Byzantium – Bitch Flicks

Violent Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the Teeth by Belle Artiquez

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

Salt: A Refreshing Genderless Lens by Cameron Airen

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it.

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on Vikings by Lisa Bolekaja

In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama Vikings.

Emotional Violence, Kink, and The Duke of Burgundy by Rushaa Louise Hamid

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.

Violence and Morality in The 100 by Esther Nassaris

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Five by Brooke Bennett

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies by Sara Century

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in The Americans by Dan Jordan

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Monster: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women by Danika Kimball

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Stoker–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms by Julie Mills

Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

Sons of Anarchy: Female Violence, Feminist Care by Leigh Kolb

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in Monster, Teeth, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Colleen Clemens

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

Hard Candy: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection by Emma Kat Richardson

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

High Tension: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence by Laura Minor

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s Medea by Brigit McCone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in Misery by Tessa Racked

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen by Ren Jender

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity by Katherine Parker-Hay

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women by Melissa-Kelly Franklin

The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked by Kate Blair

To a certain extent, the reveal of woman as killer in both films comes across as a “gotcha” moment. After an hour or so of being scared out of your wits, it’s both surprising and puzzling to see a woman emerge as the killer. In the real world, most documented violent crimes are committed by men, but in a film, where anything can happen, there’s no reason to make this assumption.

“Did I Step on Your Moment?” The Seductive and Psychological Violence of Female Superheroes by Mary Iannone

This style of fighting codes our female superheroes as half menacing and half attractive – we are meant to be afraid of them, but also enticed by them. Their violence is inextricably linked to their sexuality.

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film by Laura Power

As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road Divorce Violence from Strength by Cate Young

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in Violet & Daisy by Caroline Madden

The character of Daisy personifies the film’s juxtaposition of violence and girlhood. Daisy loves cute animals and doesn’t understand Violet’s dirty jokes. The twist is even that she has not really killed anyone, thus remaining innocent of all crimes. The opening scene displays the most daring oppositional iconography — the young girls dress as nuns, the ultimate image of pure goodness, while having a shoot ‘em up with a gang.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence by Katherine Fusciardi

True, the rape revenge trope has been put at bay, but there is still a gender issue behind the remaining motivation. It focuses around the assumption of maternity being the all-encompassing passion. Until female characters can be violent for reasons that have nothing to do with their womanhood, there still isn’t complete equality in media.

How Spring Breakers Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence by Emma Houxbois

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day by Sophie Hall

Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: Ginger Snaps by Kelly Piercy

Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out?

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of Once Upon a Time by Emma Thomas

In the past, Regina’s path to control is lined with dark magic. Dark magic is fueled by her anger, and the two intersect endlessly until it is hard to tell whether Regina is controlling the anger, or the anger is controlling her. What is definitive is that the more her power grows the more violent she becomes. With the only person who offered her a loving future dead, there is no one to rein her in.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s Repulsion by Johanna Mackin

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by Sarah Smyth

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy, and authority.

TV and Classic Literature: Is The 100 like Lord of the Flies? by Rowan Ellis

On the contrary, Octavia moves away from the explicit sexuality of her role in the pilot, and although her initial training is linked to Lincoln, she gravitates toward a warrior’s life to gain the respect of Indra. Although some critics have seen this as a drastic change in her characterisation, looking back at her first scene in the pilot, where she is held back by Bellamy while trying to attack the others for repeating rumours about her, it feels more like a development.

