ABSTRACT

The representation of women in the vampire film opens up a number of areas for study: woman as lesbian vampire; woman as victim; woman as creature; gender and metamorphosis; abjection and the maternal. In The Vampire Lovers this threat is visibly reinforced through the comparison of the stiff, unbending postures of the fathers and the sensual, eroticized bodies of the women. The female vampire is abject because she disrupts identity and order; driven by her lust for blood, she does not respect the dictates of the law which set down the rules of proper sexual conduct. Like the male, the female vampire also represents abjection because she crosses the boundary between the living and dead, the human and animal. In The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott, the vampire is represented as a particularly abject figure because it is female and therefore associated more closely with woman's blood.