While Carmilla is the primary historical source for 90 percent of the lesbian vampire movie, there are many for the vampire in general (there are only like two movies ever that source themselves with the American Western conception that the undead are suicides buried at a crossroads). Another touchstone is Countess Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who in the early 1600s was accused of rounding up the daughters of the lower classes, torturing and murdering them, and bathing in their virgin blood until she was tried and imprisoned until death. The veracity of these claims is iffy, but Báthory has inspired endless vampire stories, from the industrialized Australian vampires in Thirst (1979) to Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania games.
Polish Euro-sleaze god Walerian Borowczyk features Báthory in his 1973 anthology Immoral Tales, telling the story with the narrative distance of a procedural. We watch palace guards go into towns and round up blonde, gorgeous young women from the peasant class, directed by a callow young boy. The dozen-plus girls are stripped naked, asked to bathe, then herded into a room decorated only with an enormous bed. The countess (Paloma Picasso) silently arrives, head to toe in pearls. The horde of nubile blondes who have never seen such finery rip them off her dress until she is naked, orgiastically screaming over one another. Borowczyk bluntly cuts to the next scene, of the countess stepping into a basin waist deep in human blood. We watch her bathe—this is pornography, after all—and rinse herself off, only for the pageboy to disrobe and be revealed as a young woman in drag. Báthory has sex with her captive vassal/handmaiden, until the prisoner sneaks away and the guards seize the countess. We end on the young girl embracing one of the guards. Subtextually, this is heterosexuality reasserting itself as the norm, but the overwhelming feeling of the segment is of a pervasive, lesbian urge inside every woman. One that, left unchecked by a compulsory heterosexuality, can fester into a cannibalistic vanity. It’s hotter that way.
Borowczyk would have another massively charged vampire/cannibal sequence in his 1981 feature The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, which implies that this kind of ferocious sexual need that is inherent to heterosexual women, too. Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2016 fashion horror The Neon Demon combines Immoral Tales’s bloodbath scene with the blood cult of Rollin’s Fascination, making those films feel all their ’70s masculine unease with even the most prurient material. Refn, rather than giving us “elevated horror” fakebook material, allows the elements of lesbian blood cults laying in graveyards, consuming their beautiful rivals, and soaking in the moon as ritual to breathe and exist on their own merit. To feel the way those entire movies were meant to feel. The way they feel in memory before you notice how often in Jess Franco’s sex scenes that the focus slips in and out, or that all the music in Rabid is from a KPM library record. Watching Jena Malone, caked in blood, stare at her two model friends sapphically shower with one another. It’s all a dyke could ever wish for.
“Nothing in life… is ever that serious.”
Countess Báthory, played in Daughters of Darkness (1971) by Delphine Seyrig channeling Marlene Deitrich in Dishonored, is always movie-star gorgeous. Her costumes here were styled by moonlighting yé-yé singer Françoise Hardy, the most jaw-dropping of which is a silver Paco Rabanne gown that makes her shimmer like a disco ball covered in mercury even as her voice becomes more and more sinister. The countess arrives with her “secretary” Ilona (Andrea Rau), a young woman with bee-stung lips in a black bob and a coquette-core dress with a Peter Pan collar who appears to have stepped right out of a Crepax comic. Everything in the film is intentional. Every location. Every specifically drawn weird bit part (a retired policeman in a wet raincoat, a fey British gangster sugar daddy we only see for a few brief minutes, a gnarled concierge who’s been there for 40 years since he was a bellboy).
Daughters of Darkness, a movie in no rush (though it’s still under 100 minutes), begins following two young newlyweds as they take a train toward the husband’s home in England. Stefan (John Karlen) is reticent to tell his mother about their marriage; Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) is pushing him because she thinks he’s ashamed of her. We spend a lot of time with the couple, but particularly Stefan and his squirrelly connection to the truth when it comes to his relationships. Stefan has a real darkness swimming underneath his B+ David Hemmings presentation. We see him light up at the sight of a mutilated body drained of blood. He and the countess talk about the “original” Erzsébet Báthory torturing and mutilating peasant girls in a sexualized tone. Stefan beats Valerie, sublimating his shame in his home life into rage. He has a cruelty to him that he hasn’t taken the time to understand. He cheats on her with Ilona, then rapes her, and accidentally kills her when she falls on a pair of scissors. The core impulse of men, or at least Stefan in the role of “men,” is shame. The thing he is ashamed of is slippery. It appears to be his violent urges, his sexuality, his financial life, being humiliated in front of Valerie.