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension by Rebecca Willoughby

In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women by Julia Patt

Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

This guest post by Melissa-Kelly Franklin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

The apocryphal notion that women are intrinsically sensitive, gentle and maternal is an old one, so we rarely see aggressive women in film and television unless they’re either trying to protect themselves or are seriously unhinged. Sara Century writes that female characters are “so often victims, but even when they’re violent criminals, that violence is either quickly punished, or it’s normalised and reduced by audiences and creators alike.” It would seem that even the notion that women could stray so far from their natures as to be capable of serious violence is utterly inconceivable outside the context of self-preservation, or the protection of children. Well-trodden is the trope that a woman would do absolutely anything to protect her child; so violent acts by women can be easily explained away with the justification that their maternal instincts are kicking in, thereby restoring women to their place in the “natural order.” Similarly, rape-revenge is often used as a catalyst for driving women to violence, using rape as a means of pushing a character to her extreme, thereby asserting that only horrific trauma can compel a woman to act outside of socially constructed notions of gender. Neither of these reasons are shallow or unjustified – and I’d much rather see a female character take control, retaliate and fight back, than see her as a passive victim. However, what these more commonplace depictions of violent women do, is silence other motivations which might see women as actively engaging in calculated acts of violence for personal and political reasons.

Portrayals of calculated violence by women are few and far between. Sure, there is the recently released Suffragette, which portrays the militant action of the London-based suffragette movement, but as others have highlighted, it’s taken a good 100 years for that to see the light of day; and other celebrated examples of female violence in films like Alien and Terminator see women forced into violence to protect themselves and their families. (Megan Kearns wrote an interesting piece for Bitch Flicks about Sarah Connor’s identity being inextricably tied to motherhood and her baby-making potential.) So whether she’s saving her biological children, or her wider human “family,” these violent women subliminally remind us that women’s role in society is as nurturer, protector and mother.

Two films that throw the proverbial spanner in the patriarchal works are the feminist vampire films Byzantium by Neil Jordan, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour. The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one. Both films reflect the social anxieties surrounding such subversive women – the notion that violent women violate the very laws of nature – making these idealised givers of life quite literally, harbingers of death. The subversion of traditional gender constructs within these films depict women actively working outside social norms, effectively using violent women within the vampire genre as a symbol of feminist activism.

In Byzantium, Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) are a vampire mother and daughter duo living rough and on the run from a vampire brotherhood – all because Clara had the gall to disobey their sexist code forbidding women from creating more of their kind. As Katherine Murray discerningly points out, this is a rare vampire film where the vampire-protagonists are not rolling in cash or occupying vast estates, suggesting that we can easily attribute this to “the lack of opportunity they’ve had as women.” For over a century Clara and Eleanor have been relentlessly pursued by the brotherhood with the intention of killing the “aberration” that is Eleanor, thus restoring the status quo within their previously exclusive invitation-only boys club. Jordan introduces us to Clara and Eleanor’s desperate situation in a high-octane chase at the start of the film, which culminates in Clara’s capture. Believing he is close to finally achieving their aim, one of Clara’s assailants tells her, “I feel a great peace. As if order is about to be restored.” From the outset the film establishes an Us vs Them dichotomy, emphasising how everyone who chooses to function outside of patriarchal gender constructs is inevitably punished. Clara’s response? She shuts him up by taking off his head.

It appears throughout the film that Clara’s prevailing motivation is to protect the life of her daughter, making her one of the “violent mother” character types, but her acts of violence clearly go beyond protecting her daughter. Clara and Eleanor are targeted because they dared to violate the sacred code of the vampire brotherhood (a not even thinly veiled allusion to patriarchy) and the balance of power must be restored. The brotherhood is not actively seeking Clara’s death, rather they want to destroy the product of her disobedience – the reminder that Clara is the loose cannon that refuses to conform to their arbitrary gender rules. In their world, women are even denied the intrinsically feminine power to reproduce, as “women aren’t permitted to create.” While it is resoundingly clear that Clara would go to any lengths to protect her daughter, she is also driven by the desire for freedom so they can live unfettered by social rules which say they cannot do, say or share the same privileges that men enjoy. Clara’s deeply felt respect for individuality, freedom and personhood is made poignantly clear at the end of the film, when she acknowledges that Eleanor should make her own way in the world and discover her identity apart from being a daughter.

