattern (for example, the feminist satire of Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or the Scary Movie-esque parody of Student Bodies (1981)), but those disruptions also served to make the pattern more clear (by attempting to wrong foot the audience by not perfectly enacting a formula, it makes the audience think all the more about what that formula would have been, what their expectations are).

And audiences came. Not everything made money like Halloween (and it must be said that most were nowhere near as good as Halloween), but they made money. The more the pattern paid off, the more it was reenacted, and the more audiences came to look forward to certain elements. And sooner or later, academics noticed this and wondered what was going on. Why were filmmakers telling this story in this way? Why was it satisfying enough for a paying public that they kept coming back? Some theories were put forth, perhaps making undue assumptions about who the viewers actually were, and ignoring the potential experiences of viewers who were thus unconsidered. But even if incomplete, this scholarly work helped to illuminate the depth of potential meaning of a genre considered no more than trashy exploitation.

At some point, the academic notion of the “final girl” was folded into the creative process. I don’t know if Kevin Willamson read Clover before writing Scream, but it sure feels like he did, and even if he didn’t, by 1996, Clover’s reading of the ‘final girl’ could have just filtered into the zeitgeist enough to influence the text (and practically everything that came after it in the 90s teen slasher cycle and every post-modern, self-aware slasher/slasher parody that came in its wake). With its explicit presentation of “the rules” of surviving a horror movie, Scream seemed to help make the ‘final girl’ a much more known role (including to a general public who weren’t necessarily horror fans, but who saw this hit movie), even if that name was not applied, was still not in regular use (but I’m not sure the term wasn’t used in any of the sequels – Scream characters are so horror-literate that you’d expect it to come up). For one example of use, I know the term surfaced at least briefly in one of the Scary Movie parodies (released between 2000-2006) as Stacie Ponder, a blogger I’ve been reading for the last decade, uses this image for her blog, Final Girl.

For an example of the conspicuous lack of the term, I recently saw an interview with prolific horror B-movie actress Linnea Quigley from 1999 where she described her professional trajectory moving from being the victim who takes her top off (much of her career) to being the girl who lives to the end. Nowhere in the discussion is the term “final girl” used (and, as mentioned above, it is such a clear term, that once people know it, they tend to use it – it really cuts to the chase).

Or, for a later example, the 2006 film, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a mockumentary following a slasher in training, is utterly focused on the concept of the final girl, with the killer so certain of her mythic importance to him, knowing they are two sides of the same coin, and manipulating conditions to draw her out, calling on her to become herself so that he can become himself. But he never says “final girl.” In the film, she is always the “survivor girl.” Now was this a conscious decision to avoid an already popularized term, or had it somehow not yet achieved cultural saturation?

The Cabin in the Woods (released in 2011, but filmed in 2009, for the sake of tracking chronology) also leans hard into the concept of certain essential roles (the whore, the fool, the athlete, the scholar, for example) who all must be sacrificed before finally “the virgin” is all that remains. In this case, the people running the show manipulate the players to take on these roles even if they would otherwise be against type, but the ritual of playing out this formula in this way, with the virgin as the only one to see the end, must be faithfully enacted. But still no “final girl,” per se.

However, at some point something changed: in recent years, there have been many fictional works which revolve around both the role and the term (many of which I hope to write about in the coming weeks): Grady Hendrix’s the Final Girls’ Support Group, Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, and from 2015 alone, two films: The Final Girl and The Final Girls. All of these, and many others, focus on the significance of the role – how inspiring and important it can be for some people, how one can live in constant comparison with its ideal. Even if Clover was more interested in why men would identify with this female character, the resilient, heroic final girl has become aspirational for generations.

For my part, I find a couple of things both effective and interesting. On one basic level, something that works for me is that vulnerability, but I wonder if it’s an issue of what (male) audiences (myself included) will watch and respond to, or if it’s an issue of how writers, directors, and producers expect they will react. I cannot honestly imagine that were I to find myself in some terrible, dangerous situation, I would be John McClaning it barefoot through the air ducts, taking out a building full of terrorists. I would probably be cowering terrified in a corner someplace. It is much easier to identify (outside of hero-wish fulfillment, and don’t get me wrong, Die Hard is a blast!) with a “normal” person who is duly scared of scary things, but through whom we get to vicariously rise to the challenge of facing that fear and vanquishing that horror, even if we have to run around screaming a lot first, even if we drop our knife when we shouldn’t and don’t check to make sure he’s really, really dead before we start running away – it’s easy to yell at the screen and claim that we wouldn’t make such mistakes, but I bet most of us would. When we go on this journey with this fragile, very human character, the heroic thrill of overcoming the threat is all the more exciting.

On another level, I find it fascinating how the trope has been so culturally reproduced as to become truly mythic. The first slasher cycle is largely characterized by non-magical assailants – just a crazy guy with a knife, or a pitchfork, or a drill, or a, you get the picture… (later, especially in the second half of the 80s, following the success of Freddy Krueger, and trying to do something new, there were many more supernatural killers). But somehow, the repetition of this simple structure – kids, party, killer, girl-who-lives – has resulted in a significant archetypal figure, one who resonates in people’s imagination – this is perhaps how myths get born.

