The female vampire made her major impact in a series of films in the early 1970's based upon the fictional "Carmilla" and the very real Elizabeth Bathory. Hammer led the way with its revival of "Carmilla" in
The Vampire Lovers starring a new face, Ingrid Pitt, and an old standby, Peter Cushing. Director Roy Ward Baker emphasized Carmilla's lesbian attacks upon young women, which continued until vampire hunter Cushing, whose daughter was also under attack, caught up with her. The further adventures of Carmilla in a nineteenth-century girls' school were captured in
Lust for a Vampire, directed for Hammer by Jimmy Sangster. Pitt and Cushing were replaced by Yutte Stengard and Ralph Bates. The third film of Hammer's Carmilla trilogy,
Twins of Evil (1971), starred Katya Wyeth. She vampirized her relative, Count Karnstein and together they had to face the equally vile witch hunter Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing).
Looking for more stories to continue the success of its earlier horror movies, Hammer Films also sought inspiration from the legends of Elizabeth Bathory, whose story was brought to the screen in
Countess Dracula, with Ingrid Pitt playing the title role. The film, made as a follow-up to Pitt's earlier success in
The Vampire Lovers, was notable more for Pitt's nude scenes than for the acting. About the same time
Countess Dracula appeared, Harry Kumel released his Belgian-made film,
Daughters of Darkness featuring Delphine Seygig as a contemporary Countess Bathory, encountering a young, newly married couple. After the husband revealed himself as a sadist, the wife and Bathory joined forces and killed him. Later, the countess was killed and the wife, now a vampire, took her place. Bathory was also portrayed by Lucia Bose, Patty Shepard and Paloma Picasso (Pablo's daughter), respectively, in a series of less noteworthy films:
Legend of Blood Castle (1972),
Curse of The Devil (1973), and
Immoral Tales (1974). A delightful comedy based upon the Bathory character was
Mama Dracula (1980), starring Louise Fletcher.
Women had never enjoyed so much exposure in vampire roles as they did in the rash of Carmilla and Bathory films produced at the beginning of the 1970's. In spite of the dominance of Dracula and his male cohorts, a variety of other female vampires found their way onto the screen. Among them were
Vampyros Lesbos die erbin des Dracula (1970),
The Legendary Curse of Lemora (1973),
Lenor (1975),
Mary, Mary, Blood Mary (1975),
Lady Dracula (1977), and
Nocturna, Granddaughter of Dracula (1979).
Much of the problem with introducing female vampires to the screen, has been due to the dominance of the directing profession by men. Among the few female directors, Stephanie Rothman began her directing career with a vampire movie,
The Velvet Vampire (1971), produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The story concerns a modern-day vampire, Diana Le Fanu (played by Celeste Yarnell), who lived in the desert and invited victims to her secluded home. While the number of female directors has grown steadily, the field remains largely a male domain.
Return to top
The 1980's saw the appearance of several of the most notable female vampires, possibly the most prominent being Mariam Blaylock (played by Catherine Deneuve) as the alien vampire in the movie
The Hunger. The story centered upon the immortal Blaylock's problem: her male human partners began to age rapidly and to decay after a century or so of vampiric life. In her attempts to save her current lover (David Bowie), she seduced a blood researcher (Susan Sarandon), but in the end was unable to find a cure for their predicament. In contrast ,
Once Bitten (1985) was a delightful comedy that had Lauren Hutten as a vampire in search of virgin blood in modern-day Hollywood. Finally locating Jim Carrey, she was opposed by his girlfriend Karen Kopins, who was forced to make the ultimate sacrifice of her virginity to save him.
In
Vamp (1986), a vampiric Grace Jones managed a nightclub, After Dark, into which a group of college kids arrived, in search of a stipper for a fraternity party. While the movie suffered from an identity problem (is it a comedy or a horror movie?), Jones was memorable as her vampiric nature became visible and she vampirized one of the boys who joined her in the underground, After Dark, world.
Other female vampires of lesser note in the 1980's included Gabrielle Lazure (
La Belle Captive, 1983), Matilda May (
Lifeforce, 1985), Britt Eklund (
Beverly Hills Vamp, 1988), Sylvia Kristel (
Dracula's Widow, 1988), and Julie Carmen (
Fright Night Part 2, 1988). Several women also emerged as directors. Of these, Katt Shea Ruben (working for Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, was most prominent for her direction of
Dance of The Damned, 1988). The film didn't star a female vampire, but featured a strong woman as a potential victim who was forced to spend an evening describing the daylight to a moody vampire. The movie climaxed as the dawn approached, and the vampire finally attacked. In the end, the woman was able to fend him off.
Kathyrn Bigelow directed
Near Dark, another of the new breed of vampire movies with contemporary, nongothic settings and vampires. The story involved a band of vampires who traveled the countryside in a van. They were joined by a farmboy, who was attracted to one of the group, played by Jenny Wright. Once the young man became a vampire, he was unable to bring himself to kill and suck the blood of an innocent victim. He had to rely upon Wright to feed him. Obviously a drag upon the vampires, who had to keep moving, the story climaxed in a confrontation between them, Wright, the boy, and the boy's family.
