Daughters of Darkness: Exploring Sapphic Vampirism in Films with Morgan Dante

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While much has been said about queer vampire men in works such as Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and its adaptations, this paper focuses on the wave of sapphic vampire movies in the Seventies and Eighties. It explores how these films embody the Gothic tension and contradictions between monstrosity, death, repression, and sex—but they offer the possibility for transgressive, creative ways to explore sapphic relationships in horror through offering another route: freedom from social mores through vampirism.

Films like The Vampires Lovers bloodily explore repressed sapphic desire and present a tension between desire and blood and death (what Julia Kristeva calls the abject). Arguments can be made whether these stories are regressive or transgressive in how they present queer women. With the portrayal of lesbian desire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the predatory sapphic vampire is a threat to the ingénue; often, the sapphic vampire or her female lover meet a grisly end. However, using figures such as Elizabeth Báthory and Carmilla, these films explore bold and morally gray women and critique the suppression of women’s freedoms under patriarchy or fascism, such as when The Blood-Spattered Bride depicts a soldier’s sexually unsatisfied wife in Francisco Franco’s Spain. Other films of interest include Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, Jean Rollin’s The Shiver of the Vampire, and José Ramón Larraz’s Vampyres. A more contemporary successor of these films is arguably Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body.