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Lesbian Vampires 5: Spanish Sexploitation in the 70s

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So last week, I had planned to cover four films in my ongoing series on the Lesbian Vampire Subgenre, but I really fell down a rabbit hole on the first two selections (Requiem for a Vampire and Alucarda), wrote my longest post to date, and ran out of steam before I could cover the next two. So this week, we’re just going to plow ahead and get some first impressions out there on my next two entries: Daughter of Dracula (1972) and Vampyres (1974).  For all that I loved last week’s films, they only nominally featured “Lesbian Vampires.” The same cannot be said for today’s entries.

As mentioned last week, if you’re interested in the rest of the series, I invite you to check out Part I (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary), Part II (The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Vampyros Lesbos), Part III (Nadja, Blood of the Tribades, and Bit), and Part IV (Requiem for a Vampire and Alucarda). Also, perhaps stick around and have a look at some of the other, non-Lesbian Vampire offerings on the site. 🙂

There will most likely be extensive spoilers ahead (also, if you’re in an office or something, there could be a stray nipple if that’s an issue for you), so enter at your own risk…

Daughter of Dracula (1972)

This Jess Franco flick was released one year after his superior Vampyros Lesbos and circles many similar images, themes, and impressions (it was also one of 11 films he directed in 1972 – the man worked). That said, for all that there are elements here worthy of one’s time and discussion, it must be said that this is not the place to start with either Lesbian Vampire movies or Franco’s catalogue. However, I think it does probably encapsulate much of what a Jess Franco picture is like: languid, gorgeous, moody, fleshy, erotic, occasionally absurd or campy, and ultimately utterly unconcerned with clarity, consistency, or even character (alliterate much?). His work is not for everyone – and that is certainly true of this early 70s sexploitation outing.

It is a vampire movie, but I’d be hard pressed to call it horror. The story is hard to follow at best and non-existent at worst. And while it devotes a significant portion of its runtime to the naked female form, during which its nominal “story” screeches to a halt (often a defining trait of ‘exploitation’ work), I’m not even sure that it’s ever particularly “sexy” at least not as conventionally understood.

Franco would reportedly shoot multiple movies at the same time and stitch them together in the editing booth (getting more than one picture on the producer’s dime and only paying actors and crew for one film) and this could result in a disjointed feel – as if the film we’re watching had been assembled out of a couple of different pictures (which sometimes is exactly what he did – it’s one of the ways that he was credited as having directed more than 200 films), and that is certainly the case here – it feels as if the main character is never in the same room as most of the rest of the cast, but is following her own story, separate from the giallo-esque mystery that occupies the rest of the players. And her story is barely even a ‘story,’ so much as it’s just her seductively playing the piano or making love to her beautiful cousin in long sequences which aren’t even always exactly ‘sex’ scenes so much as ‘squirmingly lounging in bed together, naked, slowly flopping about before the fangs come out’ scenes. But hey, they do look like they’re having a good time, which is often more than you get with mainstream sex scenes.

All of this may seem pretty negative out the gate, but I did actually rather like the film, particularly on a second viewing (during the first, I was just too sleepy to put myself in the right headspace to enjoy this kind of movie making). I’ve only seen maybe 5 Franco films so far, but my impression is that to appreciate his talents (and I do believe he was talented and had something artistic to offer the world), you have to watch the films differently than most typical narrative cinema. It’s not the abstract surrealism of Rollin, but it is a step removed from narrative arc, more simply luxuriating in the richness of the seen. While he seemed obsessed with certain themes or images (vampires, Poe, old crumbling castles, the sea, death, the body – particularly women’s), I suspect ‘telling stories’ per se just wasn’t that interesting to him. And it doesn’t need to be. Can’t a film be of value based on a different rubric? Can’t he just make beautifully shot films with gothic themes and loads of nudity because that’s what he loves – and well, there was a market for it?

In this case, the minimal story, such as it is, concerns Luisa Karlstein (Brett Nichols), her name our requisite connection to Carmilla, who comes to her mother’s death bed to be told that the family has long been cursed by vampirism and that the original count can still be found, undead, in the nearby family crypt. Concurrently, there is a police investigation into the many beautiful naked women that are being found with mysterious and fatal neck wounds, seemingly carried out by a perpetrator in a long coat with a wide brimmed hat, face covered with a black scarf, and carrying a cane.

This investigation largely feels like its own separate film and though Luisa is eventually revealed (unsurprisingly as we see her flash her fangs and bite women throughout the film), to be the killer in question, it feels as if she isn’t even in that detective film. Most of her time is spent striking up a sexual/bitey relationship with her cousin, Karine (Anne Libert), a childhood friend with whom she’d always shared an attraction. Also, we occasionally see her eye, in very giallo fashion, through the crack of a door, spying on some unsuspecting woman who’s getting undressed and will soon be bitten.

For all of the issues one could have with this film, no one could say it isn’t a Lesbian Vampire movie (which could be argued about both of last week’s movies). Honestly, on some levels, it is more of one than many much better films that I’ve covered in this series, given how so many of the vampires in question also engage in sexy time with men (Bisexual Vampire erasure is a thing). Luisa, however, is only ever shown to take interest in women, either sexually or as food. But beyond ticking boxes to be thus designated, I do also want to underline the merits of this piece.

First of all, it is simply, beautiful. The on location photography along the coast of Portugal is frequently breathtaking, whether viewing a crumbling castle, seagulls on the beach where a nude corpse will soon be found, or the ornate Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra (which I was excited to spot because I’d been there on vacation a few years back and it really is a very cool, interesting place – it’s always fun to see in person a historical sight used for a Lesbian Vampire movie).

Franco catches light and warmth and texture so evocatively – water sparkles more brilliantly that it does in life, old buildings loom with delicate menace and tired grace, and flesh seems so soft, full of life, yielding, sanguine, and lovely. From the snap zooms and play with focus to the sensuality of night shoots by natural light, everything about the film is just so aesthetically crafted and captured.

Otherwise, there are loads of moments that really click. Some performances are surprisingly effective, such as Alberto Dalbés who plays the inspector with such weary, bemused exasperation, or Daniel White as the current Count Karlstein, who is suspected of the murders, but is really just running around on his wife. And of course, Franco himself plays the cuckolded assistant, obsessed with the looming threat of supernatural danger.

While the narrative is clunky and hard to piece together, there is a unifying theme of attraction-desire-need-betrayal, and the whole piece works as a series of evocative glimpses into these emotional states.