The boys gather to chat about whether Clara (Gemma Arterton) should be allowed to join their vampire club

Clara’s targeted attacks against patriarchy aren’t limited to members of the vampire brotherhood. The exploitation and persecution of women is also seen in the human world of the film. Desperate and struggling women are seen throughout the first half of the film, from the lone, drugged girl that Eleanor discovers barely conscious on a park bench, to the sex-worker being taunted by promises of a cigarette by the pimp in the amusement park. Clara sees an opportunity to gather together these women and free them from the power of the odious pimp, by first seducing him, then killing him. Clara’s rescue of the girls may well be self-motivated, but by taking them out of the hands of the pimp and into her matriarchy at the Byzantium hotel, she provides them with a safer, cleaner and fairer environment in which to work. And in case we didn’t get that this act of violence was done for a good cause, she croons to his corpse, “the world will be a better place without you.”

While we might laud Clara’s vigilantism, we feel conflicted in our admiration for her badass defiance of convention in the high-tension scene where she kills Eleanor’s teacher. We struggle more with this kill than previous ones, as the teacher is well-intentioned, inspires his students and is genuinely concerned for Eleanor’s welfare. It’s clear that Clara undertakes this execution to keep their secret and preserve their liberty, but the way she relishes her torturous performance leading up to the kill is chilling. We get a brief insight into why Clara isn’t about to take any risks on letting this man live. She tells him that once “I made a fatal error. I was merciful.” That mercy lead to the rape of her daughter, and her punishment for saving her is to be pursued for over a century by a brotherhood that seeks their destruction. While the murder is not justifiable, it’s understandable that Clara would have some serious issues trusting educated white men in positions of authority, and would not give pause to eliminating the threat. This scene reveals the desperation and degradation of the individual – and the wider repercussions – when denied all agency and personhood.

On the hunt: Clara’s first kill as a newborn vampire

Female agency – or lack thereof – is a similarly prevalent theme in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Like Clara and Eleanor of Byzantium, the women in Amirpour’s film are searching for a way to free themselves from patriarchal oppression. Sex-worker Atti (Mozhan Marno) saves every cent and dreams of escaping Bad City to explore the places marked out on the huge map on her wall, and even the more privileged daughter of a wealthy family feels the need to conform to conventional beauty standards by having a nose-job. Only the Girl (i.e. the vampire protagonist played by Sheila Vand) moves freely about the city, addressing oppression with her own form of violent justice. The title of the film effectively draws on the inherent vulnerability ascribed to a lone woman at night in order to subvert our expectations of the narrative. In this film, the girl walking home alone is not the potential victim, but rather, the predator. In a nail-biting, but darkly comic illustration of this idea, the Girl meets a sweet, good-looking young man named Arash (Arash Marandi), drugged up from a party and dressed as Dracula. In his stupor he assures her that he wont hurt her, and in delicious moment of dramatic irony, we know that the Girl may well hurt him. Fortunately for Arash, something about his lost-kitten like vulnerability touches her, and a romantic connection between them develops.

Will she or won’t she? The Girl takes Arash home after finding him lost and alone one night

The Girl’s acts of violence are never gratuitous. Her first kill of the film is the pimp, Saeed, whom she witnesses taunt Atti and refuse to pay her, forcing her perform oral sex as an inducement. The Girl observes from a distance with eerie, omnipotent stillness. When Saeed later takes the Girl home and attempts to get physical with her (his seductive dance moves are met with a subtle eye-roll from the Girl which is just priceless), she attacks him, drinks him dry and steals his valuables to give to Atti later. As Ren Jender suggests, this vampire is a vigilante who stalks the streets of Bad City satiating her hunger only on exploitative men who mistreat desperate women.

Later in the film we see Arash’s drug-riddled father visit Atti. He watches her dance sensually, then insists that they share some drugs. When she refuses adamantly, making it clear she doesn’t want any of Hossein’s kind of “good time,” he decides to enforce the ‘fun’. In a moment looking disturbingly like a potential rape, he whips off his belt, binds Atti’s hands and violates her by forcibly injecting the drugs. While stalking the streets nearby, the Girl’s hypersensitive instincts alert her to Atti’s situation, and she swoops in like an avenging angel to show Hossein once and for all that no means no.

