Vampires – Bitch Flicks

‘The Transfiguration’ Offers Insights into Vampirism and How Our Experiences Shape Us

The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I have a confession to make: I am so taken with the idea of being a literal vampire that it completely escaped my notice that Michael O’Shea’s film, The Transfiguration, may not be about literal vampires.

The film, which premiered at Cannes last year and opens in limited release this month, follows Milo (Eric Ruffin), a teenager who’s even more obsessed with vampires than I am. Milo, who we learn early on has been seeing a counselor about his violent impulses, gets beat up by local gang members during the day and stalks the streets at night, cutting his victims with a knife and drinking their blood. He keeps detailed journals explaining the “rules” of vampirism as he’s learned to understand them and he never socializes with anyone except his older brother and, as the film progresses, a neighbor girl named Sophie (Chloe Levine). Sophie has a much more casual, romantic interest in vampires, preferring popular works like Twilight and True Blood over Milo’s darker, more refined tastes – Let the Right One In, a Swedish film that shares more than a couple of plot points with The Transfiguration, is his favorite.

As Milo starts to care for Sophie, he also starts to see himself through her eyes and to question some of the choices he’s made, as well as some of the rules he’s learned about vampires. He also starts to reflect on how he became a vampire in the first place, an origin story that has less to do with being bitten by a stranger and more to do with witnessing his mother’s suicide. Eventually, like the sun setting over the course of a month, a heavy existential question settles over the film: if this is what Milo’s experiences have already made him, what comes next?

The Transfiguration is a slow-moving but confident film that uses the idea of vampires in a way I haven’t seen before – which is saying something, considering how omnipresent vampires were just a few years ago. As many other critics have pointed out (to me), it’s never entirely clear whether Milo has literally become a vampire, or if he’s just a messed-up kid who kills people and drinks their blood – and it doesn’t need to be clear. The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Shot “guerrilla-style” by a first-time filmmaker, it’s impressive that The Transfiguration even exists, and that O’Shea and his director of photography, Sung Rae Cho, were able to create an unconventional horror film that can stand side by side with indie and art house offerings at festivals around the world. The understated performance from the two young leads, Eric Ruffin and Chloe Levine, also helps to maintain the difficult balancing act between the real and the supernatural. That said, The Transfiguration is better at asking existential questions than it is at answering them and the film’s final act is a bit of a downer.

In that respect, it reminds me of another weird movie with a problematic ending: Sony’s 2012 sci-fi film, Looper. Although I liked Looper a lot, the movie’s resolution, and its message [spoiler] that its main character should kill himself so that he doesn’t ruin someone else’s life, rubbed me the wrong way. Like The Transfiguration, Looper is a complicated story about destiny, the role of formative experiences, and the question of whether someone who has internalized a very deep trauma and lashes out in violent ways has any possible path toward redemption. That question is not academic to some people; it’s something they struggle with in real life, and I hope they will not conclude that the answer is “Once a monster, always a monster.”

The Transfiguration is less glib about this question than Looper is, but it definitely seems to take the position that, after life has placed you on a particular path, you walk it until you die.

For me, the most interesting character in The Transfiguration is actually Milo’s taciturn brother, Lewis (Aaron Moten). What we know of him, we only know from a single scene late in the film, but he was, apparently, a part of the neighborhood gang before withdrawing for unspecified reasons. He served in the military for some period of time and saw people get blown to pieces overseas. And, in the single scene where he talks for more than five seconds, he soberly and surely tells Milo that, no matter how bad he feels for whatever he’s been doing, there are people all over the world doing something a million times worse. This is a moral philosophy that’s both true and incomplete, but it’s fascinating because it’s about how you go on living – and that’s something we only do when we haven’t given up on ourselves as being a lost cause.

By contrast, the least interesting characters are the undifferentiated clump of gang members who apparently have nothing better to do than to terrorize middle school kids. Nothing about them feels particularly real to me, and it seems like they exist only to fulfill a plot purpose and to serve as a vague reminder that young men with histories like Milo’s can grow up to be killers even without getting weird and vampiric about it.

The Transfiguration is an uneven film with an uncomfortably pessimistic ending, but it’s rescued by its insight into Vampire as monster and the way it leverages that insight to examine the human condition.

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

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark’: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, ‘Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, ‘Near Dark’ will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

There were many reasons why I felt like an outsider while studying film and television production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some were related to class; I felt as though everyone around me had more money (and fewer student loans). Some were related to my lack of practical production experience; prior to film school, I had never operated a camera apart from a few silly movies starring action figures. Some reasons, I am willing to admit, were inside my own introverted, antisocial head. However, it was my taste in film that really made me feel as though I did not belong at a school with “arts” in its name. I like action movies packed with stylish fight sequences, zombie movies so gory that every frame is splattered with brains, and science-fiction movies crammed with special effects. As a writer and director, I aspired to be Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Robert Rodriguez all rolled into one frenetic package, which makes you feel a bit awkward when everyone around you worships at the art-house altars of David Lynch and Terrence Malick. It’s also a bit awkward when you realize that all of the directors you look up to are men.

When I was in my final year at NYU, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. This was already a big deal, but it was all the more important to me because she had won it for directing The Hurt Locker, a tense, literally explosive drama about a troubled bomb diffuser in Iraq. Here was a woman making films that were dark, disturbing, visually compelling and packed with action — all things I aspired to include in my own work — and getting recognized for it by the Hollywood establishment. Delving deep into Bigelow’s wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes Soviet submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker and Keanu classic Point Break, inspired and reassured me while I was struggling to pinpoint my own identity, both as a filmmaker and a woman.

My favorite Kathryn Bigelow film, and the one I feel the most kinship with as a filmmaker, is her second feature, Near Dark. Released in 1987 at the height of a bloodsucker boom led by The Lost Boys, it manages to stand out from the pack thanks to its improbable but incredible combination of the vampire genre with that of the Western to create one weird, pulpy masterpiece. Before watching Near Dark, I primarily expected to encounter vampires in eerie, overcast Eastern European locales filled with fog and ancient history; to encounter them smashing across the broad, sunburnt plains of Texas in a battered motorhome was shocking and refreshing. Near Dark’s vampires are never referred to as such, nor do they have the chivalrous manners and old-fashioned elegance of many of their forefathers. Rather, they’re a marauding band of leather-coated drifters who wouldn’t be out of place in the world of Mad Max, coated liberally with blood, sweat and dirt. Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre.

Near Dark opens with a close-up of a bloodsucking creature, but not the one that you expect — it’s a mosquito, hovering on the arm of farm boy Caleb Colton (an achingly young Adrian Pasdar) until he smacks it away. Driving into town to meet some friends, he spies an innocent-looking blonde pixie of a girl emerging from a shop while licking a vanilla ice cream cone. What follows is an all-American meet-cute laden with vampire innuendo that poor Caleb just cannot comprehend.

“Can I have a bite?” Caleb drawls, oozing earnest Southern charm.
“A bite?”
“Yeah. I’m just dying for a cone.”
“Dying?”

The girl, Mae (Jenny Wright), is not just any pretty girl. She’s a honey trap, luring unsuspecting victims into the clutches of her nomadic vampire family. Caleb behaves as though Mae is the prey, the object to be pursued and hopefully won; little does he know, it is entirely the other way around. When he tries to impress her with a lasso, she grabs hold of the rope herself and reels him in, shocking him with her strength. “I haven’t met any girls like you,” Caleb says, attempting to flatter her. “No,” Mae replies in a tense voice, “You sure haven’t.”

The instant, almost animal attraction between Caleb and Mae is obvious, and they share a long, romantic night driving around the Texas plains before Mae begins to panic that she won’t be home before sunrise. Caleb assumes she’s only afraid her daddy will punish her for being out all night, and coyly asks for a kiss before she goes. What he gets is far more than he bargained for — a passionate, hungry kiss, sure, but one that culminates in a nasty bite on the neck and the sight of his bright red blood dripping down Mae’s white chin as she hops down from his truck.

Soon it is morning, and Caleb finds himself staggering across the fields towards his father’s farm, weakened by the harsh rays of the rising sun, with telltale smoke sizzling up from his slowly roasting skin. Before he can make it to safety, he is scooped up by Mae and her gang in their motorhome. They’re ready to suck him dry — that is, until Mae mentions to the others that she did a bit more than just reveal her true nature to him. By biting him, he has become her responsibility –and potentially, her mate. Furious, the rest of the vampires reluctantly agree that Caleb can stay alive a little bit longer and be given the chance to learn to live like one of them. In other words, to live by the cover of darkness, luring (usually via hitchhiking) and killing innocent people without hesitation in order to survive.

“What do we do now?” Caleb, dumbfounded by his new immortal status, asks Mae.
“Anything we want, until the end of time,” she replies.

During Caleb and Mae’s first meeting, Caleb oozes confidence and plays at dominance, the way most boys do when trying to win over a girl. However, once he becomes a vampire, the reversal of stereotypical gender roles is striking. Caleb becomes entirely dependent on Mae. It is only her attraction to him that keeps the rest of her family from killing him on the spot, and it is only her willingness to kill for him and allow him to drink her own blood that keeps him alive in the days that follow. Caleb needs Mae, and because of this, their intimacy grows in new and bizarre ways. In one particularly passionate scene, Mae bites open her own wrist and clutches Caleb’s desperate, hungry head to her while he feeds, until he almost kills her in his fervor.

Despite his obvious need to consume blood, Caleb cannot bring himself to take a life, whereas the other vampires seem not only to kill to live, but also to live to kill. They’ve survived so long by any means necessary that they don’t hesitate to wipe out the entire clientele of a rundown roadside bar for both food and fun (a scene of creative carnage that rivals the equally deadly tavern scene in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The gang includes Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the charismatic leader who fought for the south in the Civil War; Jesse’s mate, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), whose big blonde hair and skintight ensembles can’t help but remind you of another iconic Eighties femme fatale, the android Pris in Blade Runner; Homer (Joshua Miller), who was turned as a boy and perpetually struggles with having an ancient brain trapped inside a child’s body; and the particularly vicious Severen (a delightfully unhinged Bill Paxton), who introduces himself to Caleb by informing him, “I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders. Hope you don’t mind none.” They all speak in a bizarre, stylized version of Southern dialect that drips in menace and the occasional old-fashioned turn of phrase that comes from having lived long enough to take credit for starting the Great Chicago Fire. But Mae, the youngest of the vampires, is different. She kills to keep herself alive, but she seems to take a lot less sick joy in it than the others, and the more time she spends with Caleb, the more their heartless behavior seems to turn her off. By being with Caleb, she is reminded of what it was to be human — after all, she was one herself not so long ago.

