Vampire Movies by Charles Bramesco

Author:Charles Bramesco [Charles Bramesco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

But the psychological torment and faint whiffs of lesbianism are the very pegs upon which current feminist reappraisals can be mounted. Determined scholars won’t let authorial intention get in the way of appropriating Zaleska and her many daughters to reframe them as centres of tragedy and triumph. If Zaleska inspires fear in those around her, couldn’t that be more a function of male frailty than her own intrinsic hideousness? In the real world, has stifled queer desire not been sublimated into ruinous dysfunction, sometimes even violence? She’s a casualty of her own story, not a villain. As with the concubines headlining in 1960’s The Brides of Dracula or the sapphic seductress Carmilla featured in 1960’s Blood and Roses and 1970’s The Vampire Lovers, she is too self-possessed for men to allow her to live, or at least live unperturbed.

Even the purview of the explicitly pornographic was malleable enough to invite feminist re-interpretation. Incorrigible Spanish horndog Jesús Franco didn’t have goals much headier than getting his blood pumping when he made the disreputable, self-evidently named classics Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Female Vampire (1975). Both films aspire to surface-level pleasures, primarily those of X-rated flesh and experiments with psychedelic color. The bloodsucking sirens of José Ramón Larraz’s 1974 exploitation gem Vampyres were also contrived as male playthings, trapped in a vampire porno more “porno” than “vampire.”

Their contemporary Jean Rollin brought a touch more avant-garde artistry to his sojourns through the wilds of vampire erotica. His most critically vaunted films—The Nude Vampire in 1970, The Shiver of the Vampires and Requiem for a Vampire in 1971—bask in the glow of their ripely sexual subjects, all the while smuggling in jarring formal and narrative deviations. Rollin concocts cockamamie narratives and abandons them when he loses interest; floods moonlit midnight cemetery ceremonies with luminescent reds and blues; plays a death-by-nipple-tassel scene with his tongue only half in cheek. These directors didn’t directly encode challenging political content into their films, and yet even an image as immutable as a woman grinding her pudenda against a bedpost can be wrested from its critical context and nobly warped in a feminist analysis.

Along with Harry Kümel’s 1971 film Daughters of Darkness, Franco and Rollin’s films were originally conceived through the objectifying “male gaze” of a peeping camera, fodder for masturbators with somewhat more open-minded tastes. But their presentations of unabashed female pleasure have a value beyond titillation. Some women in the present day have come to appreciate the over-the-top sexuality for its camp value, and developed a certain affinity for the exaggerated male estimate of a woman’s inner erotic workings. Anna Biller’s 2016 fever dream The Love Witch focuses on a separate supernatural terrain, but her affectionate nods to the vintage pulp cheapies that inspire her illustrates this principle all the same. So Vampyros Lesbos may not have been designed with real live lesbians in mind. Regardless, it radiates sexual heat so strongly that its go-for-broke randy spectacle still manages an entertainment value between detached bemusement and a turn-on.

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