If you haven’t noticed, female vampires in movies have
been a long-running theme I’ve enjoyed exploring with this blog. It’s an
appealing aspect of fiction to me, and I just can’t get away from the
archetypical idea of the vampiress: her gothic image, seductive power, hidden
feral side, and deadly sexuality. Some time ago, around the time I reviewed The Blood Spattered Bride, I finally
gave Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a read and wasn’t too surprised
at realizing how much Carmilla’s influence is felt in a large number of cult
female vampire films. Although, there seems to have been a bit of a debate as
to whether or not the perceived erotic subtext in Le Fanu’s novella has been misinterpreted by non-Victorian readers,
yet many filmmakers have nonetheless taken the subtext at face value, taking
whatever supposed eroticism is there in the writing of the book out of
the implicit and into the explicit; and, for its time, Jess Franco’s Female Vampire
(a.k.a. La comtesse noire, Bare Breasted Countess, Erotikill, and
many more) has to be the most erotic lady vampire piece, even more
so for the XXX version Lüsterne Vampire Im
Spermarausch. (On the opposite end of the spectrum is perhaps, and also
recommended, Let’s Scare Jessica to
Death — a Carmilla influenced
movie that hardly features any eroticism).
