Finals Week: 'Lips of Blood: Female sexuality and desire in the modern vampire film'

Lips of Blood: Female sexuality and desire in the modern vampire film By Brigid Cherry

The vampire in film has always been associated with elements of sexuality and morality. This association between vampirism and sexuality is related to the violation of taboos, but more importantly allows the identification of the other which is then repressed. Erotic and sexual characteristics are equated with vampirism, which for the female character - who is herself other and therefore subject to repression - means that to embrace the vampire is to embrace sexuality. For that, a forbidden act for the woman who is constrained by patriarchy to suppress her sexuality, she is punished - she is or becomes the vampire and dies, frequently staked through the heart. She is contrasted strongly and starkly with the heroine, the victim who remains coded as virginal, who is therefore pure and can be returned to normality at the climax of the film...

Such a clear cut dichotomy in the readings of femininity in recent examples of vampire cinema is, however, denied in certain respects by the representations of femininity in these films. As Gilbert and Guber suggest in their analysis of nineteenth century literature, the whore/virgin duality normally attributed to representations of femininity are a continuity, a bipolar scale, and not an either or polarity. In this presentation I want to explore aspects of two vampire films from the late 1980s which counter the generic codes and conventions of the female vampire film: most importantly in this respect, in allowing the transgressive vampire-heroine to cross or breach the boundary from vampire/other to normal.

the Vampire Queen in Anne Rice's 'Queen of the Damned'

The two films which I will address are Near Dark - a mainstream American film with the production values and conventions of dominant cinema, directed in 1987 by Kathryn Bigelow and co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red, and The Mark of Lilith - a student film short of 32 minutes duration, shot on 16mm, and made by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin and Isiling Mack-Nataf at The London College of Printing.

Near Dark is an example of the modern American gothic horror film, but one in which character is blurred and condensed to achieve a synthesis of the dark female vampire and the light pure heroine. The Mark of Lilith deconstructs the gothic vampire film by hybridising the monstrous with the normal and substituting monstrosity for normality. Although in both films the female characters in themselves open up alternate readings of femininity, in respect of conventional narrative patterns: in Near Dark it is the ending which breaks with the conventions of the female vampire film, whereas The Mark Of Lilith continuously transgresses generic codes. Both allow the vampire to be cured by the films conclusion.

At the ending of Near Dark, the hero Caleb has been rescued by his father and returned to the family home; at night the vampire-heroine Mae comes to find him and discovers he has been cured of the vampirism she has infected him with. Caleb's young sister is kidnapped by the vampire family and a battle ensues during which Mae saves the girl and the rest of the vampire family burn up in the sunlight. Caleb takes Mae back to his father and she too is cured by means of a blood transfusion.

Reviews and fan comments on Near Dark have frequently criticised this ending. Viewers described the change from vampirism to normality and the reuniting of the couple as "wholly unrealistic... too convenient", "a tad bit disappointing", "too much of a happy ending" (these comments were collected during my research on audience responses to the film). Reviewers described it as "unsatisfying" (Video Trash and Treasures), "contrived" (Starburst) and, in reference to its "Walt Disney happy-ever-after ending", "cringeable" (Imaginator). This sense of displeasure - all reported by males incidentally - may be because horror audiences were dissatisfied with a happy ending very similar to that of the romance genre. It was also considered unacceptable precisely because it did break with the convention of the vampire film, "the ending was a little too much against the canon of vampirism" was one viewers comment. One reviewer (in the horror, science fiction and fantasy magazine Starburst), expressed incredulity with an ending that allowed the "fully-fledged vampire/western moll" to become normal, whereas the hero's cure was acceptable because "he only drank blood by proxy without initiating any murders." These comments say very little about psycho-sexual issues, and much about the expectations of the habitual horror film viewer.

Since the spectator - as with horror cinema generally - is constructed as male, Near Dark may be read as a male rite-of-passage via the Oedipal journey, but I propose that sense can be made of the film, particular the 'unsatisfying' ending, if we read the film instead as a female rite-of-passage.

The fact that the narrative does not centre around Mae, but around the hero Caleb, serves to detract from her importance within the structure of the film. The narrative represents the heterosexual, patriarchal viewpoint. There are a number of moments within the film, however, which serve to open up the narrative for alternative readings.