Most striking is the above-mentioned repeated motif of Luisa’s eye in the crack of a door. There are a few extended sequences, obviously targeted at a sexploitation market, of women stripping down in an unhurried, surprisingly non sexual fashion, as they prepare for bed or a bath, before they finally see their assailant and scream as we cut to black. Each time, we jump repeatedly, over the course of multiple minutes, between the image of the nude woman at peace, unsuspectingly going about her business, wholly relaxed, all accompanied by some gentle, easygoing music, to an extreme close up of Luisa’s eye, as open as it can be, appearing shocked (as if she really hadn’t expected what was revealed under various discarded undergarments), along with an intense musical stinger. Then we return to the intimate relaxation of a woman simply taking her time. I find it interesting that the eye does not indicate lust or arousal, but rather being overwhelmed by the immensity of what is seen. This is a film that wants to look, that takes pleasure in looking. And what it sees is often slow and unperturbed (both in terms of sexuality and in the face of imminent death). But if this was being sold to shock and titillate, it tracks that the observing eye would be that image of intensity, of more than what can be expected or contained.

And speaking of ‘more than,’ there are some delightfully campy moments, such as the few appearances of Franco regular, Howard Vernon, as the decrepit, undead progenitor of the family line. Occasionally his coffin lid raises, his eyes pop open, and, if he’s lucky, he manages to sit up, sometimes very suddenly. And that is all he ever does. He never gets out of his coffin. He never has any lines. He never does anything at all. His biggest moment of action is when he just lies there and Luisa drops a topless woman on top of him so he can have something to eat. Then she closes the lid. Can he get up? Is he supposed to be an image of broken age, impotent, but evil, infusing the land with his darkness, but unable to take actions himself? Or did Franco just bring his friend in for a day, slap some fangs in his mouth, film him looking creepy in a coffin a few times and send him home, and this is what he had to show for it? Either way, it is a fun, campy element, which may also carry a touch of something evocatively tragic.

This is certainly a peculiar little film, and I think few would exactly call it “good,” but if you are open to its pleasures, they are there to be had, and I think it’s interesting to take in what might be deemed a ‘lesser feature’ by this intriguing euro-sleaze auteur. But again, don’t watch it yet if you don’t already like Franco. If, however, you do and want to see more, seek it out.

Vampyres (1974)

José Ramón Larraz’s film is a bit of a departure from much of the Lesbian Vampire canon. While it does directly feature women who are clearly lesbians (or at least bisexual) and are also clearly vampires (but maybe ghosts as well?), it strikes a different tone from so many of the other entries on this list. A bit of an early seventies exploitation piece, it is filled with the gratuitous nudity one might expect from the genre, but more than most, it really leans into being a horror film (rather than a moody, somewhat abstract fever dream); and it is a fun one at that. It has ominous, spooky atmosphere, people exploring scary places they shouldn’t, a real sense of threat, and while I feel the audience is situated more on the side of the Sapphic vampires in question, when violence finally strikes, it is brutal and gory, and those pretty ladies are really frighteningly monstrous. It’s all pretty great.

In short, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska) rise from their graves every night to go hitchhiking along remote country roads to pick up men, take them back to an abandoned mansion, sometimes bed them (hence the bisexuality), get them wasted on fine (possibly drugged) wine from a ‘remote region near the Carpathian mountains,’ slice them open, and feast on the wet, red stuff within, leaving their naked, bloody bodies in their own crashed cars on the side of the road. Our story centers on one such man, Ted (Murray Brown), whom Fran picks up and decides to keep for a few nights (which makes Miriam nervous), and also a pair of young campers, John and Harriet, who have parked their camper on the grounds of said picturesque abandoned mansion to do some fishing and painting.

We regularly shift perspective between Fran and Miriam, living their best unlives together, seemingly taking great pleasure in their nightly games, and in each other (though they occasionally sleep with these men, it really feels like their only real relationship is with one other – the men are meat); Ted, as he is trapped – sexually, emotionally, and eventually bodily, slowly realizing his own impending doom as his life is sapped away; and the young camping couple, with Harriet as the classic horror movie wife who realizes that scary things are afoot only to be consistently disbelieved and belittled by her husband, or boyfriend as the case may be.

Off the bat (boom, tish), the film really feels like a horror movie. From the double murder in the cold open (more on that later), to Harriet’s immediate discomfort with their campsite, a hand slapping against their window in the night (presumably a victim trying to escape), to Ted’s first morning after sleeping with Fran, waking in an empty bed as she’d disappeared before morning light, feeling weirdly drained and discovering an ugly gash on his forearm.

The music builds tension. There are legitimate jump scares. And there is violent, gory death that, while still sexual in its way, is a far cry from the more artistic offerings in most other Lesbian Vampire pictures. I mean, I don’t want to set expectations too high – this is surely not the scariest movie you’re ever going to see, but it does go for the dread, the terror, and the shock of the body viscerally reduced to flesh and blood.

While I really do like this film, one criticism I can make is that it does drag a bit in the middle, and I think that may be to do with the absence of a clear protagonist to follow, though the shifting perspective does make for a very interesting film. The easiest character to identify with, I suppose, who really feels the most like what we will come to know as a ‘final girl,’ is Harriet (Sally Faulkner). She just wants to have a pleasant holiday with her partner, but creepy things are happening, she notices, and ignored or mocked for her insight, she takes some initiative and investigates. It does not end well for her (understatement), and she has one of the smallest parts in the film.

Then there is Ted. I don’t like Ted. Sorry. I can vicariously get creeped out along with him, going along on his ride into dangerous circumstances, feeling his dread as he senses that all doors are slamming shut around him, but I just don’t feel like rooting for him to live. Interestingly, I’d say this is true of all the men we see taken home and victimized, and he’s just the one we spend the most time with. None of them are shown to be ‘bad guys’ per se – Fran and Miriam are not exclusively preying on rapists or abusers (ala a more recent Lesbian Vampire picture, Bit), but they all feel like people I wouldn’t really choose to hang out with. Entitled, pushy, know-it-all guys, it’s hard not to feel like they all ‘have it coming.’ But then I have to second guess myself – why do I feel that way exactly?

Sure, they meet some beautiful women on the road, give them a lift and it turns out that these lovely ladies want them to come back to their place to drink fine wine and have sex. Nothing is wrong with any of that, right? They aren’t shown to be predators. We aren’t even informed that they are cheating on their wives or anything. And yet, it’s hard to be on their side. While I don’t want to fall into a Reagan-era slasher-esque sex-negative judgmentalism, I just don’t like them and I’m perfectly glad for the girls to drink their fill. Thus, since Ted, our primary male victim, is essentially also our main character, the story loses some drive in the second act due to my ambivalence regarding whether he lives or dies.

Maybe it’s just that the film really does rightly belong to Fran and Miriam, as does the audience’s sympathies (at least mine; I can’t speak for the majority of viewers in 1974). And they are easy to love. Fran has this sardonic, worldly, knowing charm as she lures these men home and it is a pleasure to accompany her in this pursuit. Without being overly arch, her whole character seems to grow out of Dracula’s iconic “I never drink…wine.” In contrast, Miriam just plays everything so genuinely, so sweet. She can really sell her interest in whatever some guy is blathering on about. Light and dark in their respective personas, they make a nice pair. And it is interesting the degree to which they really have no interpersonal drama. No one seems tortured by eternity or the need to kill and feed, and beyond Miriam urging Fran to finish Ted off before he becomes a problem, they seem happy together.