She was born out of the lust of storytelling and business. She was named by academia, and once identified, the art form in which she lived came to better know itself, becoming more reflexive. She has subverted gendered expectations and she has been used to reify puritanical norms. She has grown into a full-out action hero and she has been fleshed out as a person, allowed to grieve and to grow. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why a group of film makers first settled on a pattern – now she exists and carries (sometimes contradictory) meaning. She is an inspiring feminist icon. She is a harmful reduction of femaleness – not even female, so much as a man in narrative drag. She is a calculated attempt to sell women’s empowerment to make a buck. She is a re-gendered ‘everyman’ with whom all can identify, with whom all can vicariously journey through hell and return, tempered by the experience.

All of this is to say that as I just spent a couple weeks focused on one sub-genre (the Lesbian Vampire movie), I’m about to spend a bit of time with Slashers and the Final Girl. Check in weekly for more.

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part II

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Welcome (back) to my continuing journey through the somewhat niche sub-sub-genre of “Lesbian Vampire Films” in all their dreamy, artistic, evocative grandeur. For a brief overview of some common traits and discussions of Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, please check out last week’s post. Today we have another four standout examples to delve into.

I’ve planned this as a short series – two posts on films from the heyday of the genre (mostly the seventies, a bit from earlier) and a final post digging into more recent fare, and that means that I’ve had to make some hard decisions this week, choosing what to exclude. All of today’s entries are from 1970-1971, the period when Lesbian Vampires were most in vogue, and are all essential viewing, but if you like what you’ve seen, I’ll include some suggestions for further exploration at the end of the post. Also, to really examine these films, there will be spoilers, so enter at your own risk. And so, without further ado…

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

This is probably what many first think of when they think ‘Lesbian Vampire,’ and for good reason. Roy Ward Baker (The Monster Club and Asylum, among others, but my favorite of his is the 1952 Marilyn Monroe thriller, Don’t Bother to Knock) kicked off Hammer Studio’s “Karnstein Trilogy” with a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Le Fanu’s Carmilla. While it takes liberties (often sensible ones, both streamlining the narrative and adding new elements to build excitement, intrigue, or titillation), it follows the events of the book more closely than most films featuring seductive female vampires named Carmilla, Mircalla, and Marcilla. My understanding is that even though British censorship laws had recently been relaxed, allowing for the inclusion of more blood and breasts, the censor still objected to the lesbianism, but since the producers could declaim, “it’s in the book!” the literature respecting BBFC had to let it pass.

While this isn’t my favorite example of the genre (compared to what was happening on the continent, it feels a bit reserved and stately, but that is part of its charm), it is surely historically significant, both in terms of this sub-genre, and as I understand, for explicitly featuring a lesbian character in a British film at all. As portrayed by Ingrid Pitt in a well-rounded performance, neither an arch villain, nor a silly sexpot, Carmilla is not coded – she lusts and hungers for other attractive women in diaphanous nightshifts, and Emma, she might even love.

As in the book, Carmilla is in the habit of getting stranded at the estates of Austrian nobles so that she can befriend, seduce, and feed on the daughters of the house, while also going further afield to kill off some peasant ladies too. First we see young Laura meet this fate (the name of the novel’s narrator) and then we see Carmilla move to a new home and start in on Emma, who begins dreaming of being pinned under a great cat and starts suffering from anemia as small bite marks appear on her breast. Furthermore, in a worthwhile addition, while the master of the house is away in Vienna, Carmilla also seduces the governess, Mademoiselle Perrodot, who then becomes her accomplice and maybe also a vampire.

It is in these relations that the film shines: temptation and refusal – an invitation and acquiescence – romantic love declared and friendly love returned. When this turns into a house of mostly women (with one meddling butler), with shifting loyalties, trusts and distrusts, and attractions, it is most alive. (The men end up on a side quest to figure out what’s going on and return to save the day – the movie’s gender politics are, shall we say, dated.) And the three central women bring nicely different qualities. Pitt is gently commanding in the middle of it all. Kate O’Mara’s Mlle. Perrodot gets to transition from suspicious and protecting, through sexual curiosity, into being slyly devious. Finally, as Emma, Madeline Smith is the picture of doe eyed innocence, loving her new friend, but not quite comprehending how that new friend loves her (nor does she notice that her bosom friend keeps biting her, well, bosom).

The film combines a very British respectability and grand, traditional gothic horror settings and atmosphere (old castles, opulent costumes, candles and fog, painted backdrops) with a more frank presentation of sex and sexuality, and additional nudity thrown in because selling tickets is nice. Given its old fashioned style (I don’t mean this as disparagement, but it feels like a pleasant, old timey horror film for a rainy Saturday afternoon), the degree of sexual explicitness can be startling (though relatively tame by today’s standards). Still, it is all pretty matter-of-fact, which I think is essential in maintaining the style of the overall film.

That down-to-earth quality extends to Pitt’s Carmilla. Pitt grounds her nicely, both playing up the evident appetite and playfulness of a predator who has done this time and time again, and the lonely sadness that comes from having done this time and time again. I think her Carmilla, while she can kill off peasant girls heartlessly, is perhaps in the habit of falling in love with her more aristocratic prey, thus living a tragic existence of constantly destroying her loves. Near the end of the film, she tries to take Emma away with her, maybe to start an un-life together, but she’s defeated when the men of the house figure out what’s going on, find her hidden tomb, and bloodily stake and decapitate her.  One nice addition here, not in the book, is that in those final moments, Emma is somehow connected to her; she feels Carmilla die and cries out. A handsome young man, there to rescue her, tries to give comfort, but doesn’t understand what’s been lost.

