Hey you little bat-shaped marshmallows, it’s getting closer to the most wonderful time of the year: Halloween, the only day out of the whole year where it’s acceptable to dress my cat up in costumes and Instagram to my heart’s content. Last Halloween, I managed to realize my dream of publicly pressuring my friends Carly and Robin into dressing up as Gomez and Morticia Addams via a very successful Change.org petition — proof that dreams really can come true. Halloween is also amazing because there will be so many horror movie marathons, and I intend to absorb as many of them as possible.
In the last A+ Autostraddle Insider, you may have read a staff-wide discussion about the sexual predilections of many monsters and assorted fantasy creatures, which led me to really investigate the origins and theories behind the characters and movies I’ve loved my whole life. Who knew there was so much psychology behind Fay Wray’s legendary relationship with King Kong, or feminist theory related to the way women interact with the supernatural? Without further ado, let’s delve in.
Vampires
It’s theorized that in early Gothic novels, it was too taboo to address homosexual issues directly, so many authors turned to tales of horror. The trope of the lesbian vampire dates back to the 1871 Joseph Le Fanu Gothic novella Carmilla, which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by nearly 30 years. In the story, two young girls who initially meet in their dreams are heavily attracted to each other through forces that the narrator Laura doesn’t entirely understand — only to learn later that the object of her desire is actually a vampire countess named Mircalla.
The mythology of vampires changes depending on who’s telling the story, but one detail remains consistent: vampires are in general a pretty seductive bunch, driven by bloodlust and lust in general. Your basic Dracula type is an insatiable blood addict, and the more successful vampires appear to have perfected the heady eye contact and homoerotic sexual magnetism involved to draw in one’s potential victims. There’s certainly no shortage of (often terrible) depictions of lesbians in vampire movies and TV shows, from Vampyros Lesbos to Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter to We Are The Night. The vampires on True Blood were pretty much bisexual across the board, the vampires in Twilight were the clingiest, poutiest lesbians in the Pacific Northwest, and damn, Catherine Deneuve’s beautiful vampire in The Hunger makes out with Susan Sarandon all over the place.
In lieu of a clip of any of the movies mentioned above, please enjoy this trailer for Dracula’s Daughter, the 1936 sequel to Bela Lugosi’s classic Dracula which is widely regarded as the first mainstream example of heavy lesbian undertones in a vampire film. Countess Zaleska’s obvious attraction to her female prey was exploited in the movie’s advertising, which offered the taglines “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!” or the more playful “She gives you that weird feeling.”
Werewolves
If vampires represent the taboo side of human sexual desire, werewolves represent the more violent side of the id, pure animalistic rage. It’s tough enough to find quality female representations of werewolves (let’s not even talk about lesbian something-or-other Jack and Diane, where the werewolves exist only as a heavy-handed emotional metaphor), but my favourite by far is the tongue-in-cheek Canadian cult flick Ginger Snaps. Ginger Snaps follows the plight of a pair of teenage sisters who are totally over adolescence, until the older sister Ginger is attacked in the night by some kind of mysterious animal. Before long, Ginger’s gotten her first period, and shortly thereafter she becomes moody and sullen, starts growing hair in places she never noticed it before and finds herself rabidly interested in sex. When she tries to talk to adults about her concerns, she’s assured over and over again that it’s all a natural part of becoming a woman, while it remains glaringly obvious to her sister Brigitte that Ginger’s transformation is turning her into something much more menacing. Admittedly, it’s not the queerest film we’ll be discussing today, but it’s worth mentioning that up until the very very end of the film where she starts looking like a wolf for real, Ginger makes the whole fangs-and-a-tail thing look really appealing:
Story of my life.
There’s some queer content in the 2006 werewolf flick The Feeding, but it’s all between victims and not the monsters. Bummer. I guess this means there’s room for literally any of you to break the mold and create your own lesbian werewolf movie.
Frankenstein
If you’re looking for a creepy movie about a monster put together from pieces of assorted corpses featuring occasional lesbian undertones, look no further than May. Angela Bettis plays May, a lonely veterinary assistant who finds herself attracted to little bits and pieces of people, but often finds herself disappointed by the total package… til she figures out a creative solution. Noted here for Anna Faris’ ridiculous turn as May’s lecherous lesbian coworker Polly, who seems more like a letter to Penthouse than a real person (but nobody watches horror movies for the nuanced character development, I guess).
Frankenstein girls will seem strangely sexy.
Otherwise, the best lesbian Frankenstein I can think of is the one Liz Lemon stole her shoes from.