Near Dark doesn’t have much in the way of plot; Caleb is dragged around Texas by the vampires, the timer on his existence counting down faster and faster, while his father and little sister search for him. The pulsating beat of the awesomely Eighties electronic score by Tangerine Dream adds to the urgency. It all culminates in an explosive finale with numerous characters meeting horrific ends via spontaneous combustion under the cloudless blue Texas sky — beautiful, and without mercy. There’s a happy ending that some might think a cop-out, as it goes against traditional vampire lore. Yet, rejecting traditional and expected vampire tropes is one of the things that makes Near Dark such a memorable film. Nothing about it is expected. It breaks all of the rules and makes up its own along the way. This Southern-fried story of young love, lust and lost innocence has as much in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show than any Dracula movie.

Today, Near Dark’s legacy lives on in films like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from another promising woman director, Ana Lily Amirpour. In a film described as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” Amirpour brings vampires to another unfamiliar locale — this time, a dead-end Iranian town called Bad City. Here, a nameless bloodsucking girl (Sheila Vand) prowls the dark, empty streets in a chador, using her deceptively delicate and feminine appearance to lure and attack men who abuse women. Like Mae, she is much stronger than she initially appears. Independent film icon Jim Jarmusch also recently experimented in the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive, which stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as an ancient, moody, bohemian couple holed up in rundown Detroit. While less of a direct descendant of Near Dark than A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, ones feels that this sexy, slow-moving story could not have been told without its more frantically passionate predecessor. Here, the horror aspects of the traditional vampire story take a backseat as the film explores how love can be powerful enough to survive enough dark moments to fill multiple lifetimes. The loneliness inherent in being immortal seems to be the one constant among all vampire films, even the most untraditional ones — and yes, even Twilight. Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

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.

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.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies

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.

This guest post by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Vampires. Lesbians. These two things are as intertwined as the stars and the sky, at least in popular fiction. The vampire lesbian sub-genre finds its basis in an unfinished poem by Coleridge 1797-ish, and continuing onward and up to the modern era with entries such as 2010 German film We Are the Night, and beyond. There are hundreds of lesbian vampire stories in the world, and very few of them deviate from the basic plot of the 1872 novella Carmilla by Joseph Le Fanu. You can just read that story and you’ll have the basic gist: lesbian vampire seduces straight woman, is murdered by men. If that sounds like a flimsy plot excuse for violence against women, that’s because that is 1,000 percent what it is. On the other hand, if there’s hundreds of anything, at least a few of them are bound to be good. I personally have a pretty strong love for lesbian vampire films, which, for better or worse, helped me to define my own images of sexuality as a young gay. 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. And I love everything about that… except the part where they’re all mass murderers. When there is so little representation of powerful queer women in film, it becomes difficult to fully dismiss the few that exist, even if they are ultimately negative or problematic.

For all these reasons, I felt a need to compile a list of lesbian vampire films that impacted me in some way, or that I found particularly enjoyable to watch. Without further ado, my nine favorite lesbian vampire films.

9. The Moth Diaries – 2011

I liked this one. It’s a little meta, in that the girl is reading and narrating the short story Carmilla while in a movie based on the short story, Carmilla. If you can handle that, you’ll be pretty down with most of this film. There’s no organ music, which is a solid fail on the part of many films, but it’s from a female writer/director team, and I don’t think it gets enough props for being as enjoyable as it is. Lily Cole is impressively creepy as Ernessa, the Carmilla analog of the film. The main character Rebecca is immediately distrustful of Ernessa, but her friend Lucy (yep) falls under Ernessa’s sway. And so on, and so forth. There’s some pretty disturbing stuff in here: suicide features prominently in the story, the general lack of consent during sex scenes that you often see in lesbian vampire movies is definitely in there, and Rebecca makes out with her teacher, which freaks me out more than most of the rest of the movie. My critique would be that, as meta as the story gets, it never really resolves any of the questions it asks itself. There’s little in the way of socially relevent commentary here, which seems odd for a film that immediately opens a gaping hole in the fourth wall and then leaves it there for the entire course of the narrative. That said, I like this film’s self-awareness, and there’s definitely a few creepy moments that are worth the price of admission.

8. Blood and Roses – 1960

This movie makes a lot of “best of” lists, mostly because it was the first lesbian vampire film that explicitly expressed the queerness of its main character in no uncertain terms. We see a lot of what would ultimately become alternately beloved and maligned tropes of the genre: the love triangle, the arty dream sequence in the middle of the narrative, the bizarre similarity of a character to a portrait of a long-dead ancestor, and the sexually confused girlfriend character.

Our vampire Carmilla’s sexual agency, as well as her frustration, are equally compelling. She flirts with her crushes, and is upset by their rejection of her. She feeds on village girls after playing with them like a cat with a mouse. She is clearly doomed from the very moment she first appears onscreen, and yet, for all these reasons, she’s by far the most interesting character in the film.

What Blood and Roses said to me when I watched it as a young queer woman could be a much longer piece of writing, but, briefly, these images were among the first moments of queer visibility in North American cinema. As problematic as they are, they deserve analysis, and they deserve to be considered for their impact on both queer and straight audiences of their time. Besides all that, though, Blood and Roses is a campy and fun horror film from the 1960s, so if that sounds up your alley, definitely check it out.

7. Daughters of Darkness – 1971

In the 1970s, there was a fad in horror films where privileged, angry men with Beatles hair and snappy wardrobes were the main characters of pretty much every single movie. That’s going strong here, where the main character looks exactly like this:

Wowza. Anyway, the real main character is obviously not that guy, but this extremely fictionalized version of Elizabeth Bathory, at this point hundreds of years old, played by the wonderfully over-the-top Delphine Seyrig. Delphine has a respectable history in art house films of the 1970s, and worked with several of the best directors of her day. She seems to have great fun with the hypersexualized Bathory, and the whole film gets much more interesting when she shows up. The beginning of the movie is just the straight couple getting married and talking a lot, so bring on the lesbian vampires, my friends. Can I just say, as messed up as she is, Bathory is just shockingly beautiful through this whole movie. All of her outfits are the best outfits I have ever seen, and she is my style icon from here to eternity. Also perfectly fashionable, her vampire sidekick, whose simple style and bobbed hair are based on the glorious silent film star, Louise Brooks. I’m just letting you know, this movie rules. Persistent themes of the sexually aggressive and sadistic vampire focusing on the confused, flippant blonde woman are in full force here, and I would say this portrayal of the ancient and wicked lesbian vampire character is one of the more fascinating.

6. The Countess – 2009

This film is about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, widely considered to be one of the most sadistic mass murderers of all time. I say “considered to be” because, to be honest, nobody has the slightest damn idea what actually happened there. Was she a mass murderer? Probably? People were not keeping extensive records of this sort of thing in 1610, and, in fact destroyed all evidence of wrongdoing to prevent a scandal. She was of royal blood, and therefore never went to trial. What I’m saying is that all the information currently available surrounding this case is strongly based in rumor. Still, she is the person on whom much of Western World vampire mythology is based on, so if anyone has the right to be on a list about lesbian vampires, it’s the countess. The story follows the legends of what we believe to be true about her life, and carries us all the way through to her bitter end, with the entirely fictional subplot of a doomed affair with a younger man. I wasn’t personally that into the added love story of the film, but it definitely sets up some of the creepiest scenes in the whole movie, so I’ll allow it. This movie was done by Julie Delpy, who both directs and stars as Bathory, like a boss. Honestly, this film is just flat out better made than anything else on the list in concern to production values, budget, and acting skill, so if you’re into watching something less campy and more real, this is the one for you.

5. The Blood Spattered Bride – 1972

This movie starts with one of my least favorite opening scenes of all time, but if you can get through the weird rape fantasy that kicks it off, the feminist commentary actually gets really interesting as the movie goes along. The tale follows two newlyweds, Susan and her nameless husband, who exists not so much as a character, but as a representation of director Vincente Aranda’s perception of the fascist patriarchy. He comes across about as likeable as a fascist patriarchy, too, more or less crying a river every time his wife doesn’t respond to his aggressive sexual advances. A great portion of this film is Susan progressing through the story arc tropes of most major feminist characters of the 1970s: bride, to unhappy bride, to lesbian, to misandrist, to murderer. That said, honestly, I don’t really blame her, because she is literally married to the human embodiment of misogyny. As an audience member, you’ll find yourself rooting for this guy’s death pretty hard I think, so I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married to him. She literally locks herself in a cage to get away from him, uses quotes from a book to tell him she hates him, and finally flies into a full-out screaming fit that, let’s be real, is not entirely unprovoked. So, when the dreamy and beautiful Carmilla shows up in a totally bizarre scene that I’m not even going to describe right now because you should just watch it, it’s obvious that Susan is about to get straight up seduced. When your options are “man you hate who borderline rapes you a lot” or “ghostly vampire with really pretty eyes that tells you to kill your legitimately terrible husband,” I guess I’d probably go with the latter, too. I mean, let’s be real, the third option of “get the Hell out of there” is the only real option, but if she did that, there’d be no movie, so spree of murder and terror with dreamy girlfriend it is. To the credit of the film, Susan is a very interesting character. She ultimately goes the really wrong direction with it, but her feminist theory begins in a good place. Societal loathing of queer women ultimately causes her to snap when she realizes that, as a lesbian, the world will punish her sexuality and turn her into a pariah. That is a totally legit concerns for 1972. Susan is by far the best and most interesting part of this film, which is otherwise mostly a campy horror film with unsettling moments of sexual violence and the familiar art house dreaminess of most of the films on this list.

4. The Hunger – 1983

The Hunger is one of the more famous entries in the lesbian vampire canon, so, if you’ve seen one movie on this list, the law of averages would imply that it’d be this one. The beginning of this movie finds David Bowie as John Blaylock and Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock in a goth club watching Bauhaus. They are vampires, swinger vampires. They pick up another Goth couple and kill them with a tiny blade kept inside the ankh (yes, ankh) Miriam keeps around her neck.