In the early 1990's, one of the finest vampire movies featuring a female lead appeared. Anne Parilland starred in
Innocent Blood (1992) as a very careful modern vampire who had learned to survive by living according to a very precise set of rules. She did not "play" with her food, and she always cleaned up after dining. One evening, she was unable to complete her meal of a Mafia boss. He arose from her bite as a new vampire. She was forced to team up with a human cop to try and stop him. A second prominent entry in the vampire genre did not include a female vampire, but did unite Fran Rubel Kuzui with Kristy Swanson in the title role as
Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1992). A high school cheerleader, the reluctant, but athletic Buffy was designated as the Chosen One, the person who must kill the King of The Undead, played by Rutger Hauer.
Return to top
As in the movies, Dracula and his male vampire constituency dominated the twentieth-century vampire fiction area. However, some female vampires gained a foothold in the realm of the undead. Many of these have been the imaginary product of a new crop of female writers, though some of the most popular female authors - Elaine Bergstrom, P. N. Elrod, and Anne Rice - have featured male vampires.
The century began with an assortment of short stories featuring female vampires, including F. G. Loring's "The Tomb of Sarah", Hume Nisbit's "The Vampire Maid", and E. F. Benson's classic tale "Mrs. Amworth". Female vampires regularly appeared in short stories through the 1950's but were largely absent from the few vampire novels. Among the first novels to feature a female vampire was Peter Saxon's 1966
The Vampires of Finistere. Three years later Bernhardt J. Hurwood (under the pseudonym Mallory T. Knight) wrote
Dracutwig, the lighthearted adventures of the daughter of Dracula coming of age in the modern world.
In 1969, possibly the most important female vampire character appeared, not in a novel, but in comic books. Vampirella, an impish, voluptuous vampire from the planet Drakulon, originated in a comic magazine from Warren Publishing Company, at a time when vampires had disappeared from the more mainstream comic books.
Vampirella was an immediate success and ran for 112 issues before it was discontinued in 1983. The stories were novelized in 6 volumes by Ron Goulart in the mid-1970's. Most recently, the character has been revived by Harris Comics and is enjoying a new popularity.
Female vampires have continued to emerge as the subjects of novels. From the 1970's one thinks of
The Vampire Tapes by Arabella Randolphe (1977) and
The Virgin and The Vampire by Robert J. Myers (1977). These were followed by the reluctant vampirism of
Sabella by Tanith Lee (1980) and the celebrative vampirism of Whitley Strieber's
The Hunger (1981). Through 1981 and 1982, J. N. Williamson wrote a series of novels about a small town in Indiana that was home of the youthful appearing, but old vampire Lamia Zacharias and her various plots to take over the world. In spite of some real accomplishments in spreading her vampiric condition, she never reached her loftier goals. Other significant appearances by female vampires occurred in
Live Girls by Ray Garton (1987),
Black Ambrosia by Elizabeth Engstrom (1988) and the first of Nancy Collins's novels,
Sunglasses After Dark (1989), which won the Bram Stoker award for a first novel from the Horror Writers of America.
Also memorable during the 1980's was
Vamps (1987), and anthology of short stories of female vampires compiled by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles D. Waugh. It included some, often ignored nineteenth-century tales, such as Theophile Gautier's "Clarimonde" and Julian Hawthorne's "Ken Mystery", as well as more recent stories by Stephen King and Tanith Lee.
Novels featuring female vampires continued into the early 1990's. Traci Briery, for example, wrote two substantial novels,
The Vampire Memoirs (1991) and
The Vampire Journals (1992), chronicling the lives of two female vampire heroines, Mara McCuniff and Theresa Allogiamento. Kathyrn Meyer Griffith's
The Last Vampire looked into the future to explore the problems of a reluctant vampire after a wave of natural disasters had wiped out most of the human race. And not to be forgotten is
The Gilda Stories, a lesbian vampire novel by Jewelle Gomez, an African American author.
Return to top
Viewing the male vampire as a representation of the male desires for power and sex, women tended to become stereotyped as victims, and the vampire myth emerged as a misogynistic story to be constantly retold. In its worst form, so it remains. However, in modern vampire fiction, even the male bloodsucker has become a much more complicated character and the females he confronts have had much more varied roles. In contrast with the powerful male vampire, the female vampire of the 1980's emerged with the many new roles assumed by women in the larger culture and as important models (however fanciful) of female power.
A further, if much more speculative, explanation of the emerging female vampire myth has been offered by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove in their book
The Wise Wound (1978). They took a new look at old folk tales of a snake that lived in the moon and bit women, thus bringing on their menstrual flow. Shuttle and Redgrove saw the intertwined motifs of the womb, snake, and moon as integral to the vampire myth. Of some interest, they noted that when the vampire bit the young woman, the two marks usually were musch closer together than were the vampire's fangs. They appeared to be the bite marks not of an attacking vampire, but of a viper. The passive victim often responded to the vampire's bite by first bleeding and then becoming active and sexual. That is, the vampire functioned like the snake of the old myth, bringing the flow of blood that initiated a new phase of sexual existence. Such an explanation of the vampire has found a popular response among feminists attempting to deal with exclusively male appropriations of the popular myth.
Return to top