Swamp Thing
In addition to being green and covered in algae or whatever, Swamp Thing is also apparently some kind of feminist superhero? Apparently there’s a whole (kinda problematic) issue of the Swamp Thing comic book dealing with patriarchal oppression? I don’t know, I’m only including Swamp Thing because she’s such a fierce hard femme:
Very Large Maybe Angry Animals
Oh no! A very large and confused animal is somewhere it shouldn’t be (like a city or a beach resort) and it’s eating everyone/knocking things over/getting really scared/chewing on your boat/maybe a prehistoric relic/maybe an alien/knocking over helicopters/carrying blonde ladies around! Probably the only thing to do is kill it. Women are rarely heroes in these kinds of movies, and Godzilla, Jaws, King Kong, Mothra, Cloverfield and assorted Loch Ness Monster-esque creatures are almost always assumed to be male.
Still, in “When The Woman Looks,” Linda Williams theorizes that “the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films — Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, Vampyr, Dracula, Freaks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King Kong, Beauty and the Beast — should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the women).” She believes that the monsters and the women who love (or at least, don’t especially revile them) become symbols of Freudian mommy issues, played out on the big screen.
That said, I still don’t understand why we couldn’t we have a giant lesbian caterpillar crawling around Tokyo once in a while.
I WANNA COME OVERRRRR, TO HELL WITH THE CONSEQUENCE…
Pro tip, if you google “lesbian monster,” you will find Charlize Theron.
Zombies
Unless you’re Tina from Bob’s Burgers, zombies aren’t the most sexual creatures in the monster menagerie. Mostly they shuffle about, feeding upon the living and appearing for all intents and purposes pretty indifferent to more intangible matters of the heart. The exceptions of course are porny exploitation pictures like Lesbian Zombies From Outer Space, whose plot synopsis explains that “the only way to stop the apocalypse is to destroy the Space Queen, and the only way to destroy the Space Queen is to, uhm, make love to her and remind her why God created Man and Woman,” so uh, I declined to review that film for this article.
For what it’s worth, I did find Grace, a movie about Intern Grace stumbling around, groaning and eating raw flesh a zombie baby who is delivered by a person who is a lesbian. There’s also Contracted, an iffy low-budget thriller about a woman of ambiguous sexual orientation who is date raped by a strange man at a party and later turns into a zombie. The message of this movie is clear:
Pregnant, walking undead, whatever.
On the plus side, Troma apparently released this 1989 gem called Chopper Chicks In Zombietown, about a motorcycle gang who battle the undead while wearing hot leather jackets. It stars Hal Sparks and Billy Bob Thornton and looks amazing:
Ghosts
Truthfully, is there anything more stereotypically lesbian than a ghost? Life basically breaks up with you, and then you spend the rest of eternity haunting some house, moping around, listening to “You Oughta Know” and rattling chains until some living being notices how miserable you are. Yeah, we get it, ghost. You’re sad.
If you’re looking for a compelling study of the relationships women have with ghosts in these sorts of pictures, I’d recommend a chapter called “Female Spectator, Lesbian Spectre” from Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability by Patricia White. In it, White notes that some of the most acclaimed films of the genre also boast noticeable lesbian undertones. She makes special note of the 1963 film The Haunting, which features one definitively lesbian character (Theo, played by Claire Bloom) and one female character who’s openly intrigued by her, cuddles in bed with her, banters about affectionate nicknames with her (Eleanor, played by Julie Harris). Although five characters are stuck inside a haunted house, it’s only the women who seem to have any sort of connection with the paranormal forces held within. The Haunting‘s handling of Eleanor’s… curiosities are so heavy-handed that the movie ends up being sort of unintentionally hilarious, but it’s still a pretty decent thriller.
Oh no, it’s a ghost! Quick, stick your tongue down my throat! Ghosts hate that!
I’m also told that one time, Tegan and Sara walked with a ghost. It was okay.
White Guys With Knives
Yeah, I see you, Randy.
A good slasher flick plays by a very specific set of rules, and as Randy lays out in Wes Craven’s classic Scream, it’s pretty easy to tell who’ll survive the killer’s rampage. Traditionally, women with active sex lives are the most likely to be murdered, and often the amount of sexual confidence displayed will be directly proportional to the level of violence leveraged against the victim. The archetypal virgin has the best chance at survival (at least to the sequel), but any character shown having any degree of sexual interaction will almost always be a goner. The killers are almost always male, the primary victims almost always female, and Freud would have a goddamn field day with these movies.