Within vampire cinema, the female vampire film can be read via its representations of femininity as substituting the pre-Oedipal clitoral juissance for the heterosexual model of vaginal jouissance. In certain aspects, the female vampire film counters the historical devaluation of clitoral jouissance by presenting feminine pleasure through multiple sites - teeth, mouth, neck, breast - thus rendering the female body as the "non-totalised, pleasure-ready entity of surfaces and depths" of Emily Apter's clitoral hermeneutic (itself inseparable from the hermeneutic of the female body).

Throughout the film Mae is positioned as the typically polymorphously perverse female vampire. She is the only member of the vampire family depicted using the traditional gothic mechanism of the bite on the victim's neck (the others use knives, sharpened spurs, broken bottles and guns). In making Caleb, she demonstrates the oral sadism of the vampiric love bite during a protracted kiss, later she feeds him by allowing him to suckle at her wrists while her posture and facial expression indicate her pleasure in what is obviously to her a sexual act. Mae is in a pre-Oedipal state of clitoral juissance because she is vampiric. She is also childlike, immature, but post-pubescent, and on the verge of adulthood.

The opening scene of Near Dark, with Mae the subject of the male gaze, serves as a means by which the male spectator is drawn into the narrative - and via identification with the protagonist. This does serve to reinforce expectations in the viewer of the usual generic pattern and leads him to anticipate certain narrative outcomes (which - it should be added - the film generally meets). However, the opening scene then proceeds to play with the narrative and generic conventions - principally in the dialogue - whilst superficially seeming to conform to them, indicating that the film's narrative contains fissures which permit counter-readings by the female spectator and may thus provide potentially subversive pleasures for her within the film.

Salma Hayek as the stripping vampire in 'From Dusk Till Dawn'

Mae's appearance and behaviour are coded as androgynous and childlike. She is not, in outward appearance, the typical female vampire with the emphasised breasts, exposed cleavage, full lips, heavy make-up, feminine and alluring clothing of the gothic horror film. In contrast to such highly fetishised sexual figures, Mae's sexuality is represented as that of a pubescent woman, a teenager. She is flirty, somewhat shy, she half smiles, she glances downwards or half turns her head away from Caleb and then back. At the same time, she is childlike; which casts her as something of a provocative, Lolita-like figure; in other words, she is coded as a sexualised child. This is established by her entrance early in the film where she steps forward from the shadows of a building at night holding an ice cream cone. She steps into the light slowly and seductively, but she also looks vulnerable (open to rape/sexual exploitation by the ogling group of young men, perhaps) and childlike (the fact that she is licking an ice cream can be read as innocent and at one and the same time - in the way she licks it with slow, lingering movements and glances along the street towards them, knowing they are there - as sensual). Her androgynous appearance - jeans and short hair - is reminiscent of the tomboy figure. She may appear to be the object of the men's gaze and desire, but she is also seductive and fully aware that she is involved in - and in control of - a conquest; she is a vampire luring her victim, a predator hunting her prey, but altogether unlike the sexually fetishised figure of the predatory female vampire of the gothic horror film.

Mae's androgynous appearance is not so much indicative of a bisexuality however, as of the absence of the feminine masquerade: the unconscious masculinity of Freud's "residual phenomena of the early masculine appearance" is seen in her childlike behaviour. Her ripped jeans, frayed and grubby shirt, her short, unstyled hair, (and later) her soot covered skin and unkempt appearance are childish and deny any semblance of femininity.

She is both coquettish and innocent in tone in her conversation with her intended victim and this again serves to emphasise the dual roles that Mae expresses, of both the virgin/heroine and the whore/monstrous-feminine. The conversation underlines that what appears to be a pick-up of a woman on the street by the young hero, hides an ominous sub-text. The girl/woman is not what she appears to be (and she is of course several years older than her unaging vampire form).

The men present, Caleb and his two friends, look on her as an easy catch, a pick-up for the evening with the promise of sex. She also gives every impression of being the typical horror film victim. However when Caleb speaks to her, her words belie this image. His first words to her, his chat-up lines, are (referring to her ice cream cone, "Have a bite?" and she replies by echoing the word 'bite'. He then says "Just dying for a cone" and she again echoes the crucial word 'dying'. This is enticing but in a way that now marks Caleb out as the victim of the orally sadistic and destructive female vampire. Thus the normal male/female-predator/prey roles are reversed in Mae and Caleb during the opening moments of the film and the distinctions continue to be blurred throughout the film.

However, at the close of the film Mae, having been saved by the act of having the hero's blood transfused into her own veins - literally having been saved by the hero's love for her, moves from the pre-Oedipal clitoral juissance into the heterosexual, adult state of vaginal juissance. She has been accepted into the patriarchal family. The female vampire, who is previously coded as other, as a threat to the socio-sexual order, is here rendered harmless by her entry into the normal.

