Dracula's Daughters: The Female Vampire on Film

319 Pages·2014·7.229 MB·English

by  Douglas Brode (editor), Leah Deyneka (editor)

Dracula’s Daughters
The Female Vampire on Film
Edited by
Douglas Brode
and
Leah Deyneka
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2014
Brode_WEB.indb 1 11/19/13 2:43 PM
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2014 by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dracula’s daughters : the female vampire on film / edited by Douglas Brode
and Leah Deyneka.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-9295-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-9296-5
(electronic) 1. Vampire films—History and criticism. 2. Women in motion
pictures. 3. Lesbianism in motion pictures. I. Brode, Douglas, 1943– editor of
compilation. II. Deyneka, Leah, 1971– editor of compilation.
PN1995.9.V3D73 2014
791.43’675—dc23
2013038343
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Once again and as always for Sue.
—Douglas Brode
To my parents, Joe and Judy, and my sisters,
Elisa, Larissa, and Tammy. Additional gratitude to
Christine Hayes, who climbed all 199 steps to Whitby Abbey
with me for the first time, all those years ago. Finally a
thank-you to Professor Douglas Brode for creating such a
marvelous course and proposing the idea for this anthology.
—Leah Deyneka
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A sisterhood of Satan: In this posed publicity still for The Vampire Lovers, Ingrid Pitt
(center) serves as the matriarchal figure to the succubae who would dominate the
vampire genre beginning in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Hammer/Seven Arts.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: “Lamia and Lilith LIVE!” (or at Least Are
Undead) 1
Douglas Brode
1 The Lesbian Vampire Film: A Subgenre of Horror 21
Andrea Weiss
2 Sans Fangs: Theda Bara, A Fool There Was, and the
Cinematic Vamp 37
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
3 Alienation, Essentialism, and Existentialism through Technique:
An Analysis of Set Design, Lighting, Costume, and Music in
Dracula’s Daughter and Nadja 45
Paige A. Willson, Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith, and
Anthony J. Fonseca
4 A Beautiful Life of Evil and Hate: The Vampire-Witch in
Mario Bava’s Black Sunday 69
Lindsay Hallam
5 Blood and Roses (1960): Realizing the Vision of Carmilla 83
Lauren E.Strong
v
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vi Contents
6 Soft Focus, Sharp Knives: The Projection of Vampiric
Fantasy in Jess Franco’s Succubus 95
Jack W. Shear
7 Heritage of Hammer: Carmilla Karnstein and the
Sisterhood of Satan 115
Douglas Brode
8 “Your Tale Merely Confirms That Women Are Mad
and Vain”: The Uncanny Rendering of Countess
Elizabeth Báthory’s Life as Vampire Legend 139
Janet S. Robinson
9 The Dangers of Innocence: An Analysis of Film
Representations of Female Vampire Children 159
Alexis Finnerty
10 The Women of Dracula Films: Brides, Daughters, and
Fierce Opponents 173
Carol A. Senf
11 Narratives of Race and Gender: Black Vampires in
U.S. Film 195
Giselle Liza Anatol
12 Daughters of Darkness: Vampire Aesthetics and
Gothic Beauty 219
Brigid Cherry
13 The Sick Rose: Rabid and the Female Science Vampire 235
Aalya Ahmad and Murray Leeder
14 “You Said Forever”: Postmodern Temporality in
Tony Scott’s The Hunger 253
Kendall R. Phillips
15 Liberating the Vampire, but Not the Woman:
Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) 267
Cynthia J. Miller
16 Dracula’s Postfeminist Daughters in the
Twenty-First Century 285
Victoria Amador
Index 299
About the Editors 305
About the Contributors 307
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Acknowledgments
hank you to Professor Douglas Brode and all of the contributors for
T
their dedication in bringing this anthology to print. I would also like
to extend gratitude to the Syracuse University Library and the Inter-
Library Loan department, which proved to be invaluable in researching
this extensive anthology. Finally, many thanks to Jo Hampshire, who
founded the stellar Whitby Gothic Weekend in 1994; this fantastic festival
is still going strong after twenty decadent years. —Leah Deyneka
All photographs/stills included in this volume were either mailed or
hand-delivered over the years to coeditor Douglas Brode in his longtime
capacities as both a film reviewer for print and electronic media as well
as a film historian creating a series of books on the subjects of cinema
studies and popular culture by publicity people working on behalf of the
following companies: Gemini Releasing, Maron Films, New World, 20th
Century-Fox, 20th Century-Fox Television, Hammer/Seven Arts, R.K.O.
Radio Pictures, Universal, The Theda Bara Estate, Rollins-Joffe Prods.,
United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Dimension Films, A Band Apart,
Galatea Films, American International Pictures, Documento Film, Para-
mount Pictures, Aquila Film Enterprises, Constantin Film, Argos Films,
New Line Cinema, Geffen Pictures, Warner Bros., Bakor Film Investors,
Planet Prods., Warner Bros., Village Roadshow, F/M, De Laurentiis
Entertainment Group, CCC Telecine, Image Entertainment, and Mutant
Enemy. In accordance with their wishes, and permissions granted at the
time and extending into the future, all of the stills included here are pre-
sented to positively present the individual films as well as to allow for the
necessary visual accompaniment to the text without which film scholars
could not properly study works from a medium that is based on iconic
images as well as the written word.
vii
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“Sex and death: The two things that occur once in my lifetime”: In a sequence that did
not make the final cut of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* But Were
Afraid to Ask (1972), Woody Allen plays a male spider who hungers for satisfaction with
a black widow (Louise Lasser) but knows that la petite mort must be accompanied by the
Final Reckoning. Courtesy of Rollins-Joffe Prods./United Artists.
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Introduction
“Lamia and Lilith LIVE!”
(or at Least Are Undead)
Douglas Brode
Why should I lie beneath you, when I am your equal, since both of us
were created from dust?
—Lilith to Adam, Genesis (the Hebrew Talmud)
rash masterpiece” is how the late Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic
T
Roger Ebert once described Invasion of the Bee Girls (Denis Sanders,
1973).1 Written by the rightly esteemed Nicholas Meyer (Time After Time,
1979; Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982), this B movie concerns a sudden
rash of deaths among healthy young men in a small California town. A
government agent (William Smith) dispatched to discover the source of
what first appears a crime spree notes that each man passed from natural
causes after suffering a heart attack. Then our hero learns that, aided and
abetted by some strange cosmic force, the head doctor (Anita Ford) at a
nearby research lab has been employing radiation to empower ordinary
women by transforming them into sexual beings of an untold magnitude.
Simultaneously, their modest physical attributes are replaced by great
beauty.
Desperate to try and bring such a partner to full climax, a hopeless
cause, men expire during the attempt. The poster’s promotional line in-
sisted: “They’ll love the very life out of your body!” Such phrasing reveals
the intended Spectator as a male, the same age as those who fall victim
to these enchanting predators. Midway through, several suburbanites sit
around a sports bar, drinking after work. “The boys,” each an arrested
adolescent of thirty-something, discuss the passing of a friend after cou-
pling with one of “the bee girls.” That term references the queen bee’s
1
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