Ironically, the biggest explosion of lesbian vampire films in the ‘70s — typified the explicit B-movies of Britain’s Hammer Studio and the art-house erotica of European directors like Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco — was mostly born from a desire to please a heterosexual male audience. “The archetypal lesbian vampire rose to prominence at the exact point in time when the concept of lesbian identity was first coming into widespread public discourse, namely the early 1970s,” writes filmmaker Andrea Weiss, in an updated prologue to her 1993 book Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema. “Indeed, that particular image of the lesbian vampire represented a displacement of anxiety over the potential for the lesbian feminist movement.”
As she outlines in her book, many of the horror flicks of the ‘70s feature intimate scenes between a woman and a female vampire — both always thin, white, and high femme presenting — that seemed constructed for a “male pornographic fantasy.” In the end, the lesbian vampire would be killed off by the male protagonist, reaffirming that the heterosexual man reigns supreme and brings order back to the world. The final nail in the coffin? Hammer Studio’s screenwriter Tudor Gates has claimed that they used lesbian storylines as a tactic against the British Board of Film Censors: graphic sexual imagery was “considered more acceptable within the supernatural,” therefore more likely to slip past the censors.
Though many of these films were problematic, queer viewers who didn’t have access to any other lesbian representation in the media took what they could get at the time. Since then, many have begun to enjoy vintage lesbian vampire films as an act of reclamation. “While the vampiress may have once represented amorality, the perils of giving into queer desires, or lesbian predation, it now feels safe to reconsider,” Fonseca writes. “I personally think she can tell us a lot about the pitfalls of codependent queer relationships, harder truths about compulsory heterosexuality (ever notice how these vamps are almost always tied to a man of some sort?), and even our own kinky preferences.” Weiss also notes that lesbians have now enjoy these movies specifically because they watch them through a campy lens: “Camp creates the space for an identification with the vampire’s secret, forbidden sexuality which doesn’t also demand participation in one’s own victimization as a requisite for cinematic pleasure.”
Plus, there are a handful of films that sought to subvert the typical lesbian vampire trope. There’s Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), a cult favorite due to its high-profile allure: a stylish French vampire (Catherine Deneuve) seeks to seduce a more butch American (Susan Sarandon) outside of her existing relationship with a man (David Bowie). But it also includes a certain, more tasteful sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon’s characters that had lesbians rewinding over and over again in the ‘80s, Weiss claims. “There was something that had an erotic element for lesbians that wasn’t specifically camp,” Weiss tells me over the phone. “[Viewers] weren’t trying to subvert the intention of the scene. Lesbians were actually getting something from it that didn’t require them to do these kind of cartwheels that they would do for scenes that were clearly made for the sexual titillation of men.”