All told, this is an interesting transitional film, hearkening back to Hammer’s output of the late 50s and early 60s, all fluttering capes and full bodices and bloodied fangs and the full moon behind a wisp of clouds, while also looking forward to a more libertine 70s with liberalized social mores and more psychologically explored monsters. Based on the earliest progenitor of this sub-genre, it looks to where it will go in the coming years, both in the UK with Hammer’s continuation of the Karnstein films, and across the channel, where Lesbian Vampires were really having a moment.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

There is no way I could discuss the Lesbian Vampire film without highlighting Harry Kümel’s sublime Les lèvres rouges (The Red Lips) featuring Delphine Seyrig as the subtle, chillingly seductive Countess Elizabeth Báthory. For my money, it is not only great for this sub-genre, but is also just about a perfect vampire movie, and her portrayal should be considered among the Lugosis, Lees, and Schrecks of the world. This is my third mention of this Belgian classic, having previously listed it as a comfort food favorite, and expounded on my appreciation of its groovy score. But this is an opportunity to really dig into what I think makes it so special.

Briefly, Stefan and Valerie, married only one day earlier (but clearly too soon), are waylaid in a grand, empty hotel in the Belgian resort town of Ostend in the off season, on their way to England to introduce Valerie to Stefan’s “Mother.” The only other guests are the glamorous Countess Elizabeth Báthory (claiming to be a descendant of her famous namesake) and her slinky, pouting secretary, Illona. The countess takes the young couple under her wing, seducing and manipulating them both, with her eye on Valerie as a potential new companion (Illona tires of her unlife). By the end, Illona and Stefan are dead, and Elizabeth and Valerie drive off into the sunrise (which, being vampires, does not go well for them). The plot is straightforward, but the film is nuanced in how it plumbs the depths of its simple story, and the film making is just as seductive as its countess.

Central to Kümel’s film is an ambivalence regarding its characters. We have some reason to feel for each, but I don’t think anyone is exactly the protagonist. Valerie is innocent and put upon, pulled between Stefan’s latent sadism and violence (perhaps she could have gotten to know him even a little before getting married) and the manipulation and domination of the countess, but past that, she is a bit blank. Stefan has cruel tendencies and beats Valerie, but we also learn of some heavy baggage he’s carrying (“Mother” is an older, overbearing, powdered and rouged gentleman, and aside from his fascination with violence and cruelty, Stefan seems deeply closeted and self-hating, taking it out on Valerie) – this doesn’t excuse his violence, but does make him a more complex character for whom one could sympathize. Poor Illona just can’t go on in this lifestyle any longer. And finally, Elizabeth may be a devious bloodsucker, but she is a constant treat to be around.

Seyrig brings delicate, playful, beguiling charm to every moment of screen time. The things Elizabeth does are cold, hard, and greedy – carelessly disrupting or destroying the lives of anyone she encounters to take just what she wants and leave what she does not, kicking her once lover into a shallow grave without batting one perfect eyelash. However, the way she does these cruel things is always so warm, soft spoken, open, and somehow innocent. There is always a glint in her eye, a gentle smile on her lips. We get the smallest glimpses of her hardness – we see her manipulations, and yet we, just like Valerie and Stefan are drawn to her, loving her for her elegant, soft power and grace.

In one sequence, after Stefan has beaten her, Valerie rushes off to the train station. Elizabeth follows and signals Illona to go to Stefan. After stopping Valerie from boarding her train, the seduction begins in earnest, including a magnetic speech that closely resembles text quoted in discussing The Blood Spattered Bride last week: “Stefan loves (you), whatever (I) may think – of course he does. That’s why he dreams of making out of you what every man dreams of making out of every woman – a slave, a thing, an object for pleasure. So, you despise me? So, I disgust you? Ha! Come, I’ll show you what men are made of.” Clearly, she plans for Valerie to find Illona and Stefan together, but when they return and find that Stefan has accidentally killed Illona, for Elizabeth, it is just as good, even better: Valerie’s fears of Stefan’s brutality have been confirmed.

Elizabeth starts issuing orders to Valerie in cleaning up the crime scene, and after the three return from burying the body, Valerie stays in the countess’s room, waiting for her expectedly (in the same place and position where we had previously seen Illona) to tenderly undress  and bite her. It’s not long before the two of them are sucking the blood out of Stefan’s wrists. We have seen Elizabeth expertly manipulate and dominate Valerie, grooming her to replace Illona. And yet, this success feels emancipatory, liberating.

The joy of the movie is the delicious tension between Elizabeth’s monstrous qualities (which Seyrig consistently plays against, never once telegraphing a drop of cruelty) and the way the film and her performance draw you into her orbit. I heard that Kümel chose the colors for her outfits (which are stunning, each grander and more luxurious than the last), red, white, and black, because he associated them with the Nazis. Perhaps the whole film works as a meditation on the allure of power. Though we see her heartlessness – destructively exercising her quiet power, it and she never stop being attractive.

That said, this film is not a thoughtful reflection about how the sexiness of power can lead to fascism, but rather a mesmerizing, piquant delicacy. The compositions, the trance inducing music, the exquisite play of character beats are all so luscious and creamy – but the darker implications add a hint of acidity to prevent the dish from being over-sweet. Though we take pleasure in Elizabeth’s triumph, the air of melancholy and the bite of harm done complicate that pleasure, and the whole effect lingers in the mind all the more for it.

The Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

So first, I must admit that the French director, Jean Rollin has long been a blind spot for me and this was the first film of his I’ve seen. From all I’ve read about him, I think this, Les Frisson de Vampires, was a good introduction: full of bizarre imagery, circling around the themes of sex and death on which I understand he often dwelt, made with little regard for “standard ways of making a movie,” and rich with a visual poetry and unreality unlike anything else out there, all while still having a rather simple and describable narrative (which will be less true with other films of his).