Maybe there is a dramatic flaw in that they don’t seem to especially want anything they don’t have, and they aren’t in any way pressed to change. They like hunting and killing these men – so they do. They like squirming about in bed, naked and bloody, having torn some guy apart and then having sex in the shower. They do that as well. One might expect an element of jealousy to enter the picture – either about Fran’s pet blood cow, Ted, or about one of them seducing Harriet. None of that happens. So while for Ted, there is drama in his capture and torment, and while for Harriet, there is suspense in her investigations, the characters we most enjoy watching (again, I should really only speak for myself) are oddly content.

But, hey – good for them. The movie begins with the two of them making love on a bed before some shadowy male figure barges in and shoots them over and over. At the very end of the film, we hear from an estate agent that this scene had happened many years ago in the house and that the unknown murdered girls had been buried here, such that this old mansion is enticingly haunted. If their inciting event, their bloody, cruel murder, probably by some jealous boyfriend or husband, is what somehow made them into vengeful, misandrist, undead killers, then they deserve a modicum of happiness along the way.

It’s nice that they get to have that with each other. The gentle love and contentment here even sets us up for a shock when we finally see the blood flow – when push comes to shove, they are really and truly scary monsters. This is especially true close to the end, when they dispatch Harriet – not their typical target, but necessary under the circumstances – it is quite a rough scene, especially as it takes on a sexualized component, stripping her as she screams and begs, before slashing her throat.

Whereas the last few entries in this series were simply unconcerned with plot or continuity (and therefore, it felt pointless to pick them apart), this feels more like a conventionally told story and hence plot inconsistencies draw more attention to themselves. Were they actually made vampires when murdered years before? If so, why the implications that they are from Transylvania (the small region near the Carpathian mountains)? If not, were they already vampires when the shadowy figure shot them? Who knows? Why does a hotel clerk recognize Ted from the distant past? It’s almost as if it’s implied that he had been the long ago killer, doomed to return to them – but I don’t think he was; it just feels that way. Why do their victim’s watches all stop at midnight? That’s an intriguing detail that I don’t know from any other vampy content. Maybe that was when they were shot? Also, if every single morning the local police find another dead naked man in a car on the side of the road, someone is gonna get curious. Has this been happening every night for 30 years? Men might stop driving through this region. But all of these questions don’t really interfere with my enjoyment of the picture. Sometimes they offer an enjoyable moment of “hey, what?” But mostly, I’m happy to let them slide right by as the rest of the film is generally so very enjoyable.

All in all, this one comes highly recommended. It really blends much of the atmospheric, sensual pleasure of the Lesbian Vampire genre with an entertainingly sleazy exploitation horror flick, filled with spooky atmosphere, rampant sexuality, fairly rough violence, and solid horror beats.

—

And there we have two films with a fair amount in common, but which are also strikingly different. More so than some I’ve covered, the element of same sex desire and even love is explicitly present, as is the vampirism. Both come from a Spanish director working in another country and another language. Both have a kind of sexploitation charm – clearly including extended sequences of nudity and sex which are not strictly needed for the story telling, but was being sold in the marketing, and as sexuality makes up a pretty large portion of human existence, it’s a pretty legitimate thing to focus on in its own right. For whatever reason (a subject for a future post), I have a soft spot for that sense of good-old fashioned, honest sleaze – there is something charming in its directness. I recently discovered a new podcast I’m enjoying, Girls, Guts, and Giallo, hosted by Annie Rose Malamet, and I really appreciated in her discussion of Hellraiser, her statement to the effect that she hates misogyny, but she hates prudishness more. I can dig it.

But then again, these movies just feel so very different from each other. Franco’s is this languid, gorgeous, weird, erotic art piece, indulging in a death tinged sexual meditation, whereas Larraz’s is a down and dirty horror movie, ticking all the boxes of Lesbian Vampires and of horror, but maybe not really getting into anything deeper than that – an emotional character piece this is not – but it is fun and satisfying.

That said, maybe we’re good on this genre for a while. There are still others I’d like to write about, but I’ve covered 15 so far, and maybe it’s time for a break. I started last post discussing how these Lesbian Vampire posts bring more readers to this site than anything else I’ve written. Exactly why is an ongoing mystery, but I sure do love them myself. That said, there are so many other things I’m looking forward to delving into. Let’s see where we go next time…

Queer Horror II: A Small Shudder Roundup

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Chasing the annual event calendar, I think I’m just barely going to slide in under the line to do a Pride Month post for June (though last week’s film did have a clear queer reading, so that’s something). I do try to mark occasions of note, and as discussed last year, I have an appreciation for “Queer Horror,” the argument easily being made that with its focus on the outsider/the abject/the other/the outré, Horror as a genre is usually fairly “queer” (both in the original sense of the word and as a self-identifier used by those who have historically been othered for their sexual/gender identity). That said, I must again admit that I am not of the LGBT+ community and come to this from without, using the term “Queer” with all intended respect in reference to a film classification, a body of theory, and an identity.

Historically, much of the canon, so to speak, consists of pieces with gay-coded characters, or from LGBT+ creators (who may or may not have been open about their sexuality) fueling queer readings of the films even when sexuality is not explicitly present, but I think in contemporary times, the work has really opened up – it’s easier to find explicit LBGT+ characters and stories, and elements of “queerness” have spread through much of popular culture (though I feel camp as an aesthetic is still pretty niche). So, briefly, this week I’d just like to go over a few films I’ve recently watched (one of which I’d seen before, but rather love and would happily watch again). Somewhat coincidentally, these are all on Shudder (I pay for this service and do try to get my money’s worth). They are, in the order of watching: Spiral (2019), Knife + Heart (2018), and Death Drop Gorgeous (2020). I rather enjoyed all of them (in sometimes very different ways), and I think they represent very different approaches to how a contemporary film might present as “queer horror.”

Spiral (2019)

On one level, this is a fairly rote supernatural thriller. Sometime in the late 90s, a couple moves, with their teenage daughter, to a small town where everyone seems quite friendly, but there is clearly a sinister plot at work under the surface. Odd, spooky things start happening which only one member of the couple is witness to. That one starts panicking that a nefarious cult is targeting their family and that they are in grave danger if they stay, but the other partner sees nothing wrong, and is even irritated at all the craziness. Finally, head swimming with conspiracies and threats, the first partner takes drastic measures, there is a revelation of occult shenanigans, and things go real south real fast, landing with a severe, downbeat ending.