There is one terrifyingly menacing scene when the Girl probes a little boy with questions, asking if he is good. “Don’t lie” she hisses, terrorising him with the threat of taking out his eyes if he’s ever bad. It’s an easy conclusion to draw that by ‘good’ she means not growing up to become like the exploitative men of Bad City. The threatened eye-gouging punishment is a clear symbol of her preventing him from ever seeing, and thereby objectifying women. While there is no physical violence in this moment, the mere threat of it is enough to achieve her aim. The Girl is the stuff of misogynists’ nightmares.

“I’ll be watching,” the Girl warns the Street Urchin, and she always is

Both Byzantium and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night suggest that action against sexism and misogyny should be targeted and dramatic. Society has always deemed violent women as creatures to be feared, as by eschewing established gender structures they are unpredictable and uncontrollable, violating the supposedly natural laws that define their femininity. That’s not to say these films encourage bloody, criminal violence, rather they advocate the rejection of restrictive social constructs of femininity in redressing gender imbalance, using violent women characters as a potent symbol of feminist activism.

Melissa–Kelly Franklin is an international filmmaker, writer and actress collaborating in London, Bristol and Berlin. She holds an honours degree in English Literature and History, with one film soon to be released and another cooking in pre-production. Updates about her work can be found at melissa-kellyfranklin.tumblr.com and she occasionally tweets at @MelissaKelly_F.

When Dead People Have Something Useful to Say: Sexuality and Feminism in Neil Jordan’s Vampire Movies

Neil Jordan is best known for ‘The Crying Game’ —aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Neil Jordan is best known for The Crying Game —aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Interview with the Vampire is unusually relaxed about its LGBT content, especially given that it came out 20 years ago, in 1994 (a special anniversary blu-ray will be available soon). It’s a mainstream Hollywood movie about a bisexual man finding the self-esteem to leave an emotionally abusive relationship, and it has bankable A-list actors – one of whom famously sues people for saying he’s gay – in the lead roles.

Yet, it’s not remembered as being especially controversial. The characters don’t have sex – in the Rice verse, vampires are pretty much impotent and only get off on biting – but it’s clear that Brad Pitt’s character, Louis, is in two separate homosexual relationships over the course of the film. Interview was marketed as a vampire movie, though, rather than a gay romance, and the fact that people are biting each other rather than kissing apparently masks all other content.

In fact, “They’re vampires!” seems to mask many of the emotional and interpersonal dynamics in the film, which is kind of a shame, since Interview with the Vampire is a very complicated, well-dramatized story about co-dependency and toxic, emotionally abusive or incestuous relationships. The fact that at least two of these relationships are homosexual is treated as No Big Deal by the movie, and could potentially sail right past you – I guess – because of the fangs.

The female vampire, Claudia (played by a 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst), is literally an adult woman trapped in a child’s body, but she’s also a representation of how her fathers’ infantilizing treatment of her has kept her from becoming independent. When Lestat (Tom Cruise) turns her into a vampire, he does it specifically to manipulate Louis, after Louis threatens to leave him – it’s not about wanting a child, or wanting Claudia, specifically; it’s about wanting another thing to control and another avenue to control what he already has. We find out later in the film that what he’s done is forbidden – that vampires generally feel it’s wrong to create something that can’t survive on its own; a creature that will be trapped with you through its dependency.

Claudia is never allowed to become an adult and, since she and Louis are both victimized by Lestat, they form an emotionally incestuous bond that’s based on his taking care of her, and her being (sort of) his wife. She’s afraid that he’s going to leave her; he feels guilty about what will happen if he tries to strike out on his own.

In the end, Louis finds a new boyfriend, who murders Claudia in order to have Louis to himself and, at that point, Louis realizes that he can’t spend the rest of eternity taking care of people – whether it’s Lestat, or Claudia, or this new guy – and he decides to go live by himself, at which point he discovers that that possibility is not as terrible as he imagined.