Once again, we have a newlywed couple, Isa and Antoine, on their way to their honeymoon (so common, it’s basically a trope of the Lesbian Vampire film). They stop to visit Isa’s cousins at their castle, only to learn that they’d died the day before. It turns out they had been vampire hunters until Isolde, a mysterious female, ‘travelling’ vampire bit them, and now they remain on their estate, in all their early seventies, velvet bellbottomed, frilly shirt, hippy-fop glory, biting local girls and staking them so they don’t rise again. In this, Isolde criticizes them as bourgeoisie. The cousins decide to bring Isa into the fold, and plan to turn her. Seduced by Isolde, Isa never consummates her marriage to Antoine, preferring instead to writhe naked on the beach with her cousins until the sunlight makes them all disappear in a puff, an effect right out of an old silent movie. But as is often the case, it’s not about the story.

It’s about the skull in the fishbowl. It’s about Isolde crawling out of the grandfather clock and caressing the nude Isa (who rather than pulling away as one might expect when a vampire exits a timepiece, curiously waits to see what she’s going to do and then gives a gentle smile of appreciation). It’s about the two maids/servants of the vampires walking the grounds naked beneath their sheer violet gowns, carrying candelabras through the cemetery in a haze of red light, or gleefully, innocently laughing and spinning about having destroyed their once master (their periodic joy being a high point of the film). It’s about the rocking electric guitar score, wailing away beneath otherwise languorous action, creating an odd dissonance of sound and image. It’s about the hilarious, eccentric cousins circling around the camera, finishing each other’s sentences in a lecture on the history of the cult of Isis, Satanism, and Vampirism in Europe, before finishing with a flourish and a series of little bows as the maids kneel, topless for some reason, before them and Isa and Antoine wordlessly get up and leave the room without reaction or explanation.  It’s about Isolde murdering Isabelle (former fiancé of both cousins) by embracing her under her cloak, before we see that she had been wearing 4 inch long, razor sharp pastie cones and has stabbed Isabelle through the nipples (now dabbed with chalky orange-red paint). And, on a narrative level, it is perhaps about the pull of family, of belonging, of the past, of attraction being stronger than that of a typical, normative relationship. It all comes together to pull the viewer into a surprisingly engaging dream of old castles, decrepit cemeteries, and erotic death trips.

As far as I can tell, though he was prolific, and obviously aware of mainstream film in France and abroad, it is most useful to view Rollin as an outsider artist, or even a Naïve artist – he did not fail to make ‘good films,’ but was working in a form that was all his own. He made a lot of movies (many pornographic, others just jobs for hire) under assumed names which paid the bills and kept the lights on, but everything on which he put his own name, he made in his way, for himself, if nobody else. For all of their nudity and blood, they were non-commercial affairs, far too weird and poetic for the standard horror crowd, and far too rooted in the fantastic, too full of horror elements for the world of French art cinema. 

This is no exception. It is a disjointed, ethereal viewing experience, but one that feels grounded in feeling, personal and important to its maker. The performances are sometimes stilted or unmotivated, but choices have clearly been made. There are lots of naked female bodies, but somehow, the camera never leers and instead, it all feels kind of innocent: a genuine, if sexed-up, meditation on death and family and need. There are strange sequences of events and sometimes the logic that has led from one moment to the next is obscured, but it never felt actually nonsensical or boring. I was captivated throughout. I laughed. I was sometimes surprised. I don’t think I really pondered any deeper themes or poetry, but I felt satisfied that someone else was in the process thereof.

I’m sure that with studio notes, this could have been a better “movie,” but were it a clean, sensible Hollywood vampire flick, it would surely be less of a film; it wouldn’t be the idiosyncratic, personal bit of magic that it is. I’m glad I finally sampled Rollin’s oeuvre and I definitely plan to watch more (many of his films can be found on the Kino Cult streaming platform – free with advertisements). The world is a richer place for having his films in it.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

I can’t be the first to observe that with Jess Franco’s film, a Spanish-German production filmed in Turkey, you really get what it says on the tin: Vampires. Lesbians. That’s the movie (there’s more, of course, but these are the broad strokes). Franco is often mentioned in close proximity to Rollin and they had many superficial similarities: both were prolific outsider-filmmakers, often funding their unconventional films with pornographic projects; both made Lesbian Vampire movies; more broadly, both gravitated to themes of sex and death and had very characteristic artistic proclivities; both offered a dreamlike viewing experience; and both attained a very strong cult following over the years – but beneath the surface, their work feel dissimilar, each with his own very specific style. That said, I must admit that most of what I know about Franco (as with Rollin) comes from what I’ve read. I had seen this one before, but it remains the only piece of his that I’ve watched.

Somewhat following Dracula, we have an estate agent, Linda (Ewa Strömberg) sent to discuss an inheritance with Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), a vampire to whom Dracula has left a great deal. Linda had recently caught her, let’s say ‘peculiar,’ nude nightclub act. The routine, which opens the film and is later repeated, consists of the countess, in front of a mirror, removing her lingerie and dressing another nude woman who remains still as a mannequin, until lowering her to the ground and biting her neck. The scene establishes images of doubling and control, but it’s also a pretty weird way to start a film. Still, the audience in the nightclub seems to enjoy it (in a kind of subdued way like one appreciates a painting in a museum), and more significantly, the differences in how Linda and her boyfriend, Omar watch the act are notable. Linda is clearly more than taken with it and is breathlessly aroused by the end, while Omar looks rather like he’s putting up with a tedious art-thing and is surprised to find her so shaken.