In terms of Cixous's multiply-inscribed sites of desire, the desire of the female vampire is de-phallicised and re-invigorates sexuality by pluralising desire (Irigary's plurality of pleasures) and questioning the phallic dispensation. In Near Dark, in the character of Mae, this state is reversed, bringing the woman as other back into the normal. At the same time as it fractures the patriarchal ideologies of dominant cinema which depicts the punishment and death of the transgressive female of the gothic vampire film, the film's conclusion also conforms to the patriarchal ideologies of society in terms and expectations of female sexuality. It represents the Oedipal journey of the female as well as the male, allowing both Mae and Caleb to negotiate their incestuous desires, the vampire-victim relationship standing in for that of mother-son.

In looking at Mae's desire in her relationship with Caleb, after she has made him a vampire they share two 'sex' scenes in which she opens a vein in her wrist and feeds him. This itself is also a sign of her maternity at this stage in the film. In the first, they are surrounded by darkness, Mae is active and her face betrays her pleasure. In the second, the lovers are surrounded by nodding donkeys and there are frequent cuts during the scene to close-ups of the pumping machinery. Mae has lost the expression of juissance and she has to fight to get away from Caleb who is taking too much of her blood for his own pleasure. Now it is he who smiles, but his expression is menacing. This moment marks the objectification of Mae within the narrative of the film and the beginning of her transition into vaginal juissance.

Having desired Caleb and lost him, it becomes Mae's turn to take up the objective position as the desired object. Caleb rescues her from the vampire family and by destroying her vampire kin, he destroys her old way of life. Entering the daylight of Caleb's world can be taken to indicate her entry into the male economy of femininity in which she will be forced to assume her feminine role and eradicate her own desire. Her final words "I'm frightened" and the freeze frame leave the old Mae in a limbo which it may be assumed will be replaced by her new adult feminine role within the structure of the patriarchal family (which in this case is marked by the absence of the mother - a role which she will perhaps be expected to fill given the earlier foreshadowing of the role).

The Mark of Lilith too allows the female vampire to rupture the boundary between vampiric other and normality, but it does it in a manner wholly different from that of Near Dark. The former film is punctuated with statements which render the assumptions of normal and other or normal and monstrous ambiguous to such a degree that the boundary is not just ruptured but erased

The film seeks to open up ways by which women can reclaim the figure of the female vampire, as one form of the monstrous-feminine. As it asks why the goddesses of ancient cultures have been successively demonised, it attempts to assert more positive representations of female sexuality. As a complex multi-stranded film it internally breaches the boundary between audience and film, symbolically represented within The Mark of Lilith by depicting a relationship between a character in a vampire film (a female vampire, Lillia) and a woman watching the film (a black lesbian woman, Zena).

The Vampire Lovers

Opening with scenes from a vampire film set in Victorian London which depict a male and a female vampire stalking and feeding on their prey, the narrative is disrupted both by shots of spiders and wild animals feeding on their prey and by a soundtrack which consists of a conversation between the vampires at odds with the visual images. In what is just one among a number of overtly feminist statements, the female vampire questions the male (Luke) about the pleasure he takes from killing his female victims while merely feeding from his male victims to satisfy his needs. Lillia is never shown killing her victims and is disturbed by Luke's habits. The location - Cloth Court with its association with Jack the Ripper - adds to the context of male violence against woman.

The film then cuts to shots of an audience (the horror audience), who all wear the same blank, anonymous masks and are hence emotionless and without identity, although obviously masculine. Amongst them, and the only one not masked, is Zena - clearly the only member of the audience possessing a feminine gaze and the only one to question what is depicted on the screen. In a direct address to the (actual) audience, the audience of The Mark of Lilith, she delivers a monologue on the nature of horror and its meaning for women. The film thus speaks directly to women and disrupts the normal patterns of reception and identification that take place in the vampire film - as represented by the masked audience. The following quote is taken from one such speech and would seem to embody the intent of the film-makers:

"A misogynist society perceives women's power and sexuality as a threat to be contained and repressed. The predatory vampire woman is one form that dramatises and disguises the return of the repressed. Can we subvert the horror genre? Rather than turning these monsters into scapegoats, we should realise that they're on the front line smashing the norms that oppress us."