A lot of people recommended High Tension as an example of a lesbian slasher movie, but I can’t really explain why without spoiling the entire plot of the movie, so let’s just say it’s a movie about two very nice girls who go to a farmhouse in France or something, and there’s a lot of corn… and murder. I’d love to find more really great slasher pictures where female sexuality isn’t punished just for its very existence, where queer characters could exist without being slaughtered by virtue of being queer, or where lesbian attraction wasn’t considered sick and deranged in some way. I’m not sure High Tension is exactly that movie — I didn’t love it. Are we still friends?
Just tell him what your favourite scary movie is and probs we can all go home and watch Words With Girls.
For what it’s worth, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is a pretty great non-traditional feminist horror film that highlights female friendship, girl power, etc, although I’m not sure it belongs in this category.
Murderous Animate Dolls
Let’s not even play like Chucky and his Bride aren’t like, the ultimate butch/femme couples Halloween costume.
Ready for A-Camp Prom
Witches
“What are some lesbian witch movies?” I asked the Autostraddle staff email thread. “Wait, aren’t all witch movies lesbian movies?” Carolyn replied, and she’s not far from wrong. Although I had difficulty finding explicitly lesbian movies about witchcraft, I think we can all agree that we were all heavily influenced as young future queermos by the young ladies in The Craft:
Except Carolyn, who had never seen it until I made her watch it like a month ago, and now she’s gay, so.
Really, why are we all so drawn to The Craft? Is it a 90s thing? Is it a social outcast thing? Is it Fairuza Balk? Is it the dramatic appeal of a jukebox that plays nothing but Connie Francis? Yahoo! Answers has no satisfying conclusions.
But really though.
I’ve seen some arguments that Practical Magic is some kind of lesbian metaphor, and possibly The Witches of Eastwick? Still, none of these movies are officially queer, none of the characters identify in any sort of way, and although the women are empowered and awesomely anti-establishment, the drama is often about a man (or, you know, about a virgin lighting the black flame candle, who’s to say?).
As far as I can figure, lesbians love witch movies because we’re all just pawns of Satan, flying around on hybrid brooms, eating hummus out of cauldrons, collecting black cats, sucking the lives out of little children and dating everybody in our covens.
Centaurs
According to extensive research I’ve done by skimming through a few minutes of Fantasia, 100% of centaurs are just really, really gay. If you don’t believe me, just watch the clip below, which was basically borrowed shot-for-shot by the makers of Orange is the New Black for Piper’s first prison shower scene.
Demons
Despite their formulaic nature, I love a good demon possession movie, and will willingly trek to theatres to see every increasingly terrible issue of the Paranormal Activity franchise (What’s that in the pool?!?! IT’S THE POOL CLEANER AGAIN!!). Still, even when the demon is doing innocuous things like opening cabinets and scaring the family dog, it’s almost always a male-identified demon seeking out and latching onto a young girl. It’s always a young girl, isn’t it?!
The book The Exorcist is based on actually describes the possession of a little boy, but the makers of the 1973 film thought the movie would hit harder if its victim were female. In an excellent IndieWire piece called “The Horror of Little Girls and Social Anxiety About Women,” Leigh Kolb explains that “What (Regan’s) mother and her culture are embracing —atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness — can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).”
Hey girl.
Demon movies don’t necessarily have to involve homosexual acts to paint young girls’ budding sexualities as something dangerous and terrifying. Ever since sweet little Regan shoved a crucifix into her vagina, demons in movies seem to love nothing more than finding a pious, god-fearing, innocent little girl and turning her into a blaspheming, hyper-sexualized tool of the devil incarnate (See also: Nell/Abalam in The Last Exorcism, charmingly asking Reverend Cotton if he’d like “a blowing job.”).
In the end, Jennifer’s Body does a pretty alright job of giving us a sexually-charged demon who does kiss a girl at one point and boasts of “going both ways,” though it’s not terribly scary.
Vagina Dentata
I’d be remiss if we did not at least mention the fanged vaginal hero of Teeth, the ultimate revenge horror fantasy. For Dawn, the movie’s fresh-faced heroine, every man who wrongs her meets a chompy demise at the hands(?!) of her ladyparts. If nothing else, vagina dentata is the horror genre’s most transparent example of men finding female sexuality and vaginas completely terrifying, so even if the movie’s bad (which it is, and gloriously so), it’s still fun to watch.
Share your favourite queer-centric horror movies in the comments!
I LOVE THIS. Epically awesome. I want to watch every movie you mentioned that I haven’t seen yet, and then also watch the ones I’ve seen already. I’m also really thrilled that there is now a vagina dentata tag on Autostraddle, and I hope the tag is used a lot in the future
First comment!