Shortly thereafter, Linda visits her therapist, describes this experience in light of the fact that she had already been having erotic dreams of this mysterious performer before seeing her in the flesh, and wants to know what it all means. The therapist simply says that she’s unsatisfied and should “get a lover – or get a better lover.” This she does once she finally meets the beguiling countess.

If the vampire can sometimes be taken as a metaphor for unbound sexual desire, this is an example par excellence. In “exploitation” cinema, sex and nudity can sometimes be seen as “gratuitous,” a ploy to sell tickets. In this case, it is the heart of the piece. Franco’s film does not smuggle in some kind of hidden art beneath its surface of eroticism – the erotic, the sexual is the central artistic preoccupation, and the vampirism carries that theme evocatively. It’s all about bodies being “addicted to” each other; about needs beyond the bounds of the rational; about the liberation of giving yourself over to another; and about yearning for freedom, even from that ecstasy. That may seem grandiose – but it’s not – it is playful, unhinged, fleshy, and riveting. The chemistry between Strömberg and Miranda is palpable; the cinematography is fevered – hot and exciting, full of wide gorgeous shots and snap zooms to incisive details; the editing is delirious, often cutting between the main action and seemingly unrelated images, such as a scorpion on the beach, a kite in mid-air, or blood on the window; and the soundtrack is wild – an intense groove sold years later as “Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party” (though it actually contains music from three different Franco pictures).

It is also just a strange, totally engaging (if you don’t find extended sequences of “artistic” nude performance as laborious as Omar does), far-out little film. While the countess is clearly a vampire, she doesn’t follow many of the “rules” and is more likely to be sunbathing nude on the beach than sleeping in a coffin. Sometimes characters have extreme, baffling reactions, and sometimes something very creepy happens without eliciting much shock, such as when Linda finds a man (played by Franco) in the basement of her hotel torturing and killing a woman – she gasps and runs away, but never mentions it again (in our age of AirBnB and Booking.com, if we followed her example, every hotel would have bedbugs – negative reviews keep us all safe, Linda).

Finally, it does build to a surprising ending that left me a little disappointed, but perhaps it is meant to. Linda, so enraptured with Nadine, seems bound to escape her workaday, pedestrian life, but in the end, Linda kills Nadine, driving a spike through her eye, and she and Omar sail away as if awaking from a strange dream. I was initially puzzled at such a re-affirmation of the previous, unfulfilling stasis, but came across an astute reading in Bartłomiej Paszylk’s The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. He writes that it “leaves us with a convincing and complex picture of a woman torn between her sexual needs and the fear of becoming dependent on the person who finally manages to satisfy her.” Thus, I suppose it should feel unsatisfying – Linda chooses free-but-unsatisfied over-happy-but-tied-down; thus, this lusty vampire fever dream ends in melancholy.  The kite comes down to earth.

All in all, this is a singular, carnal, sometimes chaotic, periodically enigmatic, always engrossing movie, and I’ve really got to explore Franco more.

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And so, that wraps up this dive into the artsy, erotic, sleazy, aesthetic, and rather international world of Lesbian Vampire Films. I think I’ll take a break from them for a bit and cover some other topics I’ve been considering, but eventually, I plan to return for one more post on more modern iterations. But as I promised at the beginning to give some other recommendations…

Vampyres (1974) is good fun, featuring two young women sexually luring men to a castle to feed on them. The sun drenched and surreal The Velvet Vampire (1971) showcases a commanding vampire named Diane Le Fanu driving her dune buggy around the American west and seducing a young couple in their dreams. It’s also the only classic Lesbian Vampire film I know of directed by a woman. I have not yet, but plan to watch more of Jean Rollin’s work. His Requiem for a Vampire (1972) is without dialogue for more than half the run-time and is apparently very imagistic and improvised. Also, the two female protagonists are dressed as clowns, so if that sounds like your cup of tea, have a look. I also really want to try out his Fascination (1979), featuring the iconic image of Brigitte Lahaie with her scythe. Of course, there’s always Tony Scott’s ever so stylish The Hunger (1983), featuring David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve in a bit of a bloody love triangle. Alternatively, if you liked The Vampire Lovers and want more, the second entry in Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy, Lust for a Vampire (1971) features Carmilla haunting a girls boarding school (the third film in the trilogy, Twins of Evil (1971) is, I think, the superior film, but doesn’t actually feature any lesbian vampires…). The list goes on…

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Finally, a personal note: with this entry, my longest post yet, I’ve now published more than 102,000 words on this blog. I understand that’s a decent length for a novel (Frankenstein, for comparison is about 76,000, and Dracula is about 145,000) and just thought it was a milestone worth marking.

Huzzah!

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part I

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Existing within genre cinema writ large, and often struggling with the boundary between a “genre ghetto” and “legitimate cinema,” horror is really tied up in issues of categorization. Something isn’t just a “horror movie” – it’s a ‘slasher,’ a ‘ghost movie,’ ‘body horror,’ a ‘gore flick,’ an ‘Italian cannibal movie,’ a ‘melt movie,’ a ‘werewolf movie,’ a ‘giant bugs picture,’ ‘splatterpunk,’ ‘splatstick’; the list goes on and on, with new permutations, combinations, and subdivisions constantly being birthed. But undeniably, there are some heavy hitters when it comes to the classic monsters around which the genre gets organized, and one of the biggest is “The Vampire Movie,” a set of flicks on which I’ve spent surprisingly little time (so far, I’ve only really covered one). So, I’d like to start delving into a notable sub-sub genre thereof, the “Lesbian Vampire Films.”