It. Is. Nine. Teen. Eighty. Three. As. Fuck. Right. Now.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in this movie. It’s really well shot, Catherine Deneuve is pretty much the greatest actor on the planet, the soundtrack rules, and David Bowie… just, David Bowie. This film also has one of the most famously great lesbian sex scenes in cinema history. Miriam and Susan Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, hook up for the first time (only time? I don’t know) to the most lesbian song EVER, aka “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. “Sounds like a love song,” says Sarah. “Then I suppose that’s what it is,” says Miriam. You bet it is, Miriam! Moments later, those two are making out. Another slight alteration on the standard lesbian vampire tropes is that Dr. Roberts, the supposed victim of the film, is the one that initiates sex, here, rather than, as we so often see in film, the vampire preying on a human’s naiveté and weakness.

Sticking well within queer tropes, however, Miriam is honestly a real U-Haul vampire, and waits all of 10 seconds after John’s death before she tries to marry Sarah pretty much out of nowhere. We are talking about someone that has an eternity ahead of her that can’t even wait like a month after her husband’s “death” before she starts moving her girlfriend in. Which is cold as Hell, because they were married for something like 300 years. Well, I don’t want to spoil the twists and turns this story takes for y’all, so I guess I’ll cut myself off there, but, more or less, this movie is famous for a reason, and if you’re in the mood to watch a scary film that is just the most ’80s thing you’ve seen in your life, this is likely going to be your best option.

3. Nadja – 1994

I feel like this film gets overlooked by both the vampire crowd as well as the indie crowd, and it’s kind of a shame, since it has all the requirements of being a cult classic. There’s nothing particularly new in this film, but there’s a lot to like about it. The creepy vampire as played by Elina Lowensohn really sells the film. She’s one of my all time faves. The cinematography is really great, and the film looks just stunning in black and white. Especially interesting is the use of a child’s toy camera for some scenes, lending a simple, stylized perspective at key moments. There’s a lot of pretty amusing mid-90s, Generation X style soul-searching from the white, heterosexual couple at the center of the film, as well as some genuinely on point observations on the human condition from the impressively coherent vampires. As many of these films are products of their time, I must say that Nadja is about the most 1994 film you’re liable to watch in your life. Instead of the standard skintight dress fluttering softly in the wind, the female love interest of the vampire is wearing a straight up flannel shirt and jeans, and if she had slight stubble I would definitely mistake her for Kurt Cobain. At certain moments, the film looks and sounds a bit like a music video for a Portishead song, but the aesthetic is pulled off to perfection, and it really works. The overall stylishness of Nadja has only aged for the better in the two decades since its release.

2. Vampyros Lesbos – 1971

This is where I start to get emotional. Vampyros Lesbos features my favorite opening to a film probably ever, with a bizarre shot of the vampire accompanied by noise music as the credits roll, followed immediately by our hero, the vampiric Nadine Carody, doing an erotic dance in a mirror with herself. She kisses herself in the mirror while holding a candlebra, while a blond-haired mannequin watches her. Ultimately, the countess turns, and begins kissing the mannequin, while her future lover Linda Westinghouse looks on, as intrigued as her mustached boyfriend is uncomfortable. The whole time, one of my all-time favorite songs is playing, a dark, dreamy song with an irrestistably basic Hammond organ pre-recorded drumbeat and chilling yet seductive organ sounds. And that is how you start a movie, everyone. You now have my full attention. Vampyros Lesbos is honestly just a flawless victory. It’s over-the-top, set very much with a psychedelic backdrop, and Soledad Miranda is absolutely enchanting as the countess. The comparatively less interesting “girlfriend” character Linda Westinghouse is really great in this movie. Her acting is stilted, but it works perfectly for this agonized and hestitant character, who is as attracted as she is repelled by the beautiful vampire. What I’m getting at here is that Vampyros Lesbos is a great movie (greatest movie?), and well worth your time if you’re a horror fan, a lesbian fan, an art house fan, or basically anyone (who is over the age of 18). Yes, this film is just as exploitative to queer women as any other lesbian vampire movie, but if you just focus on the intriguing, mysterious countess and her compelling monolgues, the brilliant soundtrack, and the beautifully shot and haunting love scenes between Linda and Nadine, you’ll do OK.

1. Fascination – 1979

The No. 1 spot is a tie between Vampyros Lesbos and Fascination, because I definitely love both equally, but loving things equally is not how internet listicles work, so Fascination it is. I’ve seen dozens of lesbian vampire films, but there’s something about this one. It doesn’t just slightly deviate from the tropes, it starts with a weird premise, introduces multiple tropes, and then just goes completely off the rails with them, until it concludes on a note that could only be described as utterly bizarre. To me, adding art house weirdness to horror films just makes a good thing even better, so I find Fascination to be delightful, haunting, and aesthetically beautiful. The movies of Jean Rolin are often about vampires, definitely well within the realm of art house cinema, and always highly eroticized. Fascination in specific has a just bananas plot trajectory: it pretty much starts with a whole lot of lesbian sex, which then becomes straight sex, which then goes back to being lesbian sex. They’re kind of vampires, or not? One of the main characters terrorizes the countryside with a scythe, there’s a coven of witches, someone gets devoured alive… it is goddamned epic. I especially love the characters, despite how weird and evil they all are. I particularly love the character of Eva, who is very much a problematic favorite, in that pretty much every action she takes in the film ends with her committing murder at some point. The scenery is gorgeous, the cinematography is simple and beautiful, the actors seem like they’re having fun… it’s all in all a perfect 1970s horror film.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

“You guys know about vampires?” author Junot Diaz once asked an audience of college students. “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?'”

This is the starting point of Blue is the Warmest Color, which contends, and grapples with, the fact that depictions of female pleasure by female artists do not exist in art. This condition, this lack of understanding and representation, is what dogs its protagonist, Adele, as she struggles and ultimately fails to achieve a sense of comfort with her queerness. Female pleasure abounds in the film from the explicit sex between Adele and Emma, whose romance the film charts the rise and fall of, to eating, and the particular pleasure of observing and being observed. Adele is sometimes the subject, as she pursues Emma or when they take in an art exhibit, her gaze on the nude female figures constructed by men the focus of the scene, and sometimes she is the object as she poses for Emma’s paintings, the first representational work of her lover’s career.

The English title of the film, the same as the graphic novel it was adapted from, implies an inversion of the normal way of seeing. We’re used to seeing blue as cool, cold, and distant, but the film challenges us to see it as a vibrant and passionate colour the way that it challenges us to reconceptualize the power and passion of queer love. The French title, La Vie D’Adele: Chapitres I & II are heavy with film and literary allusions. To The Story of Adele H, the loose account of how Victor Hugo’s daughter pursued an unrequited love across continents and La Vie de Marianne, a novel left unfinished, suggesting both tragedy and an unfinished quality, which both come into fruition. Adele remains restless and unfulfilled throughout the film as Truffaut’s depiction of Adele Hugo is, but the irony of the reference is that Blue’s Adele is an inversion. Instead of warping the world around her to believe that an unrequited love is genuine, Adele is dogged by the invisible weight of heteronormativity that propels her to hide her relationship and live in a private shame. The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

The problem with the male gaze and trying to uplift or separate a female equivalent from it is that male gaze as a term and concept has shrunk in its application to a narrow didactic interpretation that borders on being universally pejorative. To wit, the simple unexamined usage of the term was thought to be all that was needed to condemn Blue is the Warmest Color by its skeptics, but the use of “male gaze” as a cudgel that immediately translates into prurience and exploitation does more harm than good to the conception of a female gaze not least because it immediately valorizes the alternative, as elaborated on by Edward Snow in his essay “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems”:

“Nothing could better serve the paternal superego than to reduce masculine vision completely to the terms of power, violence, and control, to make disappear whatever in the male gaze remains outside the patriarchal, and pronounce outlawed, guilty, damaging, and illicitly possessive every male view of women. It is precisely on such grounds that the father’s law institutes and maintains itself in vision. A feminism not attuned to internal difference risks becoming the instrument rather than the abrogator of the law.

[…]

Under the aegis of demystifying and excoriating male vision, the critic systematically deprives images of women of their subjective or undecidable aspects- to say nothing of their power -and at the same time eliminates from the onlooking “male” ego whatever elements of identification with, sympathy for, or vulnerability to the feminine such images bespeak.”

Simply put, the male gaze is not a monolith, and despite the way that the term is used in criticism and conversation, no one actually views film from the position that the male gaze is monolithic or purely informed by patriarchal values. To actually adopt that stance would require the conflation of Kenneth Anger with Quentin Tarantino, among other laughable absurdities. Male-directed film has always found ways to appeal to women on terms other than internalized misogyny, and of course the male vision in film has been frequently mitigated, influenced, or redirected by the work of women in other roles. Tarantino, for instance, is famous for his collaboration with the late editor Sally Menke, whom he sought out specifically for a feminine influence, which is hardly a rare event. Much recent buzz was generated by another female editor, Margaret Sixel, who worked on Mad Max: Fury Road with longtime collaborator George Miller (she edited Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City for him). Her contribution has been argued as being integral to the strong female reception to the movie, which, again, runs the risk of valorizing women’s work as being inherently superior.

The problem with strictly gendering the gaze is that it can improperly frame collaborations and essentialize the vision of female filmmakers. Mad Max: Fury Road, as a film, is more than the sum of a male director and a female editor, especially for a narrative so committed to dissecting toxic masculinity from within. So too ought Sally Menke’s work with Tarantino be seen more than just a mitigation, but a cornerstone of Tarantino’s desire to achieve more that what the limitations of his masculinity allow for, especially as the roles of women in his films evolved from non existent in Reservoir Dogs to the complete focus in Deathproof. Perhaps the most intriguing recent example of how a female collaborator transformed the work of a male director was in Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own novel Gone Girl for David Fincher, inverting the uncomfortable and frequently malicious male gaze that engenders his work, transferring the web of fear that his female protagonists like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander or Alien 3’s Ripley live in to the male protagonist and through him, the male audience. It’s a synthesis that cannot be easily essentialized into a single gendered gaze.

