ABSTRACT
The female vampire, like her sister icon the Virgin Mary, mediates between the world of the living and the otherworld of the dead. The key to the seductive and fascinating powers of the female vampire, from Coleridge’s Christabel (first published in 1816) to Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), is their overt queer sexuality which is constructed as a metaphysical, and supernatural, phenomenon. Rather than see the female vampire within the feminist tradition as the reproduction of patriarchal fear of women as ‘other’, I want to expand the theorisation to take into account the seductive power of the vampire and show how it is that she still seems to maintain a place, at some level, within the fantasies of many women with diverse sexual identities. This fascination is borne out by contemporary reworkings of the vampire genre in the short stories of
Pat Califia (The Vampire), Angela Carter (The Lady of the House of Love), Anne Rice (Interview with a Vampire trilogy), the presence of vampire imagery in Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body and in the film Mark of Lilith (Fionda, Gladwin and Nataf 1986). I will argue that the queer female vampire presents us with a duplicitous message —she is both the production of patriarchal and heterosexist fear and, at the same time as she foregrounds the fears and terrors of the dominant ideology, she is also a popular articulation which breaks the silence about same sex desire. Later in this essay I will look at two vampire films in detail. These are Crypt of Horror (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1965 and rated 15 in the UK) and Vampyres (Joseph Larraz, 1976 and rated 18 in the UK) which I believe best exemplify queer desire at work in mainstream vampire films, and which are absent from Andrea Weiss’s chapter on the Vampire genre in Vampires and Violets.