It seems strange that this would even be a genre – I don’t know of any strain of ‘gay-werewolf movies’ or ‘pansexual animal attack flicks,’ but there are cinematic elements that tend to run through these films, and there are lots of these films (Wikipedia lists about 60, and I suspect there are more), that seem to tie them together as a type (perhaps O negative, terrible, I know). Not every element is applicable to every film, and the exceptions probably outnumber the rules, but there are enough to make it feel like its own thing, and it constitutes a really interesting, cinematically rich, and often really gorgeous current within the larger world of horror.

Some common traits involve surprising deviations from standard vampire lore. For example, a striking number of these movies feature a lot of daytime footage and often the vampire in question is totally unbothered by sunlight and rather enjoys lounging in the pool, hanging out on the beach, or tooling through the desert in her dune buggy. Also, it’s pretty rare that anyone has fangs. Beyond that, there is a dreamy atmosphere, a seductive, languid, sometimes romantic, and sometimes tragic mood that runs through many, though certainly not all of these films.  And, while loads of these are pretty low budget operations, or are working within a vein (sorry) of cheap exploitation, so many of them are just such aesthetic pieces, putting such care and artistry into their design, into their craft, into beautifully filming beautiful people in beautiful locations, rather than simply trying to make a scary movie (and, to be fair, the films of this sub-genre are almost never actually scary – though some can be intense in other ways).

Vampirism in general often works as some kind of sexual metaphor – consumed by a physical hunger which is socially dangerous, alluring, threatening, and impossible to control, the vampire can represent the disruptive force of repressed desires, and it’s not surprising that they might cross gender lines. However, it must be said that the specific vamps after which the genre is named are almost never exactly ‘lesbians,’ so much as ‘bisexual’ at most (bi-vampire erasure is a thing, I guess) – but I guess that just didn’t have the same lurid marketing bite (sigh – what is it about vampires that makes me pun?). I suppose at the end of the day, for all vampires, regardless of sex, it should really be what’s on the inside that counts, but male vampires on film never had quite the same explicit fluidity as the ladies. 

Finally, I really shouldn’t discuss the Lesbian Vampire without at least briefly touching on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novelette, Carmilla. Published twenty years before Dracula, it is the literary basis for a huge swath of these films (with many others referencing Erzsébet Báthori, or Elizabeth Bathory). It is also a great little book which, in addition to basically inventing this entire genre, is atmospheric, engaging, creepy, sexy, and sometimes quite funny. It’s also a quick read. Check it out here as I don’t have the space to describe it in great detail, but I do highly recommend it.

I recently fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and have watched more of these films than I can cover in one post, so this will be the beginning of a short series (probably two or three posts in total), detailing some stand-out examples of this odd, compelling collection. Today, I’ll just sink my teeth (really – that’s the last one) into what I’ve watched most recently.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Lambert Hillyer’s direct follow up to Dracula (it picks up the story minutes after the first film ends) is visually stylish, gothic, and cinematic, not to mention, just being a fun, exciting movie (it’s clear how much the medium had progressed from Tod Browning’s 1931 film to this, its first sequel of many). Gloria Holden stars in the titular role as Countess Marya Zaleska, feeding on both men and women and feeling really bad about it. From a modern perspective, the “lesbian” reading is a bit unfortunate as, linked as it is to her unwanted need for blood, her interest in her female victims (with looks that linger far more hungrily, more longingly than with the men) can be seen as the ‘unnatural thoughts’ from which she is desperate to be freed, but it still feels progressive for suggesting that interest at all (and this is after these elements were greatly reduced to appease the censorious Hays Code). Beyond that, this film feels like the progenitor of so many, more modern, vampire films. She is not simply a monster – she is a tragic, yet dignified, heroine. Though some advertisements implored viewers to “save the women of London from” her, she is a very human figure: remorseful, but hopeful – desperate to be free of her father’s curse, but constantly giving into her cravings.

In this, she comes off as quite modern, and the story feels like something from decades later. As opposed to Lugosi’s Dracula, she is the protagonist of her own movie, and she is a sympathetic one. She sees a psychiatrist about her condition, and after a failed experiment with what is basically addiction exposure therapy wherein she sends her servant to find a young girl to model for her, hoping to present herself with and withstand temptation (she doesn’t), she instead chooses to find a companion for eternity. It is regrettable that she chooses the rather irritating (I guess he’s supposed to be charming) male lead for this position rather than his bantering love interest, Janet, over whom she looms for a tantalizingly long time (a scene in which she slowly lowers towards Janet, maybe to kill her before the ‘hero’ arrives, was described by Ellis Hanson as “the longest kiss never filmed”). I can’t imagine how she thinks eternity with this guy is going to be pleasant, but things don’t end well for her anyway, so she never learns what a brat he can be. However, for all of her amenable traits, the film doesn’t lack a sense of threat. People are being killed and she is the one doing it.