This is compounded by the fact that male nor female are fixed categories, nor are their desires. How are we, for instance, intended to properly frame the work of Lana Wachowski as a trans woman? How trans women engage with gender in our own lives and through our art cannot and should not be subsumed into a lens defined by the cisgender female experience. Which is only the beginning of how ruinous categorizations of gender in the gaze are on queer film and filmmakers. In comic book criticism especially, lenses of queer male masculinity are frequently co-opted and assimilated into constructions of the female gaze, which has the twin repercussions of narrowing queer male desire to a pinprick of feminized male figures and completely alienating queer female desire. If there are to be productive critical frameworks that utilize “male” and “female” gazes, they must be understood as needing a prism held up to them in order to properly understand the full spectrum of what informs a particular vision. There needs to be an understanding of intersectionality intrinsic to their uses.

On that note, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, the stars of Blue is the Warmest Color, are the only actors to have been awarded Cannes’ Palme D’Or alongside their director, Abdellatif Kechiche. It was done by a jury made up of Steven Spielberg, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan, Christoph Waltz, We Need To Talk About Kevin screenwriter Lynne Ramsay, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu (whose Beyond the Hills and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days have tackled themes including queer femininity and access to abortion), Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman, and Ang Lee. Nicole Kidman, it must be recalled, co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotically charged Eyes Wide Shut with then husband Tom Cruise. Ang Lee’s career as a director has been built almost entirely out of critically lauded portrayals of queerness and eroticism including The Ice Storm; Lust, Caution; Brokeback Mountain; and Taking Woodstock. The crowning of Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux by this jury, Lee and Kidman in particular, ought to have carried with it all the mythic importance of Quentin Tarantino, as head jurist, awarding Chan-Wook Park the Palme D’Or for Oldboy a decade earlier. Instead it’s treated as a footnote. Presumably because in this instance, that jury was more attuned to the nuances of the male gaze than the American critical establishment that presaged its arrival on US soil with cries of exploitation and misogyny.

The Cannes jury made it clear that they wanted to define the film as a collaboration, and I would extend that further to define it as a conversation. At its heart, Blue is the Warmest Color is a film about performances of identity and how the stresses of assimilation can erode and destroy fundamental parts of our being. One of the primary ways that we can perceive Kechiche’s self awareness that his masculinity limits his ability to conceive of and portray female queerness accurately is the insertion of a viewpoint character for him, an Arab actor Adele originally meets at a party thrown for Emma’s artist friends. He asks naive, well meaning questions about their relationship that queer women the world over hear, but understanding that he’s probed far enough or perhaps too far into her life and identity as an interloper, he opens up to her. He tells her about how he’s an actor and he’s just been to the United States, describing New York City in the same way that we dreamily describe Paris. “They love it when we say Allahu Akbar,” he says with a smile, telling her about how there’s always a hunger for Arab terrorists in Hollywood. Kechiche is, himself, Tunisian, and this is his exegesis.

He’s approaching the queer experience from the perspective of the immigrant experience. This is the Adam’s Rib that he proffers up towards the goal of uncovering female pleasure in art. This is the part of himself that he bares in order to justify the depth with which he probes Adele and Emma’s relationship. The clearest way that we see his Arab identity in the film is in the act of cooking and eating, which easily transcends the specific cultural context he takes it from thanks to the intimacy and care with which it’s handled. Cooking is framed as emotional labor, seen most keenly as Adele frets over making Spaghetti Bolognese for Emma’s friends, fretting over it as she serves it. Eating is, except for Adele’s junk food stash, a communal act, the consumption of the emotional labour of cooking as much as the food itself. This merges with queerness as Adele tries oysters, possibly the most yonic food imaginable, at dinner with Emma’s family. Her hesitance and discomfiture with eating oysters despite the welcoming attitude of Emma’s family mirrors the overwhelming tension she’s experiencing in her performance of queer femininity, and the difficulty she’s experiencing in how accepting Emma’s family is of it.

The broader sense of how Kechiche attempts to conceive of queerness through the best available lens at his disposal is how he constructs France’s queer community as a diaspora. He portrays Adele’s budding queerness and her experience of the queer nightlife in much the same way as the child of immigrants might feel overwhelmed and illegitimate by their first exposure to their parents’ native culture. There are certainly parallels between Adele’s entry into the queer community while still in high school and A Prophet’s Malik’s early uncomfortable interactions with the Arab prisoners after having been forcibly assimilated into the ranks of the Corsicans.

Where they differ is that Malik is able to thrive within the group by shedding attachments to the structures that will never accept him while Adele folds under the pressure of maintaining both a queer identity and the public performance of a straight one, immolating her relationship with Emma and leaving her isolated. Similarly, the Arab character returns to the film as Adele visits Emma’s latest show after their reconciliation. He tells her that he’s left acting, that he got tired of that one narrow performance of identity that the film industry allowed him. He’s never been happier. Adele remains unable to shed that attachment to the normative world and leaves feeling more upset and isolated than ever before.

The pressure of assimilation asserted by heteronormativity and white supremacy are distinct yet similarly functioning forces, which is one of the main achievements of the film. While it is by definition an uneasy attempt at capturing the queer female condition, Blue is the Warmest Color succeeds magnificently by providing a context and a shared struggle with which to build solidarity between marginalized groups in contemporary France. In the scene immediately following Adele’s break up with Emma, we see her leading her children in a celebration of African culture, with Adele wearing a cheaply thrown together pastiche of African fashion, adopting a clearly false and ill fitting identity. It’s a stark metaphor for how poorly Adele assimilates into heteronormativity.

Kechiche’s attempts to conceptualize of others’ struggles by finding commonality is by no means uncommon or uncelebrated in contemporary film. Jim Sheridan found common ground with 50 Cent when making Get Rich or Die Tryin’ by taking him to where he was born in Dublin and exploring their differing experiences of 1980s New York City. In an oddly similar way, Steve McQueen launched his feature film career by exploring the Northern Irish experience of otherness in his account of Bobby Sands’ imprisonment in Hunger.

In regard to the female gaze, Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t an exemplar, but a cautionary tale in how conflating the gendered gaze with the gender of the director can obscure and severely harm incredibly brave and vital filmmaking. Especially in the case of a film that strives to achieve a sense of understanding between distinct groups that suffer similar forms of oppression.

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

Vampire Girls: Claudia and Eli

This guest post by Kathryn Diaz appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

In the great monster mash team of terrifying children, the vampire girl is varsity captain. On the one hand, they are dolls forever: trapped in their prepubescent bodies for hundreds to thousands of years without a single curl losing its bounce. On the other hand, with hundreds of years of life come hundreds of years of experience, knowledge, even maturity. The great perverse contradiction of an innocent but worldly, pure but sexual girl beings that characterizes so many fantasies and paranoias about young girls comes to a larger than life reality with one part vampire bite added to sugar, spice, and everything nice. It’s a lot to take in. Especially since in practice, these horrific fantasies are much more complicated than they appear and often pack a harder punch than their makers bargained for. Because little girls aren’t dolls for men to play with. They have wills of their own, and one day they learn to use it with bite.

It’s worth mentioning that one of the most famous vampire girls in cinema is coveted by her makers for her girlishness. Claudia isn’t just raised in the vampire way by Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, she’s worshiped for it. From the moment she transforms from a dirty, malnourished urchin to a cherub-like creature that asks ever so sweetly for more blood, she is the apple of Lestat’s eye. He is charmed by her coquettish innocence and praises such traditionally feminine virtues as neatness. Even before this moment, Claudia represents hope for Lestat and Louis’ relationship and redemption for Louis’ conscience because of her apparent youth and innocence.

In the montage that depicts Claudia “growing up,” we see her surrounded by servants, dresses, and frills and privileges fit for a princess. One in particular has her standing on a pedestal in the center of a room–for trying on dresses, of course. But the imagery of her as a worshiped being, or perhaps a favorite doll upon a shelf is not to be dismissed. As Louis explains in his voice-over, “To me she was a child” and “to Lestat, a pupil.” Claudia is, in short, made into the desires of her makers.

This is not an uncommon motif in the vampire genre, or even in the broader spectrum of monster-making. Dracula makes his brides after his lusts, Frankenstein’s creature asks for a bride after his loneliness. Louis and Lestat are in good company, but Claudia manages to break away from the pack of female creations by sheer force of will and determined disobedience. She is more than discontent, she is proactive. And she isn’t alone.

Like all vampires, Eli was made by someone once upon a time. Both Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me In are purposefully vague about the details of her origin story, but we can depend on the basic aspects of the common vampire myth to fill in some of the blanks. We don’t know what happened to her maker either, but their absence and Eli’s lack of preoccupation with them seems to support the idea that she doesn’t miss them. Instead, Eli roams the world as she chooses, finding human partners to help her survive along the way. She has broken away from the hold of whatever agenda she was created for and spends the film working her own. Like Claudia, Eli rebells against the routine of her lifestyle for her own desires. Her protector, Hakan, is comfortable in the way of their life and in their solitary household. He has a possessive devotion to Eli as evidenced by his behavior when the subject of Eli’s new friend, Oskar, comes up. Eli is quick to remind him that while he may play the role of her father to the outside world, he doesn’t have any authority authority over who she chooses to spend her time with.

Claudia’s rebellions are much less cooly carried out, perhaps in part because they are nearly always to some degree, unsuccessful. Like Eli, Claudia tries to gain some ownership of her identity through trying to control her appearance and how she is perceived by others. She tries to take her “perfect” doll-like appearance into her own hands by cutting her hair. She dresses older and when she is alone with Louis, she adopts the countenance of a woman as old as she feels rather than that of the child she looks like. These are different but comparable tactics to Eli insisting that she is twelve and maintaining an awareness and hold of childlike things such as puzzles and games. Both of these girls do not want to be overridden into someone else’s idea because of their circumstances. But Claudia cannot get what she wants out of her actions. Her hair grows back when she cuts it, strangers refuse to take her seriously when she dresses older, capturing and drawing grown women does not transform her by any manner of alchemy. But Claudia does accept her fate without a fight, perhaps lest Lestat mistake her for the dolls he buys her every year. So she breaks the rules, pushes her luck, and she tries her hand at a little bit of vampire-on-vampire murder. When Louis starts to show how uncomfortable he is about the deed, Claudia tells him “he deserved to die” and later, that she did it “so we could be free.” She knows, perhaps even better than Louis, that he is a created monster like her too.