This summation could surely be applied to countless films, but this one comes with one small difference – the couple are two men (crazy, right?). On paper, this choice seems like it could have come from a calculating studio exec, seeking to tap into the current moment and exploit the real life difficulties such a couple would face relocating to small town America, making easy emotional hay out of real traumas to which they might have previously been subjected thanks to their identity. And after watching the film, I read plenty of negative user reviews which said exactly something to that effect. However, I’ve got to say that for me, it really clicked.

We see in multiple flashbacks how Malik (Jeffrey Bowjer-Chapman, who’s great), the partner who sees the danger, was attacked for being gay when younger, seeing his lover murdered before him. This early trauma has shaped him in many ways: making him more of an activist than his current partner and possibly giving him an impulse to live more openly, proudly embracing his identity in defiance of those who would abuse him for it, but it has also disillusioned him of any expectation that others can be trusted, that he will ever really be safe. He knows that though some things have seemingly improved, the world is still the world and there are still people who hate him (because he’s gay, because he’s black, because he’s an outsider from the city invading their small, insular town), who would hurt him (or worse) and his family if given half the chance. His partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), has just not had the same scarring experiences and thus plays the role of the disbelieving husband demanded by a film like this.

The supernatural-paranoia-cult movie of it all generally works fine (though I suspect some plot elements might not hold up well to scrutiny, and to harp on just one of my least favorite genre tropes, when oh when will helpful ghosts finally learn that the way to issue urgent warnings to a protagonist is not to jump scare out of the shadows, making a creepy elongated face, and shrieking? It. Is. Not. Helpful.), but the addition of the “gay” element really makes the whole film feel like so much more. Malik’s apprehension and dread is palpably grounded in the very realistic possibility that he/they are actually being targeted for being gay (and early on, he does have to deal with their living room being vandalized with homophobic graffiti). This social-emotional grounding lends weight to everything that happens, taking this straightforward cult movie and turning it into a social horror that feels like it’s “about something.”

But this doesn’t reduce the whole film to a mere drama. It is still a horror movie and Malik’s justified and understandable fear, informed by his own terrible experiences, really does make it all scarier, granting a kind of instant pathos as we feel how close these fictional creepy events could be to something all too real and terrifying, as well as giving his character realistic reasons both to trust his gut terror and to deny it, knowing that he could easily just be paranoid following his earlier trauma. Our viewpoint character, we are with Malik as he fears for his family in the face of this looming, mysterious menace, and we are also with him as he doubts his own senses, memories, and judgements – coming unmoored, ‘spiraling’ out of control. We have no better idea of what is real than he does, and his alarm is contagious.

In the end, we learn that they have in fact been targeted for being gay (though not hatefully as one would expect, so much as coldly and opportunistically), that there is actually a dark magic at work, and that Malik was both paranoid and right, and then the movie crashes to a close with a greater commitment to horror than I’d expected of it, both on the immediate, personal level and writ large.

From what I read online, I have the feeling that this one wasn’t super popular with audiences (which quite surprised me given how I’d taken to it), but I have to say it worked for me – both as a supernatural and a social horror film. Admittedly, the first half played better when I was still unsure what was going on and was quite pulled in by its emotional weight, but after growing somewhat shambolic in later scenes, in the last minutes, it stuck the landing. Also, I think this offers an interesting example of one way to do “queer horror” – a more or less by the book horror movie, following the tropes of its given sub-genre, but the central characters are gay, and that gayness is actually part of the plot and not simply incidental. This may still be a case of blatant opportunism following the success of a film like Get Out (I didn’t find much about Spiral’s development), but even if it is, I still found it quite moving, at least a bit scary, and consistently engaging.

Knife + Heart (2018)

Described as a French “neo-giallo,” this is a beautiful, erotic, brutal, confounding, hypnotic, peculiar film that is alternatingly blisteringly intense and dreamily hazy. It gets all the adjectives. Some adverbs too. Set against the backdrop of the French gay porn scene of the late 70s, we largely follow Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis), a director of low budget, but artistically ambitious, gay porn films as her actors start getting picked off one by one by a mysterious masked killer in often disturbingly sexualized fashion. It is all stylish and atmospheric as the day is long: moody scenes at night in the rain, neon lit discos, a constant play of light and shadow and color and sweat, and so, so many cigarettes.

Directed and co-written by Yann Gonzalez, this can be bit of a difficult film. Anne, and through her, we are led on a wild goose chase that takes some weird turns here and there (one key to her investigation turns on feathers found at the crime scenes that a bird psychic with a twisted claw hand identifies as being from the seemingly extinct birds of a forest out of an old legend where she then travels, wanders drunk into the woods until finding an expository graveyard, and learns the killer’s history – ok, sure, why not…) and furthermore, Anne, while magnetic on screen, is a hard protagonist to like. Much of the film revolves around her abusive, drunken, obsessive stalking of her ex-girlfriend, who still works as her editor and puts up with a lot from her. As a viewer, it’s difficult to process this often unpleasant person, so driven by want and artistic ambition, but also so clearly harmful to this woman she purportedly loves (and in one scene sexually assaults) and so coldly willing to exploit the deaths of her ‘friends’ as fuel for her filmmaking (as her co-workers are being hunted down, she begins making her new film – all about a masked killer stalking gay men, recreating the real life deaths of her employees and really upsetting some of the survivors in the process). She is a complicated person whom we spend the whole film with but who is always a bit unknowable. And she’s just not a ‘nice’ person.

Past that, as referenced above, this is a movie that in dreamy fashion is very willing to take its time. It has periodic bursts of violence and flashes of passion, but more often moves at a rich, molasses like pace. This is not to say that it is boring or poorly paced, but you have to be in the right mood to go on its particular ride (and the first time I saw it, back when it was released, I wasn’t quite there). Much of this plays out in Anne’s investigation, one feature that links this to the giallo genre – wherein so often an artist or writer finds themselves, for some reason, investigating a series of murders you might otherwise expect to be police business. In this case though, it is clear why it falls to her – the victims all gay men or trans women, porn actors and prostitutes, the police will not work this case. It’s a joke for them. And as the fear grows around her, Anne finds herself the only one who will make the journey into understanding.

All of that said though, I love it, and I’m so glad I watched it again for this post. I love any film that can so envelop me in its mood, in its setting, in its vibe – however ambivalent that might be. I love the places where it touches horror – there are some absolutely top shelf sequences and we’ll deal with them shortly. I also love a quality here that I’m having trouble putting my finger on – though it sometimes feels like a long walk to get there and some character motivations and emotions feel obtuse, somehow it really got to me and in a final coda (featuring an impossible reconciliation and a loving warmth absent from much of the preceding film) I found myself in tears and not even really understanding why. It’s as if the gestalt of the film’s play of mood and look and mystery took me on an emotional journey more powerful than that of the plot or characters.  There is an almost subconscious emotion suffusing it all that I found very affecting.