And it all really oozes style – from the gothic horror set pieces of the cemetery carpeted with fog where she burns Dracula’s stolen body to end her affliction, to the mid-30s classy London interiors everyone inhabits, to the spooky castle, complete with giant spider web, to the statuesque charisma that Holden exudes. This flair is definitely evident in the filming, for example, the play of light in the young model’s eyes as Marya mesmerizes her before feeding or the smooth way Sandor, Marya’s jealous familiar, slides her hypnotic ring onto her finger as she dramatically poses to be dressed.  Past that, the adventurous parts are exciting and the comic relief lands without feeling out of place. It all comes together so effectively to create a moody, fun early horror classic, which I expect far too few have seen.

Blood and Roses (1960)

With this entry, originally titled Et Mourir de Plaisir (To Die of Pleasure) we move closer to the ‘house style’ of the Lesbian Vampire movie. An Italian-French coproduction, directed by Roger Vadim (And God Created Woman and Barbarella, among others), this dreamy, colorful film lays the groundwork for where the genre would later go. In fact, director Joe Dante called it the “origin of the Euro-horror film,” and I see what he means. While there had of course been horror movies made on the continent before, this is perhaps the beginning of a certain style – combining quite artfully filmed and erotically charged material with horror narratives, in this case, a spin on Carmilla. With little explicitly shown (one bared and bloodied breast), it is such a lavish, sensual, atmospheric outing.

The connection to the source material is relatively thin (which is often true). At a stylish Italian Villa, the cousins Carmilla and Leopoldo, as well as Leopoldo’s fiancé, Georgia, entertain guests in advance of their coming nuptials. Long ago, their ancestors, the Karnsteins, had been believed vampires and the locals had risen up and staked all but one, Mircalla, who could not be found and whose grave remains empty. After her disappearance, it was noted that any woman who became engaged to her former fiancé (and cousin) had a habit of dying before her wedding. Just as Mircalla seemed to have jealously guarded the affections of her cousin, so too, in the present, does Carmilla seem to yearn with unspoken and unrequited love. Though Leopold, Carmilla, and Georgia seem intimately close, Carmilla is clearly desolate due to the upcoming wedding.

Then, on the night of a grand (and beautifully filmed) masquerade ball, which Carmilla avoids, drunk in her room, before coming down dressed as her anagrammatic ancestor,  a fireworks display blows up a portion of the family crypt. Carmilla is drawn to investigate and afterwards, she isn’t quite herself. Perhaps she is killed and the vampiric Mircalla takes her place. Perhaps the spirit of Mircalla takes control of her living body. Perhaps she experiences a mental break and creates Mircalla to allow herself to act on darker impulses. It is mostly not clear (though a final shot suggests one reading).

Either way, it becomes clear that there had clearly been something between her and Leopold in the past, and he’s not really over it, as evinced in a moment when he and Georgia put an either drunk or newly vampirized Carmilla to bed – they undress her and the way he unabashedly stares at Carmilla while standing right next to his fiancé seems like it should probably concern Georgia more.  While Carmilla still seems to carry a torch for her cousin, it is now clearly Georgia for whom she really thirsts (plus, a poor servant girl turns up dead with mysterious holes in her neck). One might wonder if Mircalla had truly been killing her cousin’s brides out of jealousy, or simply out of lust. Sadly, after expressing her feelings one rainy day in the greenhouse and kissing some blood off Georgia’s lips, who doesn’t exactly reciprocate, but also doesn’t pull away, things do not go well for Carmilla/Mircalla (often a theme here), and (spoiler alert, but hey, it’s a vampire movie, this can’t be too much of a surprise) she ends up artfully staked on a tree branch in the dawn light.  

The permutations of the story take a back seat to mood and effect, but what effect – eerie and rich in its deeply saturated technicolor splendor, peppered with surreal dream sequences and breathtaking shots. There are moments of threat and suspense, but mostly this is a sad, enveloping presentation of the vampire as a powerful and free, yet doomed need, a sensual hunger. I have some trouble keeping the plot straight in my memory, but the sensory-emotional experience lingers, and the visual languor sets a roadmap for where the genre would go in the next decade or so.

The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

A fantastically rich and intriguing Spanish film, Vicente Aranda shot it late in the Franco regime and it can be rewardingly read as an allegory of life under such paternalistic fascism. A young woman, Susan, is newly married to a childhood friend, whom the credits name only as “husband,” and after a brief stop at a hotel in which she has a vision/fantasy/premonition of being raped when alone in the room, her wedding dress torn, they move on to his family home, a grand Castillo, somewhat gone to seed. That night, consummating the marriage, he rips her dress, just as in her vision, and from that point on, their new relationship is a minefield. He can be tender and considerate or violent and assaultive. But, more than anything, he is controlling and patronizing, treating her more as a child than a partner. It’s also a red flag that the portraits of all the women of the family are stowed away in the basement, and one, that of Mircala de Karstein, who killed her husband on their wedding night, has had its face cut out.

Susan has dreams of a beautiful veiled woman coming to her in the night, leading her to a dagger and imploring her to kill her husband, in one sequence, gorily castrating him. This dream woman is a dead ringer for the mysterious, naked Carmila that “husband” finds buried on the beach, breathing through a snorkel (it’s a bit odd) and brings home. There is a spark between the two women and “husband” somewhat fades to the background. By the end of the film, Susan has joined Carmila/Mircala in a sexually emancipatory ritual of blood-letting and drinking, and the two of them kill off a few local men, and attempt to run off together. As is a consistent theme here, it doesn’t go well for them.