Claudia and Eli are both determined, willful girls strong in their sense of self and what they want. It also feels fairly safe to say that the horror derived from them is from a fear of how much they can do and accomplish on their own terms and the consequences of getting on their bad side. I mean, these girls aren’t afraid of things getting a little bloody. At all. But it’s also worth noting that both of these films are invested in their perspectives. Interview with the Vampire is almost devoid of human characters and Let the Right One In is about Oskar and Eli’s growing relationship together. The loved ones in their lives adore them, seek comfort in them, and stand beside them. We read Eli’s notes and watch her quiet excitement as she gets back in touch with what she loves in the world. We see Claudia’s smile as she dances with Louis in France and her forlorn expressions as they share in their loneliness together. As frightful as the lengths these two girls will go to are, it’s hard not to want them to succeed. We are made to understand the frustration and anguish of their positions and the ache of hoping for something as universal and fundamental as control over one’s life and identity. Even though one of these girls succeeds in her story and the other does not, it says something that these films are able to clearly articulate that a little girl is not just pretty and cunning and mysterious. A girl is also every bit as complex and full of yearning as her older male counterparts. She can be as fierce as anything else that goes bump in the night. And sometimes? She’ll win. And you’ll be glad she did.

Kathryn Diaz is a writer living in Houston, Texas. She is currently pursuing a B.A in English at the University of Houston. You can follow her at The Telescope for more of her work.

The Imaginary World of ‘Mona The Vampire’

The series chronicled the adventures of Mona Parker, a young girl who enjoys dressing up like a vampire and sees saving her town from monsters as her mission in life. The stories are Buffy-lite: a giant bug substitute teacher, a robot babysitter, doppelgängers, a computer virus with mind-control powers, and new cafeteria cooks who aim to poison the school with salmonella. Though the show often pulls out from Mona’s fantasies to reveal the reality of the situation, Mona’s fights against the forces of darkness, usually end up somehow solving the crime or prank, exposing a conspiracy or locating the lost item anyway.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Children’s Television.

As a kid, I had a boundless imagination.

I put on plays in my backyard (notably a bowdlerized Romeo and Juliet) and my friends and I spent our recesses pretending we were princesses, fairies, cowgirls, mermaids and Hogwarts students. I convinced my little sister we were always traveling the world- any clock tower was Big Ben, a local bridge was the Golden Gate and power line towers were always the Eiffel Tower.

In short, I was a lot like Mona the Vampire. Or at least, I see a lot of myself in her.

I’m unsure if the show is at all familiar outside Canada. Here, it ran for four seasons (1999-2003) on YTV (basically our equivalent to Nickelodeon) and I binge-watched it on weekends and as treat whenever I stayed home from school sick.

Though the show often pulls out of Mona’s fantasies to reveal the reality of the situation, Mona’s fights against the forces of darkness, usually end up somehow solving the crime or prank, exposing a conspiracy or locating the lost item anyway.

And Mona is never deterred by rationality, in her mind, everything out of the ordinary has a supernatural explanation and nothing can convince her otherwise.

A typical day in Mona’s world may involve fighting space invaders.

As a lead character on a children’s show, Mona is refreshingly atypical. When deciding on alter ego, she eschews the traditional superhero or princess dress and chooses to be a vampire. As a female character, Mona is also unique in her love of scary stories and late night horror movies, comic books and gruesome creepy crawlies. With her usual costume, which she chose herself and slips on at every opportunity, she tries to make herself as frightening as possible with a wig of wild, gravity-defying braids, plastic fangs and exaggerated purple circles drawn under her eyes.

However, the general effect is more adorable than intimidating and with her high pitched voice, it’s clear she’s still a child, unsure of her place in the world, underneath it all.

In fact, like Batman, she considers her true self to be her caped crusaded identity. Mona Parker, not Mona the Vampire, is the disguise. Though Mona sees herself as a vampire, she never troubled with questions of morality, in her view, she’s a good vampire and that’s that. She doesn’t need to bite people or drink blood, but instead has vampire senses that tell her when trouble is near.

While Mona is a good vampire, Von Kreepsula is a evil one, who must be contained within the pages of a comic book

Unlike the brooding vamps we’re used to, Mona also has a child’s sense of morality. She believes that she and her friends are good while the monsters they fight are all bad. For example, Von Kreepsula is Mona’s nemesis, an evil vampire to match her good.

But like the children watching the program, Mona learns that morality is not so black and white

In several episodes, Mona learns the monster she’s been fighting is merely misunderstood, lost it’s home or separated from it’s family. Even her sense of self is challenged when Mona meets a vampire hunter and has to convince her of her essential goodness.

Though Mona is neither binary extreme of masculinity or femininity, the two options usually available to children’s heroes and heroines, her friends and sidekicks Charley (AKA Zappman) and Lily (AKA Princess Giant) certainly are.

Princess Giant, Zappman and Mona the Vampire — Princess Giant, Zappman, and Mona the Vampire

Like Mona, Charley and Lily are imaginative kids who love to play her games, though it’s a little unclear to what extent they believe in actually believe in the monsters and vampires infesting their town. While both are timid and scared on their own, Mona’s bravery and self-confidence buoys them are draws them into her world.

What I found so refreshing was Mona’s personality as a leader, the Really Rosie type, the Queen of the neighborhood. As a leader, Mona also helps her less confident friends discover their skills and strengths by making them vital parts of her fantasy narrative. She can only defeat the monsters with the help for Charley’s Zapp-A-Rama Gun, his aptitude for science and Lily’s ability to grow.

She introduces them to the highly covetable idea of developing a superpower that makes your weaknesses into strength. Sure Charley is easily scared and often bullied, but with Mona’s encouragement to be the superhero she sees in him and encourages him to see for himself, he’s just like his hero, the Man with Nine Lives. Likewise, without Mona, shy Lily hides behind her hair and lets others push her around and feel her small. When they meet, Mona tells Lily she can have any type of alter ego she wants and chose her own powers. Lily chose to become the braver version of herself that she hopes to grow into, and takes on the power to make herself as big as she wants, so no one can intimidate her and make her feel unimportant.

In their daily lives, Mona and her friends are ordinary elementary school students

Closing out the pack is Mona’s trusty cat and confidant Fang is always there as back-up and a (silent) voice of reason anyway. Fang may have more sense than either kids or adults and his expressions often silently suggests the problems in Mona’s logic that no one else can see.

Mona’s parents are supportive but weary. They believe they are raising a highly intelligent, imaginative child, one who gets in her fair share of trouble but is loyal to her friends and always able to find a way out of a jam. They’re the kind of parents every wildly imaginative kid should have, people who always know there are many reasons to be proud of their daughter and nurture her creativity.

Moreover, Mona’s friends are also posed as underdogs throughout the series. Mona’s nemesis is Angela, the cruel and vain daughter of lottery winners who believes she can win friends by showing off her enormous wealth. George, often Angela’s henchmen, is a crude bully who mainly picks on Charley, but is the Principal’s nephew, so he rarely gets in trouble. In comparison, each episode, Mona shows she can save the day with just her wits and imagination, teaching young viewers their value above all.

As with many children’s shows, the kids on Mona the Vampire are smart and resourceful, solving crimes even the police can’t and speaking and working with adults like colleagues, the ultimate fantasy for most real-life kids. In many episodes, Mona deals with the local chief of police, Officer Halcroft who offers rational explanations to each incident. Each time, she dismisses them as ridiculous and unbelievable.

I also love how improvised the character’s costumes seem, like real things the kids could have gathered from around the house. Mona’s floral cape is an old curtain, while Princess Giant’s long blonde hair is a mop. This small aspect of the series adds realism to their imaginings and suggests that the show’s creators consider or remember the actual mechanics of children’s fantasy games.

The typical effect used to transition between “fantasy” and “reality”

In addition, the show refuses to underestimate children as an audience, the stories are never definitively attributed to natural or supernatural causes and the show never overtly indulges or refutes her world. The transition effect between “reality” and Mona’s fantasy gives viewers room to judge how much of the fantasy is real. Many episodes even end on an uncertain note, with even the adults unable to explain every detail rationally, suggesting there may be some truth to Mona’s imagination.

Mostly I liked the show because it clearly respected and celebrated the dreamworld so essential to childhood and creative, curious children. With imagination like Mona’s, even the ordinary world can be magical.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Apparently Suicide and AIDS are Real Problems in the Vampire Community: ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The titular lovers here are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film poster for Only Lovers Left Alive — The film poster for *Only Lovers Left Alive*

Only Lovers Left Alive is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The story spins out in an intoxicating swirl of music and high-culture; at the centre of it, a couple who can’t live without each other but don’t live together any longer. The titular lovers are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film takes ideas we’ve seen in films like Interview with a Vampire , Let The Right One In and Byzantium, and adds commentary on our modern world. What would an elegant immortal being who’s seen it all think of our quick consumer culture and digital devices that allow us to feel to connected to people continents away.

Plus, answers to the question many have wondered. What would vampires think of iPhones? Of Techno-music and videos on Youtube?

Sure to be a cult fav, Only Lovers Left Alive is dark and decadent, saturated by haunting rock music and an unshakeable air of impending danger. Indie-hero Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this vampire tale, pumped full of wry, intelligent humor and some delightfully silly historical references with a stylized production as rich and decadent as it’s story. The Palm d’Or nominated film chronicles the reunion Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), beautiful vampires who have been lovers for centuries and married several times. Recently, they have been living apart: him in a crumbling house on the outskirts of Detroit, her, swathed in silks in Tangiers.

A picture taken of Adam and Eve the third time they got married. Eve remarks: “We looked so young”

Adam is your basic emo-rocker. He’s got the long, unwashed hair, shirts unbuttoned to his navel and the distaste selling out, but underneath, he has the face and sickly-sexual comportment of a romantic poet. Isolated in a town where no one seems to live anymore, he spends his days playing guitar and composing music he isn’t ready to show anyone. He only leaves his home to procure blood for a local hospital, where he struggles to control his thirst around bleeding patients. He relies on Ian (Anton Yelchin) to do errands, bringing him instruments and keeping the fans away. As the story begins, he is considering killing himself and asks Ian to bring him a wooden bullet.