But it is in the places that horror meets queer that this movie shines. Central to the killer’s story and motivation is a mixture of repressed homosexual desire, self-hatred, and resentment for those he lusts after, those who can live in the world, as themselves, without shame. Thus, all of the kills are infused with an erotic charge and also a deep emotional weight. Every kill is exciting and scary, as is fitting of a horror/giallo, but it is also terribly sad, a tragedy that does not go unmarked. Generally in your classic slashers, everyone died before the final girl had any inkling that anything had happened. Here, a community is threatened, and they know it. Their friends are dying horribly, and there is room for mourning and dread (though not so much room that Anne can’t take advantage of the tragedy to inspire her new pornographic opus, “Homo-cidal”).

Two deaths bookend the film, making such a deep impression at the beginning and the end that I’d probably love it regardless of whatever else happened between them. Early on, we see a young man in a dark, seedy club, the music pounding, half-heartedly dancing with a couple of guys while he makes eyes with the mysterious figure across the room in a kinky leather mask. He goes with the stranger into a back room and there is a frisson of want, desire, and risk – the thrill and alluring sexiness of putting yourself in the hands of a stranger. He finds himself stripped and tied down to a table, still unaware that anything is awry, so turned on, so up for the sexual adventure. And then it all goes wrong and as he’s being savagely stabbed, the sounds of his dying bring tears to the eyes. Trust given is betrayed. Desire led to vulnerability led to death. It is rough, violent, and sexual; and it just breaks your heart.

All of the intervening deaths have a similar blend of horror and eros, need and trepidation, beauty and tragedy and it is really something special. This leads (via a long and winding road) to a final death, the dispatching of the killer in a porn theatre, where he had been stalking his next victim in a dark room in the back. Having finally unraveled the mystery of who and what and why he is, Anne identifies him and the men in the cinema close in. This is the killer who had been terrorizing their community, and knowing how the police had been so uninterested in offering protection, they move to eliminate the threat themselves. It’s not important that they understand his internalized homophobia, that they sympathize with his childhood trauma and mutilation – they have to defend themselves and each other against those who would erase them from existence – and they do. Finally, one young man, similar in build to the first victim, picks up a knife the killer had dropped, approaches him, and tentatively presses the blade into his chest, before continuing to stab and stab and stab. As he kills the killer, the young man whimpers and cries, echoing the sounds of the first victim’s death. There is tragedy not only in the dying but also in the killing, in the horror he must carry out to know that he and his community will be safe, or at least safer.

It is just freaking gorgeous. And sad. And it sings with pain. And is just so very, very cool. Not all of it feels like a horror movie per se, but the parts that do are extraordinary, and the film as a whole is really special – a rich, sad, evocative piece that worked on me in ways I can’t quite puzzle out, but which left a deep and lasting impression. Beautiful.

Death Drop Gorgeous (2020)

On some levels, this has similarities to the previous film. Again we have a story centered entirely around a queer community, with both LGBT+ victims and killer. Someone is murdering employees and visitors to a drag club in Providence, Rhode Island, and no one knows who or why. But past that, these films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Whereas Knife + Heart is highly produced, artful, and deeply earnest in its emotion and weight, Death Drop Gorgeous is totally independent, low budget, enjoyably trashy, and entirely camp, which is more or less the opposite of earnestness.

From the Providence based queer gore film collective, “Monster Makeup,” this is real indie, regional cinema. Reportedly crowd funded and filmed over a year and a half of weekends, with the writers, director, editors, sound mixers, and producers all playing leading roles, thus minimizing costs, this is clearly a labor of love – it may be a bit rough around the edges and the performances may be broad, but in many ways, they are supposed to be. Plus, the filmmaking is quite strong (really, better than the trailer had led me to expect) and the camp of it all justifies any other apparent weaknesses.

Basically, in high camp style, this is a classic whodunit slasher, though in the final act it takes a turn for the supernatural. The kills are all executed at a high level, both in filmmaking and in practical effects, and they’ve got a surprisingly realistic, visceral quality that I hadn’t expected given the deliberate unreality of much of the rest of the film, making this a stronger slasher than I’d hoped for. In many ways, the kill scenes could have come out of any conventional slasher (but some of the content therein, such as a penis being thrust into a glory hole only to graphically get mulched in a meat grinder, might not be featured in more mainstream fare).

On the mystery level, we’re presented with loads of red herrings as to who the killer might be. Is it the aging drag queen, in danger of losing her edge, who feels pushed aside by a culture and clientele obsessed with youth, beauty, and novelty? Is it the young bartender with a short temper? Is the sleazy, coke pushing club boss somehow behind it all? Could it be the aspiring, but untalented performer who faces rejection at every turn? The movie does maintain a degree of suspense for quite a while, and my only real criticism is that I wish it had waited to reveal the actual killer a bit longer as I felt diminished tension from that point on.

But once we do know the identity of the murderer, the film shifts in surprising fashion, adding a kind of Elizabeth Bathory, drag-vamp note to the final proceedings, which also includes an extended fight scene that goes much longer than one might think, bringing to mind the alley fight in They Live. And when this happens, in spite of the inherent irony of the camp, there is a depth of feeling rooting the killer’s murderous rage. In fact, the film manages to drum up some legitimate emotion all along the way among its cast of comically overplayed queens, pushers, dreamers, and club boys.

Whereas Knife + Heart felt like it was recreating a real community in a time and a place (Paris, the gay porn scene, 1979), Death Drop Gorgeous feels like it comes from a real community in a time and a place (Providence, a group of queer artists, 2020). It may not be realistic in its presentation of community, but it feels truly rooted in the lived experience of its creators. And its ‘faults’ make it all the more lovable. The presence of so many ‘non-professional actors’ (a term which, as someone who has long worked in a kind of pro-am theatre scene, kind of irks me) brings an amateur charm (by which I do not intend  ‘unprofessional’, unskilled, or untrained, but rather, following the etymology of the word, from the Latin “amator,” or ‘lover,’ from “amare,” ‘to love,’ I mean to say one who does an activity for the love of that activity as opposed to purely for a profit motive). Though charm is also brought by the surprising cameo of 80s horror mainstay, Linnea Quigley (who’s brief presence really took me by surprise).

There are also other elements that could seem like a fault, but learning more, just give the film more character. Notably, as so much of the drag performance involves lip syncing, I was puzzled at first that the sound seemed out of sync a number of times during the drag shows (and at no other times) – weird given that it makes it seem that the performers are not lip syncing particularly well – and then I read that the performers had done songs they didn’t have (and couldn’t afford) the rights to and that the filmmakers had to record new songs to match their lips as best they could – which is rather a loveable element that I enjoy more than perfectly synced lips (necessitated creativity more interesting than boring perfection). Also, there are precious few “death drops” in the film (a move from ballroom voguing involving the dancer falling back very suddenly, which should apparently more accurately be called “dips” but come on – “death drop” works better for a horror title), but the one that occurs earns its name.