The vampire lore sneaks into the story in such beautiful ways. These ultra-glamorous creatures don’t have reflections, they can’t touch running water (including rain), they fear the sun. The countess is immortal and behaves as such. She is patient, calming, but demanding. She only wants you to love her. Forever. As Patricia Highsmith described Tom Ripley, the Hungarian countess is someone who is both so enticing and appealing but ultimately off-putting because she is deeply lonely. The charm has an insidious edge to it. Is it because she is manipulating, hypnotizing her prey? Or is it because she’s just someone you can’t help but adore in the same measure you pity them?
Seyrig herself is both a Nouvelle Vague icon (starring in Last Year at Marienbad, Jeanne Dielman, and Mr. Freedom) and an outspoken second-wave feminist. Her very participation elevates this material. It’s her finest performance. By far. We see her catlike smile as she talks everyone in the movie into never leaving her, into covering up a murder. We see one of the few moments of true vampirism as the countess throws open her cloak and embraces Valerie exactly like a Hollywood version of Dracula.
Belgian filmmaker Harry Kümel dabbled in theatrical horror but was mainly a director of television drama. It’s shocking that Daughters of Darkness wasn’t the culmination of a career in horror. Set in a cavernous summer resort hotel in Ostend, Belgium, during the rainy season, the film is in pursuit of something rarely addressed in the horror of the lesbian vampire milieu: tone. It is a sad, isolated movie. The viewer feels stuck in this place, but tries to make the best of it. Time expands like it does during the dull parts of a vacation. The glamour of the countess is all the more seductive.
Daughters of Darkness has the finest example of the cuckolded husband. Stefan is emotionally and physically weak. His wife is taken from him by the countess, and he doesn’t die by them killing him. He dies in a weak and effeminate way—a glass bowl slicing his wrists open when it cracks. He doesn’t even deserve violence; he has been erased and cucked and now dies by accident. While it appeared that she was pursuing Stefan, she was triangulating them to only pursue Valerie, who at first hated her. Was it because she is a beautiful woman or was there a challenge to overcome? Either way, she’s so much more interesting than yet another man who channels his shame into violence. Another loser. The countess and Valerie drive off, drunk on each other. Valerie’s personality is completely wiped, and she is nothing but a creature at the countess’s pleasure. The violence that ensues feels inevitable, as does what follows. There is endless, endless time for the intoxication of not love but desire.
It is the most famous lesbian vampire movie, likely the best lesbian vampire movie, the one sampled in Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl” (“What are you thinking about?” “The same thing you are.” Yes, it’s frustrating that it never samples that movie, but the Rollin film has a fantastic title and it’s probably Zombie’s best song and definitely his best video. Daughters of Darkness is profound because it’s the only one of these movies that feels truly composed, on a script and visual level but never compromised by bad acting or weak metaphors. It is a miracle.
Stephanie Rothman claimed to have seen Daughters of Darkness during a trip to Europe, but the timeline is a little tight, even for a Roger Corman school alum. Set in the sun-bleached desert, Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971) is the New World Pictures budget version of Kümel’s film but with some different fish to fry. A couple at an art opening is invited to a strange woman’s isolated ranch, as she toys with them, slowly revealing her manipulative intentions.
The Velvet Vampire takes a different approach to a lot of the same concepts as well as few interests of its own. The married couple here, Susan (Sherry Miles) and Lee (Michael Blodgett, who was the resident himbo in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), meet Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) and explores their sexual desires—the couple each dream of sleeping with Diane, then do; Diane spies on them in their bedroom. While the allusions are to Carmilla, the plot is much closer to the cinematic Dracula. The Velvet Vampire is very sexy, but it’s never exploitative, which may be one of the film’s flaws. American smut is a completely different lingua franca from the European porn it’s stepping up against.
Susan and Lee’s relationship has a lot more to do with an American hippie version of ’60s permissiveness. The sense of competition, one that rewards neither character, is basically what anyone complains about polyamory now, only worse. Lee seems like a philandering and resentful shit. Susan is a shrieking dingbat who visually recalls the Brady kids. Diane is perfect, smart and cool, and dresses like the evil model from Funny Face. Diane dresses up in Technicolor rayon to lie in her husband’s coffin. She wears full coverage in the sun. She drives a dune buggy. She hides behind a two-way mirror to watch her guests fuck. She’s alluring but in a fiercer brunette kind of way. The end gets a little Scooby-Doo does In the Mouth of Madness, but few Americans understood the lesbian vampire as a series of emotional negotiations and seductions.