Meanwhile, Eve is an ultra-sophisticated vaguely European jet-setter, drawn to exotic locals and excited by life. While Adam has his music, Eve has literature. In a scene any book lover would adore, she packs suitcases full of books for a visit to Detroit. She gazes over the texts, some medieval with woodcut illustrations, some in ancient languages, some modern, her faces enraptured at the beauty she sees. Her close confidant is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, he keeps a picture of the bard on his wall to throw knives at.

It’s hard to imagine better actors for the lead roles. Swinton and Hiddleston both appear uncanny and otherworldly, in appearance, in the way they carry themselves and in the way they find they inhabit the film’s world, that they seem like members of some unknown species that includes only each other. Swinton in particular has never looks less human, she wanders around Tangiers like some strange white unicorn trying to take on human form.

It is perhaps too on the nose that they are Adam and Eve, but the names highlight the connection between them. They have a mystical connection that draw them to each other, highlighted by Adam playing guitar in Detroit while Eve dances in Tangiers as if she can hear it. Though they are not the first man and woman, through history they seem to be the only couple that always endures, their relationship only thing that will live on as empires come and go.

Adam and Eve look like an ordinary couple, happy to be together

Adam and Eve are well-developed, each with their own separate but intertwining lives, passions and histories. They seem remarkably real for centuries old vampires, You can easily imagine them roaming around in the dark corners of a dying city. Though they live separate lives much of time, there is a magnetism that pulls them together when they reunite, seeming as if they each want to consume the other, breathe in their air and connect by running their hands along each other’s bodies just to experiences and remember each other. Their intimacy is tasteful and personal, suggesting that on top of sexual attraction, they just want to be near each other and as content to lie beside each other nude as they are to play chess together and eat blood popsicles.

It’s a very romantic tale, both in the modern sense and in poetic tradition. For all his protests, Adam is a romantic hero, lost in a desolate wasteland that mirrors the ravages of his soul. He has isolated himself in the dying city of Detroit, whose loss of the auto industry has made it a virtual ghost town. When Eve visits, he takes her on a tour of its wilderness, showing her where people used to live, taking her to an old gilded theatre falling into ruins. At home, his wall is covered in photographs and portraits of the dead luminaries he has known, so he can never forgot the temporary nature of human life, passing him by.

He is disillusioned with musicians and his old heroes, the scientists, dead and destroyed by the cultures around them. He sees science as destroying human lives, contaminating water with chemicals and blood with diseases and long ago stopped considering himself part of this humanity. He calls humans zombies and decides he can’t be around them anymore, disgusted by their fears of their own imaginations.

Eve is the light to Adam’s darkness, all in white while he’s always in black, yet remains a realistic character because of implied darkness of her own. Swinton plays Eve like an ethereal vision who can’t escape the weight on her shoulders, she always seems struggling to stay afloat. It is this weight and her passionate love for culture, the books she reads through while packing, the Shakespeare volume she sighs after finishing and the rapturous dancing and yen to explore, that keeps her from being a mere servant to Adam’s moods. Eve is so well in synch with the world, that she has slight psychic senses, able to intuit the age of a guitar just by touching it and maintaining a deep connection to the moon. She believes in living and experiencing as much as possible of each era that passes by. THough she is implied to be older than Adam, she is still able to appreciate lie and wax poetic about the lights and color, the dancing and friendship that are all part of the experience.

From her point of view, Adam’s depression is a waste, so she devotes herself to bringing him back into the world, reassuring him that even if the world is destroyed for humans, they’ll still be around. She resents that he treats her like a part in his story, a means to the end, rather than a real person to rely on when in times of need. She feels taken for granted like, he sees her as another one of the transitory zombies who will come into his life and leave it. Despite the specific references to thing like immortality, it’s not unlike the typical conversation between an ordinary couple in any other movies. The supernatural elements added to what is essentially a woman trying to help her depressed partner, serve to make the story larger in scope, more evocative of gothic conventions and tortured love and dangerous.

Adam examines a guitar, showcasing his passion for music

Jarmusch skillfully integrates modern technology into their ageless world experienced as just another culture’s momentary trends. He also includes references to both modern pop culture and ancient history without either seeming shoehorned in. Eve is as taken in with Jack White and David Foster Wallace as Mary Shelley and Marlowe’s ghostwritten Shakespeare plays, while Adam’s doctor disguise includes name tags like “ Dr. Faust ” and “ Dr. Caligari”.

Eve notes all the things she has been through and survived, the different cultures that seemed dangerous that she has watched die around her. She considers modern times no different, an age that any other, with its transitory values that will end and tries to enjoy our technology as part of the experience of this time and place. While Adam uses retro pieces of equipment and hooks his phone up to an ancient TV to talk, Eve is comfortable speaking on her iPhone’s Facetime and interacting with the outside world to make travel arrangements for the pair.

For all his speeches denigrating humanity, Adam has all too human concerns. He is attached to his possessions and secretive about his music, worried about it getting out before it’s ready. As a rock musician, his entire lifestyle and tortured-rocker identity is supported by human fans, ones who his complains about and just wants to leave him alone. While ethereal Eve believes in traveling light and replacing anything tangible, Adam is of the world and tied to his possessions.

After feeding on Ian, Ava’s teeth are extended, making her look monstrous

About midway through and after a lot of anticipation, as Adam, Eve and Marlowe all had dreams about her, Eve’s sister Ava (a spacey-fairy Mia Wasikowska) arrives at Adam’s house decked out like a 60s groupie. Party girl Ava is invasive and impolite, entering uninvited, forcing her way into their dreams and into their house and to Adam’s annoyance, listening to his music without permission. There is a genuine big brother-little sister relationship between Ava and Adam, and as old as she is, she’s a teenager out to have fun, even if it means intruding on an important moment between the couple. She bounces around, jumping on the bed where the couple is sleeping, as if she is their child.

In addition, Ava is an even stronger force than Eve at drawing Adam out of himself. In one scene, Ava is enjoying a TV show that depicts Dracula dancing on psychedelic backdrops. While Eve comes and watches it with her, Adam, perpetually brooding turns off the TV and spoils their fun. In one hilarious moment, the women try to get Adam to go to a club with them. Though Adam insists he is not going to go, the next scene shows the three vamps in dark sunglasses at a hipster bar. Though meant as a joke here, his brooding can become unintentionally humorous at times.

After the night out, Ava bites Ian, killing him and destroying much of Adam’s prized possessions. Ava’s feeding off Ian is played as a clear metaphor for sex, based on the language she uses: “I didn’t mean to do it, but he was so cute. I couldn’t help myself.” It’s suggested that Ava is wild and unable to control her sexuality, and with that it mind it’s a little uncomfortable that she is berated for it. Unlike Adam and Eve, who have figured out ways of constraint, subsisting through hospitals and Marlowe’s connections, she refuses to live by a set of rules and is punished for it when Adam kicks her out of the house.

Scenes of the vampires drinking blood are shot similarly to how scenes of drug use are often filmed, with characters rising in the air and come back down, sighs of euphoria on their faces. This comparison makes a lot of sense within the film as the characters appear perpetually strung out, floating around their environs.

Eve enjoys a dose of blood, drugged by the drink

There’s something dream-like and hazy about the film, like the domestic drama at its core, the basic story of a depressed man and his bon vivant wife visited by her annoying sister at an inconvenient time that causes them to reassess their relationship, is filtered through the mind of someone on a bender. Blood and gore function as necessary ephemeral to a vampire tale, but are never fetishized or allowed to become too much of a focus. The film’s end utilizes feeding to solidify their bond as a couple. In the only real horror shot of the film, we see a close-up of Eve with her fangs full extended and her eyes widening, reminding us that these people are monsters.

I can see how someone might dislike the film’s pacing, as it is often slow and full of silences. Short scenes of dialogue are broken up by what seem like music videos, sequences of actors dancing, driving, pacing, wandering around the city, drinking blood and having sex, while Adam’s curls around them. But it works well, for the hazy, hallucinatory tone of the story, more about characters and feelings than plot. Silences and musical scenes give the characters time to breathe and interact on a deeper level than they could easily put into words, making them feel more alive and complete.

However, there is a certain amount of regression in the relationship between Adam and Eve, who often feel like hipster teenagers looking with distain at everyone who isn’t as cool as they are. They think music sounds best on records, refer to everyone else as zombies and have only ever been friends with people who’s names we know from out history books. At times, their namedropping can begin to feel incessant. I suppose it wouldn’t make an interesting story, but why does every immortal character in fiction travel through the important moments in history like Forest Gump?

All put together for a night out, the lovers are glamorous and ethereal

Strangely, there’s no very much that happens in Only Lovers Left Alive. The only real conflict is Adam’s depression and his contempt for the people around them, who we rarely see. The characters’ fear of contaminated blood, previously a mere quirk of their universe, does become a real conflict, but only toward the end, when they is not much time left to explore it. After much warning that Ava’s going to come and something terrible will happen, she visits for a couple night, kills Ian and is kicked out, never to be see again. Adam and Eve panic about how difficult it will be to hide the body, but accomplish the task with ease and are never caught nor in any danger. Marlowe appears only to impart wisdom, gripe about Shakespeare and die (perhaps in poor taste) of AIDS or some other blood borne disease. There’s no giant battle, no mysterious enemy lurking in the shadows, no finagling their way around the cops and keeping their secret. Instead, it’s a lovely atmospheric meditation on romance, the passing of time, and the impermanence of cultures.

See also on Bitch Flicks: Guest Writer Wednesday: Melancholia, Take 2

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

‘True Blood’ Season Six Kick Off!

Written by Rachel Redfern

***Spoiler (or more aptly called, rumors) alert

With the passing of one great HBO show comes the dawn of a new one. While we all cry for the season finale of Game of Thrones and the subsequent nine months without Peter Dinklage, it means now we have True Blood to look forward to.

Starting June 16th, the next great gratifyingly guts and love HBO show will be up and running with ten episodes pleasantly filled with Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard), Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), and Alcide Herveoux (Joe Manganiello); while the show has a normal run of twelve episodes a season, it’s been shortened to a soul-crushing ten due to Anna Paquin’s pregnancy.