In the end, this is a fun, personal, idiosyncratic movie that manages to deliver some emotional heft through the campiness. Furthermore, that camp offers value in and of itself, bringing a stylized-vulgar-comic-grotesque-fabulous and inherently queer aesthetic to the film which, regardless of how much more common LGBT+ characters have become in popular media, is still rare and characteristic. This film is all the way over the top, embracing every flaw as a feature of high art. And finally, it really does commit to the horror, going for the gore, for the intensity of the kill in a variety of inventive, gruesome, and delightfully cringe inducing ways.  It’s a good time.

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And so there – I’ve caught up with a few films from the “Queer Horror” collection on Shudder. And there are many other titles there worth the watch, some of which I’ve already discussed here, such as Daughters of Darkness and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. I also recommend there After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (an odd French sci-fi trip), Demons of Dorothy (also French – very campy short), Hellraiser (a classic though I think mainly considered “queer horror” due to its maker), All About Evil (a fun quasi-John Waters-esque romp starring Natasha Lyonne), Tammy and The T-Rex (a surprisingly gory kids movie), and Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl (an intimate chamber piece of modern gothic). It’s a good collection and there are others I still intend to check out one of these days.

Also, I’ve managed to publish this while it’s still June – so hey, good for me. Now to figure out what I’m writing about next…

Lesbian Vampires Part III – More Modern Examples

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So here’s a little look behind-the-scenes on ye old blog. Since starting this thing, I’ve been compulsively checking Google Analytics to see if anyone is reading it.  Most weeks I get about 15-30 visits. On a low week it can hit single digits and on my best ever, I managed 77. And so I have some sense of what visitors seem to respond to. One other interesting metric I check is how often different posts have been viewed over time. It’s here that I came upon something interesting the other day. Back in August, I did two posts on the often artsy, sometimes exploitative, always beloved subgenre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film. Far and away, “Lesbian Vampires – part II” has somehow gotten more action than anything else I’ve written (far more, for some reason, than part I).

Well, as all the films I covered in those two posts were from the seventies or earlier, and I had long been planning on returning to check out some more contemporary fare, I’m going to follow what seems to be the will of the people and dig into a few more Lesbian Vampire movies – this time, all from the 1990s or later. These will all be first time watches for me, so I’m curious about a few things. Something I love about the films previously discussed is how they take place at what I think Stacie Ponder (of the blog, Final Girl, and the podcast, Gaylords of Darkness) termed the ‘intersection of arthouse and grindhouse’) – at once gorgeous, deeply felt art pieces and trashy b-movies peddling flesh and blood. Does that enticing aesthetic still carry into future endeavors? Most of the older work clearly falls within the bounds of ‘exploitation cinema’ and however much those films may (and I think they often do) carry out a progressive/feminist/emancipatory project, they were all clearly made by men for the titillation of a presumably straight male viewership. In more recent times, does the work still maintain that typical perspective of a ‘male gaze?’ Does it somehow upend it? Can you actually find a good Lesbian Vampire movie written/directed by at least one LGBT+ female-identifying person (I want to cast as wide a net as possible), and if so, beyond it being good for people to be given the room to tell their own stories, does it change anything in how those stories are told?

So, let’s find out…and, as always, there will probably be some spoilers, so be forewarned…

Nadja (1994)

This one had been on my radar for quite a while and I’m glad to have finally checked it out. But I’m also relieved I didn’t do it before last summer when I wrote about Dracula’s Daughter as it is a direct remake. Really, it’s an interesting case in terms of looking at film history, and specifically this subgenre. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda (and with David Lynch tellingly signed on as an executive producer – he also has a small cameo), this is a surprisingly faithful retelling of a film from the 30s, which embraces the dreamy qualities of a subgenre from the 70s, but is so much a product of its time – an early 90s black and white arthouse picture, frequently talky and surreal, some of it shot on a lo-res toy camcorder (when not really striking high contrast cinematography), alternatingly dwelling in genuine existential angst and cool ironic detachment. It is groovy and surreal, philosophical and pretentious, dreary, dreamy, and often quite funny. It’s a little bit of everything.

And generally, I’ve got to say it works, though in the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Especially the first time there was an ultra low-res sequence (they seem to coincide with moments when a character is under vampiric influence), I wondered if I had it in me to get through the whole thing. But somehow it is really very watchable, even captivating – striking a delicate balance between its circuitous but deeply felt philosophizing and its offbeat sense of humor. It’s atmosphere is just as rich as any of the beautiful seventies pictures that come to mind when I think of Lesbian Vampires, but it is a different kind of richness: more a heroin chic fugue state, the mind impossibly trying to muddle its way through essential questions of death and love and hate and attraction, trailing off and staring into the middle distance for a time, before sardonically joking it off and lighting another cigarette.

In terms of plot, it is very similar to its source, but there are some modernizations, some additions, and some subversions along the way. Among other things, the attraction between Nadja (the titular daughter of Dracula) and Lucy is able to be explicitly acted on in a way that would not have been possible in 1936 (the MPAA rated it R for “bizarre vampire sexuality”). Lucy is married to Jim, the nephew of Van Helsing, who (as in the original) starts the film having just been arrested for driving a stake through the heart of this seemingly harmless immigrant from Transylvania (using public domain shots of Lugosi from White Zombie).

Lucy also describes how she has lost all contact with her family as they didn’t “approve of her lifestyle” but now she’s married so they should be ok with her. She and Jim, especially under the heightened emotions of hunting and being hunted by the undead, repeatedly declare their love and need for each other, but their marriage feels barren and empty. In one night of real attraction (if not passion), she gets bound, physiologically and emotionally, to the magnetic, soft spoken Nadja, striking beneath her cowl, who happens to be into a bit of menstrual blood play. Not entirely happily (no one in this film is ever really “happy” – it’s not that kind of picture), Lucy falls under her spell.

And the film as a whole casts a mesmerizing spell as well, especially in terms of its look and sound and feel. It can be just so sumptuous sometimes, inky blacks and ivory whites cast into stark relief. Visually, it harkens back to its 1936 progenitor while also prefiguring A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (maybe I’m overstating it and it’s just that all three are b/w movies about a vampire girl in a cowl). But also, the toy camera sequences which had initially distanced me can be very effective, creating a hazy, deeply pixelated effect, which is ugly and modern, but produces a visual fog familiar for a contemporary viewer. It’s utilized in moments when a character is not in control of their mind, of their perception, and it successfully pulls the viewer into that muddled, frustrated headspace. It’s not “pretty,” but it is effective.

