Sexy lesbian vampire chic

[cronus]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timst ... -elegance/

Sexy lesbian vampire chic: how Europe disguises its fascist demons with bourgeois elegance
By Tim Stanley

The movie Daughters of Darkness (1971) begins when newlyweds Stefan and Valerie miss their boat. They stay the night in Ostend, in one of those old, empty hotels that echoes like a tomb. To relieve their boredom, the fates send them the charming Countess Bathory who turns out to be both a lesbian and a vampire. She beds the beautiful Valerie and then invites the couple to dinner, where she suggests that they tour Europe as a threesome. Stefan objects, so the Countess slices his wrists with a glass fruit bowl. The girls suck him dry and speed off into the night. High on life, Valerie goes too fast; the car spins out of control, the Countess flies through the windscreen and our sapphic hero is impaled on a fence post. Daughters of Darkness sends a timeless message to vampires everywhere: don't drink and drive.

I stumbled upon this fangtastic movie last weekend and instantly fell in love. So, too, did the feminist social critic Camille Paglia, who used it in her book Sexual Personae to explain the appeal of vampirism. Quote:

A classy genre of vampire film follows a style I call psychological high Gothic. It begins in Coleridge's medieval Christabel and its descendants, Poe's Ligeia and James's The Turn of the Screw. A good example is Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant lesbian vampire. High gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history.

According to Paglia, "the thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine." When men watch horror movies they are invited to experience "submission to overwhelming force" – something that is normally the preserve of women. She particularly likes high Gothic because the feminisation of both the male characters and the male viewer is so explicit. In Daughters of Darkness, Stefan is a violent brute who beats Valerie after a small tiff. Bathory is gentler and more sophisticated; even when sucking the life out of Stefan she never displaces a single golden hair on her head. The Countess is a trangressive hero: the woman who steals a man's woman and then murders the man. Sisters doin' it for themselves.

(continued, watched too many vampire movies and conflated and pushed the metaphor outside its limits maybe?)

[laklak]

Chic chicks.