As a little recap, season five ended with Eric yelling, “Sookie, Run!” after the creation of Billith, the lovable Bill turned into a religious vampire fundamentalist who drinks the ancient blood of Lillith and becomes an evil liturgical nightmare.

Artwork of Lillith

As a feminist, I find it fascinating that Lillith was chosen as the starting point for the vampire religion. In the original legend of Lillith, she was created before Eve to be Adam’s wife, but she refused to be Adam’s “slave” and so rebelled against god, left the Garden of Eden and then slept with Satan. She gave birth to many children by Satan, but when god demanded she give them to him she refused. Therefore, like so many female mythic figures (and modern day ones) she has been cast as either a demonic prostitute or as a great mother figure who protects children, more commonly known as the angel on the hearth.

This obviously transitions into the use of religious themes from season five, and that will be carried over into season six. (According to the season six trailer, an incredulous Sookie tells Bill, “You really do think you’re god.”) Whether True Blood intends to cast Lillith as a demon or an angel hasn’t been entirely determined (though my money is on demon); however, it’s incredibly unique to have a woman as the savior figure in a religion (the only other film/tv show I can think of is Dogma, and I’m not sure that counts). Unfortunately though, it seems Lillith can’t just stay a woman; Bill drinks Lillith’s blood and effectively becomes a part of her, either taking on some part of her divinity or just becoming her in flesh. While it was a bit frustrating to have her become a man at the end of the season, it’s also still interesting to have a possibly androgynous religious figure.

True Blood is a show that has consistently dealt with some of the more mythological and pagan representations of women: Holly (Lauren Bowles) as a good witch; Marnie (Fiona Shaw) and Antonia in season four as the sometimes bad, sometimes good witches; Maryann (Michelle Forbes), as the evil ancient maenad in season two; and a whole host of good, bad and flighty fairies throughout the entire show.

Of course on the surface, True Blood gets a reputation as a vampire romance with lots and lots of sex; however, the show in general has powerful themes: religious fundamentalism, terrorism, racism, homosexuality, and even PTSD. Todd Lowe and his gentle search for earthly normalcy provided a great counterpoint to the search for supernatural artifacts or dominion of the other characters. Also, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) is one of the most interesting homosexual characters on television; Ellis plays the role with a physical masculinity but with a more feminine wardrobe and a flamboyant sexuality. For me, Ellis’ masterful acting as a playful joining of genders and stereotypes is able to move away from a trite rehashing of more mainstream representations of homosexuality. (Note: The following clip, while representative of Ellis’ fine powers of gender melding, also contains explicit language. NSFW.)

True Blood also did an amazing job with firmly insinuating a real sense of place into the series; there is a gritty realism to its deep south with the humidity, rich and poor suburbs, accent, clothing and behavior. Ultimately the show portrays poverty, varying levels of education, spiritual communities, even a few crappy old cars, and unlike many other shows, characters are of varying beauty and body type, have unstylish hair cuts and ill-fitting jeans (except for a lot of the vamps–most of them are just dripping sex). So at least the show maintains some sense of realism while the main cast runs around staking vampires and strip dancing with fairies.

We also have to recognize the incredibly kick ass soundtracks that the producers bang out over every season: Beyond the bland mixes of generic pop music of most shows, True Blood features punk rock, country, folk music, fabulous jazz and sleazy hip hop in a brilliant mashup. It also has in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best, opening sequences of any tv show.

The cast of True Blood

So, on to season six: what can we expect? Spoilers and rumors to follow.

Sookie and Jason: Looks like Sookie and Jason are on the trail for Warlow (Rutger Hauer), the mysterious vampire who killed their parents and to whom Sookie was apparently promised. Sookie also looks like she’s coming in to her own and letting someone (Bill? Eric?) know she doesn’t belong to anyone and that she’s getting sick of the way her life is going.

Eric and Sookie: Eric and Sookie look like they’re getting it on in a few scenes and beyond that, Eric looks sweet, and sexy and amazing. Perhaps this season we’ll get to see him in the heroes’ role as he realizes the best parts of himself? Also, apparently Nora isn’t just his sister? Supposedly, there’s a little bit more of a secret there than we originally thought. Bigger than all of that though, is the rumor that Eric might meet the true death in this season, which if that happens, would entirely change the course of the show.

On a side note however, the show has received some criticism for its unwillingness to kill off major characters, so while I think that Eric dying is a low possibility, (though Skarsgard’s career has been gaining recently; he might want to move on to other projects) perhaps that’s why the show might be ready to take the plunge of major character death? Also, consider this season’s tagline “No one lives forever.”

True Blood Season 6 and tagline

Pam and Tara: Pam and Tara will continue their relationship and the two definitely seem to be going it alone. However, I have heard that Tara has a near-true-death experience, which we hope will only be an experience and not a permanent change.

Evil: The humans might just be the villains in this season, along with Warlow, since rumors have been leaked of scary anti-vampire weapons (one of which might end up hurting Tara). It also looks like there’s some intense secret lab where humans have been conducting experiments on vampires and other supernaturals. Perhaps a vampire/werewolf alliance will be on the horizon this season?

On a happy note, everyone’s favorite pastor family is back with Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) and Steve Newlin (Michael McMillian), and Sarah looks like she’s probably gonna be a badass.

Trailer #2

Trailer #1

What do you think will happen this season? Is it time for a main character to die?

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

It’s Braggin’ Time!

Hey, remember back when I reviewed that awesome Amy Heckerling movie Vamps, starring Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter? Well, Bitch Flicks ended up on the back cover of the DVD! I’m officially quoted as saying, “A fun cast of characters for sure, but Silverstone and Ritter shine.” Look!

The Vamps DVD cover

So you should all reread my review, “How Vamps Showcases the Importance of Women Friendships,” and then go buy this DVD—mainly because the film is a blast—but also because Bitch Flicks.

I fucking so instagrammed this

Tanya Erzen’s ‘Fanpire’ Blog Tour: Fans of the Twilight Saga

This guest post by Tanya Erzen is part of a blog tour to promote the release of her newest book, Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It, which you can purchase at the Beacon Press website. Other blogs participating in the tour include Women and Hollywood, Feminism and Religion, Fangtastic Books, and Everyday Sociology.

Even though Breaking Dawn Part 2, the long-awaited final film of the Twilight series, premieres on November 16 in Los Angeles, devoted fans will begin camping out for days and weeks ahead of time. They’ll sleep in tents and shuffle through interminable lines in a grimy parking lot, all for the fleeting glimpse of a Twilight celebrity on the black carpet. After all, this is the age of mundane celebrity: everyone wants to be one and be close to one. Fan sites like the Twilight Lexicon and HisGoldenEyes will roam the premiere, hoping to obtain the coveted interview with stars like Robert Pattinson or Kellan Lutz. In the fan firmament, these sites reign near the top of the hierarchy, where they have access to insider gossip, corporate giveaways, and visits to film sets.

The massive fan demand to be at the film premiere as the Twilight juggernaut reaches its crescendo has prompted Summit Entertainment to almost double the numbers they will accommodate at “fan camp.” Mothers and daughters, groups of girls and contingents of TwilightMoms, traveling from afar to the tent city will feel the elation of being among other captivated fans. After days together, they’ll be bonded to legions of others with the same aspirations, embarking upon a kind of public happiness absent from their daily lives. There have certainly been fan crazes before, but what differentiates the Twilight phenomenon is that its fan base consists almost entirely of women and girls.

Denigrating these female fans as rabid, obsessed and hysterical is a favorite pastime for many media outlets. The specter of hundreds of stargazing women, clamoring for a glimpse of actors, evokes snarky bewilderment among pundits. Descriptions of fans typically include comments about unbridled fanaticism and the ear-piercing shrieks of thousands of girls.

At one Comic-Con, the longstanding convention that is a lure for, mainly, male fans of comics, science fiction, and fantasy, Twilight fans camped out on sidewalks for days to attend the actors’ panel. The invasion of female fans into the Comic-Con stronghold sparked a backlash. A few disgruntled male attendees sported signs that read, “Twilight Ruined Comic-Con,” and one baffled online commentator at Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “Fan boy culture’s hold on the Con was hijacked by a vampire romance, of all things.”

Applying adjectives like “screeching” and “stalking” to female fans, commentators imply that Twilight fans should just get a life. Older women, especially, are a favorite target. They’re “stalker moms,” pitiable addicts, and negligent parents. Details magazine mocked them for reverting back to adolescent folly: “It’s not uncommon to hear them break into unprompted gasps, giggles, and squeals.” The implication is that these women just need to get a life instead of spending all their time obsessing about a frivolous interspecies romance.

It is unsurprising that critics deride a phenomenon that attracts mainly women, to all extents labeling it as an instance of mass hysteria. The misogyny lurking here is obvious. One has to wonder why, for example, equally zealous fantasy-football players or sci-fi geeks, many of whom happen to be male, do not endure the same disdain.

The refrains go something like this: the books are poorly written and riddled with cliches, the people who like them must be dupes of the patriarchy or simply burdened with bad taste. These screeds overlook what makes the series compelling for millions of women and girls. In my time with Twilight fans around the world—from the occasional forum participant and those who watched the films fifty times to the person who corralled her entire office into choosing Team Edward or Team Jacob—I have found they also spoke of how the fanpire transformed their everyday lives, not as mere escapism but as a vehicle for connecting with others and forging new identities beyond that of Mormon mother or ordinary teen.

At conventions and premieres, thousands of girls and women discard their cares about boys and men to bond in aerobics and self-defense classes and dance together at elaborate Twilight-themed vampire balls. Married women in the group TwilightMoms temporarily abandon domestic responsibilities for convivial sleepovers where they simultaneously bemoan the absence of spicy sex and intimacy in their marriages and reassure themselves that heterosexual marriage is the only way to envision their lives. Three generations of families bond with each other over their enchantment with the books, attending book releases, conventions and tours of Forks. None of these fans care if Comic-Con is no longer teeming solely with men wearing alien and superhero costumes, nor do they need or want rescuing from the scorn they receive for their fanaticism.