I was speaking to a friend recently about Rothman, and I think the reason she’s important stretches beyond her actual work (which is so strong, if heavily affected by the school of filmmaking she arose from), because so many female directors make only one movie. Statistically the odds are so stacked against women that once a director makes enough movies to develop a voice, it needs to be celebrated. Being held up as an outstanding member of a minority is devaluing; watching an artist move from that space to a body of work will always be a gift.
John D. Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), which has some of the same urges as the lesbian vampire movie but more time for its lead’s psychological deterioration—its gayest urges are sublimated into the paranoia and Mariclare Costello’s vampire Emily is more of a Machiavellian force than a Carmilla, or even a Diane LeFanu. Emily’s sexualized physical contact with Jessica (Zohra Lampert) feels like an extension of just how much she owns every man in her world.
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) is massively influenced by Rothman, and The Velvet Vampire in particular, particularly in the way it shoots sunlit locations and gorgeous Technicolor costumes on 35mm. Also, in the way the two women confront one another in the film’s last reel and the way the discussions of the male character belie an unspoken attraction to/rejection of the other.
“Nothing human loves forever.”
Iconic Euro-sleaze actress Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) was one of the leading choices to star in The Hunger (1983), until director Tony Scott said no. Which she felt, along with her many failed attempts at landing a Bond girl role, kept her from ever breaking out of the pornographic pigeonhole she’d found herself in. She was replaced by Catherine Deneuve. Both women were involved with subgenre catalyst Roger Vadim. Deneuve and Vadim had a child together. While the story of The Hunger comes from author and screenwriter Whitley Strieber’s novel, and Scott seemed to have a completely different aesthetic set than the material, with connections to the heart of European art-horror. Thematically, it shares quite a lot with Daughters of Darkness, contrasting a gorgeous young actress in her sexual prime with a glamorous middle-aged New Wave icon.
The Hunger invents large chunks of Gothic iconography and gives birth to the ’80s in general. Willem Dafoe appears briefly as a featured extra, accosting Susan Sarandon at a payphone. Music videos dined out on The Hunger’s billowing curtains, blue-tinged New York streets, and strobing goth clubs. Bauhaus released an edited version of the opening credits as their video for “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” This is the first time lesbian vampires were situated in New York City, and in the ’90s, it would become the most iconic place for this subgenre. The Hunger may have been lightly disowned by stars Bowie and Sarandon (both of whom later changed their minds), but its DNA runs through a surprisingly vast amount of cinema and fiction.
Throughout his life, Tony Scott was less respected but far more beloved than his older brother Ridley. The Hunger was his first film after a decade of commercial work (Stanley Kubrick loved the Scotts and had a young Tony direct a single shot in Barry Lyndon). Comparisons to Blade Runner have always abounded—Ridley Scott likened his group of replicants to Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Both brothers sought to make glossy, commercial versions of the material put forward to them. What’s spoken about less is that Blade Runner and The Hunger are movies about creatures trying to understand their relationship to life and death in the aftermath of the sudden passing of the directors’ brother Frank.
The Hunger is the most beautiful lesbian vampire movie ever made. In a way, it’s also the most enduring, having benefited from a massive Hollywood release, even if it was critically derided as shallow to such an extent that Tony thought it impacted his career. Tony later said he modeled his first movie on Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s Performance (1970), particularly its expressive editing and graphic-first style. Additionally, The Hunger was sold on the rare acting performance by a legendary androgynous rock star (both Mick Jagger and Bowie never looked hotter in these respective films). They both only appear in a third of their movie and steal each with a charisma so totemic that they hold the eye in every scene. Bowie’s character, John Blaylock, is his own cinematic showcase, aging decades in a single scene—the waiting room that never ends. Makeup effects artist Dick Smith did the transformations throughout the movie, using his experience on The Exorcist and Little Big Man. He also did the creature effects that end the movie.
The Blaylocks, a classy European-looking couple in shades, stalk through a caged goth club as Bauhaus sing about how the world’s first and foremost goth icon was somehow dead. Frontman Peter Murphy takes his big-screen opportunity to eat the entire previous decade of rock star’s lunch. They pick out a pair of OutRun-looking 1982 goths. The goths go with the Europeans to a Hamptons manor where they are stabbed and drained of blood. The vampires shower together and return home to their Upper Manhattan brownstone.