Returning to comparison with the 1936 film, though more explicit, this feels less focused on the element of sexuality. In that film, Countess Zaleska was driven by her relationship to (and abhorrence of) her vampirism, and her blood lust was clearly a metaphor for other desires that might have been deemed ‘unnatural’ at the time. The implication of her attraction for the fairer sex dominated the film – both forbidden and alluring – never directly spoken of, but so, so present, and her whole focus was freeing herself from her ‘curse.’

In this more recent outing, Nadja goes home with this woman who probably never should have married a man and their relationship doesn’t need to be coded. Even though Lucy speaks of past trouble with her family, in the eyes of the film, the sexuality of their encounter feels more commonplace and therefore less significant, less dominating. When her father dies, Nadja speaks of being able to make a fresh start, but I never really get the sense that she wants to stop being a vampire – or to stop being attracted to women. It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be a tragic closeted person, desperate not to be herself, but there is an erotic charge missing – being tempted by the forbidden. I wonder if in our more enlightened times it is still as possible to generate the allure of the taboo. In Nadja, we rather dig into the allure of ironic cool and poetic ennui. Ultimately, Nadja perhaps gets a better ending than Zaleska – she at least lives, but in the body of her brother’s lover, her identity now subsumed into that other woman’s. Maybe continuance is worth it, and maybe it would have been better to be murdered by her familiar and die as herself.

Ultimately, I don’t know that this moody, poetic piece really caused me to plumb the depths of our modern listless existence, but I did rather appreciate the viewing experience. Just as much a reflection of the time and place in which it was produced as Vampyros Lesbos or The Vampire Lovers, this is both a solid 90s experimental film and a surprisingly fun little vampire flick.

Blood of the Tribades (2016)

This ultra-low budget feature (approx. 20,000 USD) from Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein took me a bit by surprise. Clearly an homage to the work of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and Hammer Studios, it is a crowdfunded labor of love, full of crumbling stone edifices, diaphanous gowns,  bloody breasts, and gendered violence. It may not succeed on every level, but its love for the source material is obvious and the filmmakers do a lot with what they have. As described on their Kickstarter page, the intention was to embrace the style and atmosphere of the early 70s subgenre, while including explicit socio-political messaging. Generally it is successful on both counts. It is also one of the very few examples I’ve been able to find of a Lesbian Vampire flick (co-)directed by a woman.

The film’s premise is that 2000 years ago, the vampire Bathor established a small town of vampires as a kind of utopia and then went off to conquer the continent. Since then, the undead residents have lost their way, dividing along gender lines and seemingly having purged the village of racial others. A group of men (who all drink from a fountain of Bathor’s blood, which seems to actually be making them sick) have started hunting down the women for causing their illness, being irreligious harlots, tempting them with their flesh, and not giving them sufficient offspring. For their part, the council of women’s leaders underplay the threat and try to keep the peace, though their members keep getting crossbow bolts in their hearts whenever they disrobe. Finally, two women escape the carnage with some outcasts (who I believe had been excluded based on race), and we learn that one of them can actually read the ancient words of Bathor and return the community to its founding values (if she doesn’t get staked first).

Socio-politically, it’s not subtle (men, and at least one woman, motivated by religious zealotry, attacking women for their sexuality, murdering them for making them feel inadequate – a (white) women’s movement, which fails to include women of color and pushes for a kind of moderate incrementalism, thus enabling the men’s violence – religion being corrupted and weaponized to subjugate minority populations and punish sexual/gender expression), but it more or less works. One thing I would take issue with though is the implication that the political element is a novel addition. I think the filmmakers behind the classic 70s Lesbian Vampire films may not have brought very intentional messaging to their films, but regardless, the films themselves were deeply infused with politics, often expressing feminist sentiments, even if a given director was just trying to make something lurid to sell tickets, or simply indulging in his own personal peccadillos. For example, the climax here is directly political in its language, but at the same time, it seems to directly recreate the blood ritual of The Blood Spattered Bride, a film whose politics may have been ambivalent, but no less urgent – the politics was always there.

The question this prompts for me is how much weight should be given to intent. If Franco or Kümel created something just because they wanted it to be beautiful or sexy and along the way it happened to communicate emancipatory feminist ideals, is that less valuable than a work where that was the intention from the get go? Or is art more ‘pure’ when made without seeking to make a statement (even though a statement can so freely be read therein)? I honestly don’t know.

If anything, the film’s body politics is given increased parity. For example, while there are plenty of bosoms on display, there is easily as much male nudity. The vampiric men’s rights activists have a tendency of assailing one of their own for being insufficiently fervent in his misogyny, stripping him down, strapping him to a large bondage X and whipping him bloody with roses. It all has a vibe of repressed desire being redirected into a kind of homoerotic sado-masochism, and along the way, there are rather a lot of penises (one even flies through the air, impaled on a crossbow bolt).  On the other hand, until the final, more bloody, sexual, and tragic-romantic ritual between the two remaining ladies, while the women are often nude, there was surprisingly little suggestion of eroticism (the “tribades” of the title being an archaic word used before the inhabitants of Lesbos became unanimous with the idea of female same-sex attraction) – rather, there is a lot of child-like frolicking about. Now, did this circumvent a male gaze, freeing the female vampires from objectification (though when in this state, there are usually leering male figures, waiting to kill them) or does it infantilize the women, robbing them of sexual agency? I’m not sure, but it is a change, one which many critics focused on, stating that the film ‘subverted the sexist tropes’ of its progenitors.

One other difference is the lack of seduction. A recurring trope of the earlier films is the older Lesbian Vampire (often Carmilla) luring the young ingénue to the dark side of both vampirism and sapphism, along the way, turning her against the (often abusive) man in her life. While seductive and freeing, this could also be read as presenting an older, predatory lesbian, preying on and turning younger women. That element is wholly lacking in this case, particularly as every character in the film is already undead. There is perhaps a political merit to this, but I regretted the absence of temptation.

I came to rather like this one, but I think it’s important for a viewer to comprehend its budget in advance and therefore temper expectations. I was initially put off by what I’d deemed the “cheap” look of the film – there is some exterior photography that’s quite attractive, aided by the available locations, but the interiors suffer, particularly the men’s headquarters in which the walls are just covered with sheets, masking whatever modern space they had to work in. Past that, reading the performer’s bios, it seems that most came out of the local Boston art community, specifically, the burlesque scene, and that few had much previous film acting experience. However, knowing more about the project, I appreciate its successes more and can more easily overlook its failures. To be fair, many of the early 70s films also had quite low budgets, but benefitted from working in Europe, where there’s a desolate castle around every corner, and shooting on grainy film, which can cover shortcomings in an artful haze. It’s harder to pull off this kind of picture in the States on high def digital.