At the same time the fanpire encompasses authentic ways to belong and connect to others, the ceaseless commercialization of Twilight means that for many fans, ravenous consumption of all things Twilight is the main way to retain their feelings of enchantment. When they begin to feel Post-Saga Depression (PSD), what fans call the blue feeling that descends after finishing the books and realizing there is no actual Edward, there are Edward and Bella Barbie dolls, calendars, video games, graphic novels, and fangs readily available in the vast, bazaar-like atmosphere online or at some conventions. Everything on display at official conventions is based on spinoff marketing, celebrity endorsement, and steering fans to other movies that feature the Twilight actors.

Even while critics continue to disparage the fans, they remain a key concern of Summit and other brands eager to exploit their earnings potential. Tent city is now a Summit-sponsored event, designed to harness fan’s buying power. A fan once described the fanpire as an army storming bookstores, conventions, and movie theaters. Twilight-lovers want the ineffable high to last as long as possible, and the corporate sponsors of these events are certainly delighted to oblige. Creation Entertainment knows that the danger for fans arises when, without another book to read, life begins to feel barren. The swoon-inducing possibility of celebrity proximity and the desire for the next Twilight product sustain fans in the months of drought between a new film or significant fanpire gossip.

Critics scoff at Twilight fans, and then they wonder why Fifty Shades of Grey, originally a smut Twilight fan fiction story, is a national bestseller. It’s time that they began taking the complicated practices and pleasures of female fans seriously. The corporate marketers certainly are.

———-

Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. She is the author of Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, which won the Gustave O. Arlt Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a visiting scholar at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle.

How ‘Vamps’ Showcases the Importance of Women Friendships

I’m reposting my review of Vamps—which previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on May 3, 2012—in honor of Vamps opening in theaters (in limited release) tonight and releasing on DVD November 12.

Movie poster for Vamps

Vamps, the new indie film directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter (the upcoming star of the TV show Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23) takes the vampire genre and turns it into a fun, feminist celebration of youth culture and female friendship. The film is part spoof of the recent onslaught of vampire fare, part romantic comedy, part buddy movie—with women!—part history documentary, with some astute political commentary thrown in, and, ultimately, a film about aging, which pays particular attention to the struggles women face within a culture that values youth and beauty above all else.

Jason Buchanan on Rotten Tomatoes effectively captures the plot as follows: “Radiant New York City vampires Goody (Alicia Silverstone) and Stacy (Krysten Ritter) find their immortality in question after learning that love can still smolder in the realm of the undead. Meanwhile, Russian bloodsucker Vadim (Justin Kirk) prowls the streets in search of the next big thrill, and Dr. Van Helsing (Wallace Shawn) seeks to exterminate the creatures of the night as young Joey Van Helsing develops an unusual fixation on Stacy. As ravenous ‘stem’ vampire Ciccerus (Sigourney Weaver) presides over her dark dynasty with the help of her loyal assistant Ivan (Todd Barry), oddball Renfield (Zak Orth) strives to impress Stacy and Goody by any means necessary. Amidst all of the bloodshed and intrigue, nefarious vampire Vlad (Malcolm McDowell) works to perfect his knitting skills.”

Alicia Silverstone as Goody and Krysten Ritter as Stacy in Vamps

It’s a fun cast of characters for sure, but Silverstone and Ritter shine as the main (women) characters. And for once there’s almost no reason to discuss The Bechdel Test; these two ladies barely talk about men for the first half of the film. Instead, we get to see them playing practical jokes on each other, hanging out in their shared apartment (often texting back and forth while inside their two side-by-side coffins), discussing their fashion choices—which is hilarious, as they struggle to make sure they’re fitting in with the latest 2012 trends (Stacy was first turned into a vampire in the 80s, and Goody lived all the way through the 1800s)—and generally looking out for each other and even (gasp) looking out for other women.

[SPOILER] Case in point: one of my absolute favorite scenes in the film happens early on, when Goody and Stacy head out for their nighttime ritual of club-hopping and imitating the new dance moves of the local youth “Day Walkers” (the term they use to refer to The Living among them). A couple of particularly horrible dude vampires approaches a woman after she bends over, ass in the air, with the word “Juicy” written on her tight pants. The dude vamps merely introduce themselves to her, to which she responds, “I’ll get my coat.” Goody chastises the horrible dude vampires—Goody and Stacy drink only the blood of rodents, not humans—and the dudes respond with, “She’s asking for it,” referring to her “Juicy” attire. It’s a pretty fucking great commentary on the victim-blaming that always accompanies any instance of the rape or sexual assault of women.

Stacy and Goody on the computer

Goody walks over to the woman with the goal of getting her to stay away from the vampires, but she ultimately ends up hypnotizing her; in this film, vampires have the power to erase the memories of Day Walkers. At first Goody says something to the woman (paraphrasing), “Listen, you don’t want to leave with them. They’re really bad guys.” The woman says, “I like bad guys.” Goody begins hypnotizing her, repeating, “No, I like nice guys.” The woman walks away, passing the horrible dude vampires, while saying, “I like nice guys. I like guys who listen to me when I say things.” (I laughed out loud at that.)

This scene makes me so happy for a couple of reasons. First, a woman intervening to help another woman avoid getting killed by two horrible dude vampires—an obvious metaphor for rape in this scene, rarely happens in movies. How lovely to see that! Because women looking out for their friends certainly happens in real life—first-hand experience! Second, while I don’t necessarily like the implication that women always go for Bad Boys, I appreciate the acknowledgment that bros like this, who want to harm, abuse, and assault women, definitely exist.

Stacy, Goody, and Sigourney Weaver as Cisserus in Vamps

Also, get this: I turned 33 six months ago. I still have my crappy 35-dollar Blackberry that my sister’s dog spent an hour chewing on. (There are bite marks on the fucking battery.) Let me just say, I could relate to the commentary about youth culture in this film. Heckerling makes wonderful observations about technology, with constant mentions of Twitter, Facebook, texting (there’s a funny reference to someone being in a “textual relationship” due to lack of real-life communication), and other technological stuff I’m probably forgetting because I don’t know what it is. While the film definitely celebrates youth culture, especially in its appreciation of women’s fashion (which reminded me so much of Heckerling’s famous film Clueless), it also juxtaposes that celebration with a critique of the value our society places on youth. That theme comes into play throughout the film, but the focus on women and aging sharpens with the introduction of the head vampire in charge.

Two words: Sigourney Weaver. Do we not adore her? The Alien films, mainly due to Weaver’s badass role as Ellen Ripley, remain one of the quintessential go-to franchises for getting that much-needed feminist fix that Hollywood movies today seem less willing to provide. (Quick shout out to Hunger Games, though!) And Weaver’s role in Vamps as Cisserus, the head vampire, or “Stem,” as they refer to the few vampires who possess the power to turn people into vampires, displays some feminist qualities—strength, leadership, and ambition, to name a few—but her character isn’t without flaws.

While the other vamps fear Weaver’s character—because she’s In Charge—they mainly fear her because she’s the evil, murderous villain. She obsesses over acquiring the love of young men, and when she doesn’t get it, well, you know, she eats them. In many ways, she reminds me of a vampiric version of Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. She often summons Goody and Stacy (by psychically speaking to them), and it’s almost always to make them model clothing. (Ha!) See, vampires can’t see themselves in mirrors (invisible!), so Weaver wants to look at these women wearing her very youthful, fashionable clothing so that she can visualize what it possibly looks like on her. Eventually though, Cisserus’ power goes so far to her head that she begins putting the other vampires in danger, and the tagline for the last act of the film basically becomes “This Bitch Needs to Die.”

Vampires hanging out at the club

A woman-in-charge who becomes an evil, power-hungry bitch who ruins lives? Where have I seen that before? (Clue: EVERYWHERE.) I did get the sense from Vamps, though, that it’s making light of that trope rather than relishing in it, and casting feminist film icon Weaver in that role further pushes it toward satire. An interview with Weaver in Collider sheds a bit more light on that:

Collider: What made you decide to jump into the vampire genre with Vamps?

Weaver: Well, I’m a big Amy Heckerling fan, and I also loved the character. She was so unrepentant … I love playing delicious, evil parts like that.

Collider: How does your character fit into the story?

Weaver: She is the person who turned the girls into vampires. So, they have to do her bidding, and she’s very unreasonable and demanding. I would have to say that the one change I made was that I thought she was not really enjoying herself very much, in the original script. I thought, “What’s not to enjoy?” She’s 2,000 years old, she can have anything, she can have anyone, she can do what she wants, so I wanted her to be totally in-the-moment. So, I talked to Amy about it and she just evolved that way. She’s a really happy vampire. She digs it.

(I have to admit, I can kind of get behind a woman—vampire or not—saying, “Fuck it; I own this town.”)

Most of the descriptions and plot summaries I’ve read of Vamps say things like: “Two female vampires in modern-day New York City are faced with daunting romantic possibilities” … (from imdb). True, but not quite. It’s ridiculous to reduce the film to the status of cheesy rom-com because, while both Stacy and Goody somewhat struggle with their hetero-romantic relationships, Vamps ultimately celebrates the friendship and love between the two lead women. (I will say that I have a feminist critique of the ending, but I can’t give it away YET; the movie only recently got picked up by Anchor Bay Films and will be released in theaters around Halloween.)

Stacy and Goody at the club

Overall, it’s pretty significant that I left the theater feeling that this movie—a vampire movie that follows most of the same vampire tropes as all vampire movies—explores something new. It’s also disappointing that I left with that feeling. Because when I thought about it later, I realized what felt so new to me was the depiction of a female friendship that seemed wonderfully authentic. Their dude problems were fairly secondary; their loyalty to each other trumped all other obstacles. Their friendship, in fact, resembled my real-life friendships with women: we don’t fight over men; we don’t sit around endlessly talking about men; we don’t get together and stuff our faces with entire cakes if a man doesn’t call.

That’s why this close relationship between Goody and Stacy is so important to see on The Big Screen in 2012.

In an interview conducted with the director Amy Heckerling by Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein asks the question, “Do you have any comment on the fact that only 5% of movies are directed by women?” Heckerling’s response? “It’s a disgusting industry. I don’t know what else to say. Especially now. I can’t stomach most of the movies about women. I just saw a movie last night—I don’t want to say the name—but again with the fucking wedding, and the only time women say anything is about men.”

Word.