Bowie was ending a period of massive artistic inspiration and expansion, sober-ish and recording his five best albums. He was about to release Let’s Dance, an album co-produced by Nile Rodgers and a massive reorientation toward mainstream success. This was Bowie at the precipice of becoming a different type of celebrity. While he’s very restrained in The Hunger, it’s the last moment he was the same person he was during The Man Who Fell to Earth (also directed by Tony Scott’s idol, Nicolas Roeg). This was the last time he was the Thin White Duke, Berlin Bowie. When the film came out, he was a different person in the public eye. Catherine Deneuve had existed as the classier sex symbol to many of the French starlets, having an access to an unknowable quality that directors would be mining deep into the 2000s and a frank sexuality that combined to make her the most iconic European star of her era—Deneuve in The Hunger is the same woman who appeared in Repulsion, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and, most importantly, Belle de Jour. The Freudian sexual dreams created by Buñuel of a housewife who longs for images of her husband degrading her in unspeakable ways. We see Deneuve and feel her entire career as an object of sexual obsession suddenly weaponized. Like Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness, she is a Dietrich-like creature of pure, endless calm and a damaged glamour.
Miriam Blaylock (Deneuve) is an immortal vampire, who turns John (Bowie), a French soldier she met 200 years ago. They have lived together ever since. As the film begins, what they have been treating as immortality is catching up with John. After seeing gerontologist Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon, in her finest role) on television describing her study of how lack of sleep is causing rapid aging in chimps, John goes to ask her of a way to stop his accelerated decrepitude. Sarah blows off John and then is aghast at his sudden decrepitude. Miriam puts a decaying John in a crate in her attic just before Sarah appears at her door.
What then plays out is one of the great Hollywood cliché love scenes, in which an either enchanted or tipsy Sarah intentionally spills wine on her white T-shirt and the two women end up in bed together, wind billowing drapes from off-screen. A brilliant detail in The Hunger is how the kills early on make you think it’s a kind of distanced take on the vampire lore, saving the introduction of traditional fanged bite marks for the first sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon’s characters. We don’t even see them; we watch two trails of blood flowing down Sarah’s arm. Sarandon has never been as beautiful or more in control of her physicality—she became more of a movie star as she matured, but here she’s so magnetic yet feels like a real person next to these two ethereal creatures.
The rest of the film is a dance between Miriam and Sarah, who doesn’t feel particularly in love or want to kill or live forever as an “addict.” Miriam wants another partner, another lover to stay with her for a few hundred years, to fuck and kill alongside. The parallels to both drug addiction and AIDS are strongly implied in Strieber’s original story, as with many ’80s and ’90s vampire stories. Miriam very calmly tells Sarah with a planetary gravity that her love is forever.
The most fantastic part of The Hunger, beyond the sex and the direction, is how fiercely Sarah decides against her heterosexuality, grinning with a glowing elation as she drinks her useless boyfriend’s throat dry, his blood sopping down her neck from her grin as she walks into the climax. This is a very gay movie, likely more gay than the entire cast and crew involved. While so many of the lesbian vampire films have the feeling of queerness as created for straight men, The Hunger has a different vibe that feels like it’s an anti-heterosexual work of art accidentally made by cis het men. The utter disgust Sarah feels for her boyfriend, men on the street, etc. is so overwhelming that it cuts through the story they are telling.
People love Tony Scott because of his expressive nature, his commitment to the image as a painter turned photographer, as a messy person who frequently made films about self-destructive characters saving worlds they are not allowed to inhabit. His career-long collaboration with Denzel Washington was so strong because they’re both mainstream blockbuster entertainers working from a place of hurt and contempt, despite the warm nature at the heart of both men. Sarah is the first of those characters, willing to throw ecstasy away in order to be an individual, even if it kills her. The studio-mandated ending where she survives doesn’t change this. The urge to self-destruct for her principles is right there. The final scene shows Miriam torn apart by the undead corpses of her loves, who truly never die, no matter how destroyed they are by age and time. While the female vampire seducing the heroine away from heterosexuality is often destroyed, rarely are both the cucked male and the vampire equally discarded. Perhaps The Hunger feels so gay because the sex feels positive and no one is punished for it, at least not in the established rhythms of this movie. The Hunger covers much, much more ground and has endless amounts to say. It’s a movie discussing age versus youth, or one talking about age gaps in queer relationships. Here, it’s predatory on both ends. European style colliding with the commercial mainstream to create a new slick hybrid. You could discuss it forever… forever. 🩸
Next time: Lost in New York
is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
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