In another sequence, Lillia - dressed in the typical flowing white garb of Dracula's victim - looks out from the screen as she is being bitten by the male vampire and, seeing Zena, says: "I was playing the part of a victim. I wanted to change it. I looked out from the film... I saw you... you wanted me to have a new role... to be set free." She subsequently appears in the audience sitting behind Zena, having been called out from the film by the desire of the female spectator. As Krzywinska asserts of Carmilla in the Hammer film The Vampire Lovers when writing about her own exploration of her lesbian sexuality: "the vampire offered an articulation for our fantasies."

Lillia, the vampire, is coded as victim and displays the feminine masquerade associated with the gothic female vampire (cleavage, red lips, flowing hair, floating white garments, rich deeply coloured fabrics - velvets, furs, satins). She inhabits the fictional, celluloid world of the gothic horror film and lives according to the patriarchal, heterosexual ideologies inherent in that fiction. The protagonist Zena, a black lesbian film-maker, exists in the real world, but in the midst of normality she is circumscribed as monstrous, because of her sex, her ethnic origin and her sexuality.

The female vampire is placed - in dominant cinema - in the role both of victim and of parasite. The Mark of Lilith seeks to deny both and offer an alternative scenario. Zena - who as a black woman and as a lesbian feels that society has made her the monster (she is other in a multiplicity of ways and therefore multiply monstrous) - desires, stalks and seduces the vampire (a narrative pattern that has been repeated in other lesbian feminist films including Amy Goldstein's Because The Dawn). It is this reversal of the usual pattern which frees Lillia, allowing her to recognise that her existence was determined by a distorted masculine fantasy and to regain her reflection, her other self. (By not having a reflection, the vampire Lillia cannot be self-reflexive, she is framed only through the male gaze.)

Although grounded in lesbian imagery, the representations of femininity may alternatively be read - by heterosexual women (as suggested by Holmlund) - as female bonding and autonomy, but perhaps also as a bisexuality, in the sense of that "other bisexuality" which doesn't, in the words of Cixous, "annul differences, but stirs them up, pursues them, increases them", that can appeal to the feminine spectator. Such a circulation of pleasure between women, as Irigary showed, is "unmediated and unmobilised by male desire" and therefore hidden to phallocentric sight. Zena's desire for Lillia counters the discursive mechanisms which oppress and alienate women from themselves and from each other. Irigary's site of transformation/transfiguration allows Lillia to regain sight of her reflection, her self, to be literally transformed and transfigured.

Kate Beckinsale in the 'Underworld' films

So then, avenues exist in the female vampire film whereby female erotic pleasure (the one and more female sexualities, auto and homo and heterosexuality, of Irigary's two-lips) is foregrounded, either deliberately or subversively, and in the process - for the feminine spectator - desire can displace horror.

By rendering the duality of women thus - making both the extreme femininity of the feminine masquerade and the representation of lesbian-feminism subversive - the duality of the whore-virgin is denied. The vampire-victim relationship breaks down under such scrutiny, leaving the vampire to be desired by the potential victim and the victim to deny the monstrousness of the vampire by separating it from the monosexual economy. Representations of feminine sexuality are reclaimed by addressing the potential for empowerment, rather than victimisation, for female spectators. A transformation of the myth of the monstrous-feminine through reinterpretation and reappropriation may then be possible, if only within the context of feminist intervention in the film-making process - since, as with Near Dark, dominant film still serves phallocentric ideology.

Both the films I have discussed hold the potential to open up fissures in the text allowing for counter readings by female spectators. Although Near Dark does reinvent the vampire film, it cannot, does not, take such a radical position as The Mark of Lilith with respect to its address to the female spectator. Unlike Lillia in The Mark of Lilith, Mae's victimisation passes without comment and instead of escaping from a patriarchal relationship, enters into yet another one. The Mark of Lilith's central theme of the same-sex seduction and desire which allows the vampire to be freed from her status as parasite and victim cannot be read in Near Dark, the narrative and visual focus being governed in the latter film by the masculine, patriarchal view of feminine sexuality. Nevertheless, the fairly rare feminine viewpoint of the Oedipal journey in Near Dark does render the film open to reinterpretation. The conventional heterosexual standpoint in the film - it is the heterosexual love story which frees the heroine from vampirism, underscores the reading which allows the dark woman to escape from her misogynistically-determined Hollywood fate, though not via the mechanism of same-sex desire which can be clearly read in The Mark Of Lilith.

Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Stirling, Scotland.

NOTE: Paper presented at the 2nd Gothic Conference, University of Stirling, June 1995.