“They’re vampires!” certainly adds an extra layer of interest to the story, and creates lots of opportunities for gory, stylized violence, but it’s the all-too-boring, all-too-common human dynamic beneath it that makes the vampire stuff worthwhile. It’s a story that spans centuries and uses fantastical elements like, “Look, this child can never grow up!” to touch on deeper reflections about dysfunctional relationships, boundaries, and self-esteem. The fact that it snuck the idea of two gay/bisexual men raising a child together into popular culture is just an added bonus.

Jordan revisits some of the same themes in his less well-known but more political vampire movie, Byzantium (2012), written by Moira Buffini.

More in-your-face than Interview with the Vampire, Byzantium tells the story of Clara and Eleanor Webb (Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan), a vampire mother and daughter on the run from others of their kind who want to kill them.

Most of the story takes place in the present day, but flashbacks slowly reveal the tale of how Clara (who is Eleanor’s biological mother as well as her vampire!mother) was forced into a life of prostitution by a misogynist naval officer, Captain Ruthven, and later stole the map to immortality from him.

The way we get this information is really ham-fisted, and it’s lacking in any kind of subtlety or emotional weight, but the idea is important. Ruthven comes by the map in the first place because local Nice Guy, Darvell, who thinks of himself as a good person, invites Ruthven to join his Secret Special Amazing Fraternity of Super Cool Dudes, knowing that Ruthven viciously destroyed Clara’s life. He feels sorry for her, but the idea that Ruthven is responsible for doing this to her is in no way incompatible, for him, with the idea that Ruthven is the kind of guy you’d want to be blood brothers with for eternity.

When Clara steals the map to the supernatural cave that turns people into vampires (just go with it), Darvell gets pissed-off and tells her that she ruined everything by becoming the first female vampire. She’s forbidden from turning anyone else, but, when Ruthven attacks Eleanor as revenge for Clara stealing his map, Clara brings Eleanor to the cave and makes her a vampire, too. Nice Guy Darvell spends the next two hundred years trying to kill them because they wrecked his super special brotherhood.

Along the way to driving home this point about women’s equality, Byzantium also explores the uncomfortable dynamic between Clara and Eleanor, where they’re more like sisters than parent and child – partly owing to the fact that Clara was so young when she gave birth to Eleanor – and the uncomfortable way in which Clara keeps resorting to prostitution as a way of making money. (This is maybe the only vampire movie where the vampires are not somehow rich, and you can easily trace it to the lack of opportunity they’ve had as women).

In the end – spoiler, spoiler – Darvell finally figures out that he’s being an asshole, and Clara figures out that Eleanor needs to have her own life rather than being a project for Clara to work on.

Byzantium is not a subtle movie, but it’s interesting in that it uses the long life of vampires to trace the social position that women have held in Western culture, over the past 200 years. When we first meet Clara, she isn’t even treated as a person – in fact, she steals personhood from a group of men, and passes it onto her daughter, making her public enemy number one. Flash forward to the present, and it’s ridiculous to suggest that Clara and Eleanor aren’t people – so ridiculous that even Darvell comes around to the idea, in the end.

It’s a very different narrative about vampirism than the one where male aristocrats get to hang out being rich and good-looking, luring women toward them in some kind of magical thrall. It’s a narrative that takes into account that the world looks different depending on whether you’re standing on top, or getting your face stomped in, down below.

Whereas Interview with the Vampire has a more general message that isn’t specifically about being gay, and casually pulls in gay characters, Byzantium is much more overtly political, and much more about articulating an experience that is specifically female. Both approaches are interesting, and both offer something more than “They’re vampires!” to steer the story.

Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium are both movies that use their supernatural elements as a springboard for exploring social and psychological content that’s relevant to the world we live in. Rather than using real-life issues as window-dressing (True Blood), or being purely escapist (Twilight, Dracula), Neil Jordan’s vampire movies (and the source works they’re based on) show how you can re-imagine the vampire in different, less superficial ways, based on what kind of analogy you’re trying to make.

We’re living in a time of vampire saturation, but it’s a (blood) well that doesn’t actually have to run dry. As long as “vampire” is tied to something more than having fangs, I’ll keep watching these movies forever.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.