Aranda undertakes some thought-provoking shifts of viewpoint. The beginning of the film belongs entirely to Susan: her fear and mixed feelings of attraction and revulsion. Oddly though, before the halfway point, right after she has admitted to hating her husband, the perspective moves to him for almost the remainder of the run time as he investigates strange goings on and implications of the supernatural. It isn’t until Susan has tried and failed to stab him that we return to her perspective. The viewer is pulled between two poles of identification and two different kinds of horror. Susan is in a horror film of domestic and psychological abuse, haunted by the violence of her dreams – her desire to free herself. “Husband” is in a horror film where a lesbian vampire is preying on his wife, and he must defeat this fiend. Overheard by a doctor friend of his, the words the women repeat in their blood ritual seems like what men’s rights activists think feminism is all about (if they were only so poetic): “Say it with all your heart – I hate him! – He has pierced your flesh to humiliate you – He has pierced my flesh to humiliate me – He has spat inside your body to enslave you – He has spat inside my body to enslave me.” More than a decade before Andrea Dworkin was mis-read as stating that “all heterosexual sex is rape,” this chant would seem to imply such a sentiment, and this seems to feed the husband’s fears and subsequent violence.

At this point, be warned: to describe what really makes this all work so well, I’m about to utterly spoil the ending.

At the end of the film, the two women have stopped to rest and maybe make love in Carmila’s coffin, where the husband finds them lying together, naked and serene. He shoots the coffin again and again until blood gushes out. A young girl, who had been in contact with Carmila, arrives and says the women will rise again before kneeling down before the husband. He shoots the child in the head, opens the coffin, brings a knife to a breast, and the film cuts to a newspaper headline that proclaims a man arrested after cutting out the hearts of three women. It is a brutal ending and I think its abrupt cruelty suggests the film maker’s position. The domineering, if sometimes kindly ‘lord’ may present himself as a caring, reasonable protector – he may be the one framing the story, offering the only available narrative, but that paternalism and control is a form of violence and he will not balk at ruthlessly destroying anyone who threatens the continuity of his power. It’s a shocking, chilling conclusion to a curious and provocative film, the quashed sexual revolution on screen (probably reflecting how Franco had so utterly stripped women of their rights) calling for a more complete socio-political upheaval off screen.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)

This is an peculiar one. Filmed in Mexico by Juan López Moctezuma, this follows some of the patterns of the Lesbian Vampire film, while also going in some other directions, notably, a serial killer film and a B-movie action/cop procedural, complete with car chases (and cars that really like to blow up). Mary is an American artist bumming around Mexico in her ramshackle van, seemingly living a free-love, artistic, vagabond lifestyle, painting, embarking on relationships with men and women, and sometimes poisoning them and stabbing them in the neck with a hairpin before ravenously lapping up their blood. Also, she’s being chased by a creepy man in black whose face is always covered by a black scarf.

I will say that this did not strike me as strongly as the other three entries today, but it is still an interesting, unique case, even if the film making didn’t rise to the greatest heights. The most notable detail is how different Mary’s character is from many of the other female vampires of the genre. Even when some version of Carmilla, for example, is fated to a lonely un-life, unhappy in love, and probably gets killed by the end, she still feels powerful, dangerous, and alluring. She feels in control – she is the gravity of the film, pulling everything to her center – lovers, death, meaning. By contrast, Mary (and in this, she echoes Marya from Dracula’s Daughter) is cursed to crave blood thanks to her parentage (it’s obvious long before it’s revealed that the creepy guy following her is her dad), she is bad at killing (there is a great scene when, even having poisoned his coffee, she really has trouble finishing off a local fisherman on the beach – it’s awkward, tense, and fumbling, but she does finally do him in), and she is so upset and scared for much of the run time – by what is happening to her, by what she, herself is doing. Somehow, she is both the monster and a powerless, terrified victim. Unlike some others, she survives her picture and goes on to travel and kill and drink – but perhaps that is the worst fate for her, so it is hardly a happy ending – things do not go well for anyone.

Along the way, there are some scares and effective moments. The presence of the mysterious man chasing her (and killing his own victims along the way) flavors this more like a ‘horror’ movie than a dreamy-Euro-sensual death trip. Her lack of overpowering strength or mesmerism when killing brings to mind Romero’s Martin, who shares this quality – and occasionally the killings carry a kind of horror as they are not clean and sensual, but rough, out of control, and always in danger of failing, thus getting her caught and arrested. Also, one death is really quite sad as she finds herself in the bath with Greta, a woman who has brought her home (in a reversal of the pattern, it is the vampire who has been seduced), and she obviously doesn’t want to poison and kill her, saying that she’s never before chosen someone she knew, someone she cared about, but she cannot stop herself – tears are in her eyes as she brings the pin to Greta’s neck.

Compared with the other films today, it is not so visually striking, but the old, grainy film stock can be really quite forgiving, and it is certainly something different and worth checking out.

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So, with that, I think we’ll wrap up this first installment of my Lesbian Vampire rundown.  While these films don’t tend to be very scary, I think they represent an interesting corner of the genre. Something I often love about horror movies is feeling ensconced in an atmosphere, however unsettling – it’s a quality I don’t associate with many other kinds of films, and these are all about atmosphere – moody and otherworldly, with the nominal monster often holding the most appeal. It’s a rich place to dwell for a while.

Also, one warning that I hate to have to give – many of these are inexpensive European movies and when venturing into that territory, it’s important to know that animals were sometimes ill-treated in the filming (no ASPCA on site). If that is something that will ruin a movie for you, you should check first. I’m not happy to end a post about some films that I really do like on this note, but I’d be remiss not to.