The only criticism, I would really make is that there is rather a lot of world building (the whole history of the vampire village, its founder, the religion, etc.) and I think a strength of the originals was their disinterest in logically explaining anything, instead dwelling in a space of Eros-Thanatos psycho-sexual tension. While this film commits to its inspiration’s vibe, often succeeding far better than the toy crossbows might suggest, I think the exposition undercuts some of its potential power.

Still, this was a charming watch – doing so much with limited resources, and evincing an understanding and love of what made those 70s films so special. The passion that went into the project feels somehow more palpable than with many more polished, higher budget creations.

Bit (2020)

Brad Michael Elmore’s film is just tremendous fun. If I was missing the element of seduction in the previous film, this one has it in spades. However, it is less about the allure of some mysterious woman (though there’s a bit of that), than it is that of vampirism, of power, of ‘the night’ – and the night life. Temporarily leaving aside the “Lesbian” part of the equation, something I always appreciate in my “Vampire” content is fun. I remember slogging through Interview with the Vampire, irritated with Louis’s constant moaning, only to then pick up the second book, The Vampire Lestat and feel such a breath of fresh air – Lestat loved being a vampire – it’s sexy and powerful and a really good time and he wasn’t complaining about having those things. Elmore’s movie takes a similar tack, also bringing to mind such films as The Lost Boys and The Craft.

As in those two examples, the film centers around a young person, Laurel (Nicole Maines), who comes to a new city and falls in with a gang of exciting, young supernatural types (in this case, a group of radical, feminist, lesbian vampires who (mostly) hunt predatory and/or irritating men). We understand that Laurel has been through a hard time, particularly during her just completed, final year of high school. But it’s never exactly stated what that hard time was. I’d assumed coming out, but having read later that the actress is trans, I suppose it could have been transitioning. Either way, it’s clear that leading up to this, things had been emotionally and psychologically hard and that, unsure of the direction she wants to go in her life, she needs to take some time (in this case, crashing with her older brother in LA) to find her way.

When Laurel finds herself a vampire, and further, in a like-minded community, it is thrilling and empowering – it’s also just fun. Sure – she’s a protagonist of a teen vampire movie, so she’s reluctant to kill people and comes slowly to the whole blood drinking thing, but being a part of this group just feels so good. There’s a lovely scene where after some bad stuff has gone down and Laurel has had her first kill, thus completing her transformation, she’s on the roof with the leader of the group, Duke. After filling Laurel in on some personal history (and essential exposition for the narrative), Duke offers to show her one more thing. Laurel declines, saying she can’t handle any more changes tonight, but Duke insists, saying something like, “you’ll like this – everyone likes this.” And then she shows her how to fly. And it is so sweet. It’s Lois and Superman. It’s Peter Parker swinging around the city for the first time. It is a young person who’s been through such difficulties feeling lifted and free and strong.

And before this, I have to say, I actually loved the exposition (not a sentence I often write), which was all presented in a kind of disco dance sequence as we learn of Vlad, Duke’s sire. An ancient vampire, he’d held her, and a bevy of other ‘wives,’ in his thrall for decades before she was finally able to overcome him and free herself. I loved how lame he seemed. We keep cutting to Vlad on the dance floor, surrounded by his collection of sexy ladies who have been magically made to love him, with their costumes changing periodically over the years, and he just never looks cool. There is no way he could be surrounded by women without magic. On one level, it’s just funny, but on the other, it underlines the domination, the slavery at work – which is at the heart of Duke’s socio-political drive. She’s learned the hard way that power is not safe in the hands of men.

Of course, there needs to be a story, so as in The Lost Boys and The Craft, our protagonist has to be thrust into conflict with the leader of the pack, in this case, Duke. I would rather that hadn’t been necessary, but where the story goes is still enjoyable, so ok – I’ll take it. And I appreciate how the arc of the vampire storyline is rooted in emotional character issues. Laurel struggles to balance her need to find and live her truth and fulfill her responsibilities. We learn of past suicide attempts and know that she’s had a support system of family and at least one close friend. But there is a tragic inability to do right by those that have stood by her if she is to go off and become her own complete person.

Caught up in the joys of her new un-life, she irreparably fails a dear friend. Reluctant to give into her newfound bloodlust (not letting herself fully be herself), she tries to repress it and accidentally strikes out at those she wouldn’t have normally chosen, ultimately hurting a member of her family. In refusing to hunt as Duke and the others do (going after, e.g., rapists, right wing internet trolls who tweet at young girls to kill themselves, and pretentious faux ‘allies’ who talk a big feminist game for cultural cache), Laurel inadvertently ends up breaking the key rule of ‘bite club’ and turning a man (the biggest no-no for Duke – who has a nice line about how nice it would be ‘to make every woman a vampire and let men be scared to jog at night’), which pushes the story into its final act conflict. While I would have loved to stay in the space of joyful power and sexy discovery, I do like that this turn really grew out of the character in emotionally significant ways.

Another aspect I really enjoyed is that though efforts were made to film the women and their relationships and attractions without a lecherous ‘male gaze,’ the film does not feel neutered. There is still an element of desire and sexuality. Elmore is able to establish and dwell in a space of sexual tension, playing out the flirtation and seduction without it feeling like the camera is leering. It’s a tightrope walk and I think he’s quite successful.

This is a crowd-pleasing (for the right crowd) take-back-the-night party, and it does as well by its vampirism as it does by its diverse LGBT+ characters. It’s also striking the extent to which it manages to wear its socio-political viewpoint on its sleeve without ever feeling preachy or propagandistic. Balancing the emotional truth of its protagonist, the dictates of its narrative, and its progressive perspective, it successfully delivers an equally entertaining and moving, contemporary Lesbian Vampire picture.

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So, there we have a few ‘modern’ examples of the genre. To answer my question from earlier in this post, I didn’t really find any made by a female and LGBT+ identifying person, which is a shame, but I’m glad I did watch these three. Still, I know I’ve skipped a great deal and there is still more homework to do. There is a huge gap between 1994 and 2016. I have the impression though that the Lesbian Vampire kind of disappeared into a general late night Cinemax “sexy vampire” for a stretch of the 90s and early 2000s (and many of those flicks just don’t look that interesting/good); however, she’s somewhat resurfaced of late. Also, recently, between social advancements opening doors for more people to tell their own stories, and the extent to which digital has made filmmaking so much more affordable, leading to a boom of micro-budget independent work, there is so much more explicitly ‘queer horror’ (though, for whatever reason, still vanishingly few “Lesbian Vampire” movies made by out-queer women). I wonder if this sub-genre, with one foot forever in 70s exploitation cinema, has much of a place in the current filmmaking landscape, or is it only approachable as something to either subvert or homage? I don’t know, but there are still a few other examples from the last 15 years I’d like to check out. But I’ve also watched very little Jean Rollin, and life is so short…

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!