An old favorite in the black-and-white ghost movie that definitely includes an obvious lesbian is The Uninvited (1944). One possibly asexual ghost, and the lesbian who idolized her. It is all subtext because 1944, but still.
I started watching that one, and The Haunting, on repeat around age 8, and have never stopped, haha.
Stef, this is so, so wonderful. You are truly a Scream Queen.
Also, “Vagina Dentata! Vagina Dentata!” is easily one of my all-time favorite (and most often quoted) movie quotes
there are so many appropriate occasions to use it.
<3
Stef, do you sing “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” as soon as you see Halloween items hit the shelves too? O_O
This post I want to hug it for an awkward and probably creepily too long of a time, it just gives me warm fuzzies like that.
Kate Beckinsale in “Underworld”! I don’t know how important it is to this conversation (if at all) but It needs to be mentioned. That outfit made my prepubescent body feel things I didn’t understand until I was a good 17.
Also, I just watched all 19 episodes of the Carmilla web series. Its so bad but so good all at the same time. Its cute.
White guys with knives movies are always terrifying. The tragic hairlines alone are enough to keep me up at night. “But…but how can someone just have no edges that aggressively?”
Also, Teeth is a life goal.
**White guys with knives movies are always terrifying. The tragic hairlines alone are enough to keep me up at night. “But…but how can someone just have no edges that aggressively?”**
Omg I cannot stop laughing.
I was thinking, “why so homicidal you have everything! You need the skins of these women too!??!?!?!”
Like goddamnit Harold! Go take your community college associates degree, get a stable job with a 401k, find a wife,have three kids, live comfortably in the middle class and have an affair with your secretary when you hit your forties. The rest of us do not have the time nor the patience to deal with you skinning us alive because you wanted “adventure”. BYE HAROLD
This comment led me to check out the Carmilla webseries, and holy shit, just watched all 19 episodes at once as well. Soooooooooo gooooooooooood!
I just fell into the famdom earlier this week. God bless Tumblr lesbians. Welcome to the club!
I WAS ABOUT TO POST ABOUT IT – QUICK, EVERYONE WATCH THE CARMILLA WEBSERIES BY VERVEGIRL.
It is bar none my FAVORITE thing ever. Think Gay Buffy. And also, in addition to pretty much every girl liking girls on the show, they’re all RIDICULOUSLY HOT OMG.
The Haunting is, IMO, the scariest movie ever and one I cannot watch if I’m in the house by myself and there isn’t one drop of blood in it. Claire Bloom is amazing and drop dead gorgeous in it.
But I can’t believe “Let the right one in” was left off the vampire list (the Swedish film, not the mediocre US remake called “Let Me In.” Eli is the best screen vampire and the most heartbreaking. Plus she’s a fascinating study in gender variance and even transness (the book goes into it in more detail). If you’ve never seen that film and love vampires, it’s a must.
i forgot all about let the right one in! def a classic, and i love how the book deals with eli’s gender. the us remake was a travesty.
I loved the Swedish movie, and the book too. (I missed the trans element the first time I saw the movie, and understood it only after reading the book. It certainly gave additional meaning to lines like “what if I weren’t really a girl?”)
I HATE SCARY MOVIES BUT I LOVE THIS ARTICLE
This is a brilliant article but I’m particularly thankful for these bits:
1. Reminding me of all the amazing pictures you’ve sent me of your cat in Halloween costumes
2. Reminding me of that epic campaign that got Robin and Carly to dress up as Morticia and Gomez
3. The Liz Lemon’s shoes jab
4. The lesbian-ghost parallel
5. Dating everyone in our covens
I love this article so much because I have to many feelings about the horror genre and Halloween in general and thus I have made a very long and hopefully entertaining list of my feels:
Item 1: The Craft was everything to me and I related to Rochelle’s character so much it’s not even funny! Being a water sign and bullied by a white racist bitch-face who never became nice to me just ignored me after junior year. I also had a huge crush on this goth girl in high school and experimented with my fashion wearing all black which my mom blamed Marilyn Manson and thought I was experimenting with Satanism, oh mom.
Item 2: I like to think vampires are real.
Item 3: I remember watching a lot “urban” (black people) horror films and found the themes interesting. It could range from fears of ghosts, killer clowns, serial killers to experiments with fear based on the cultural history of racial violence. A memorable one is “Bones.”It’s about a man murdered by some dude and comes back to seek revenge played by Snoop Dogg as the vengeful ghost. I had a huge crush on Bianca Lawson (who was in Pretty Little Liars as queer character but met a tragic end) and she is part of my many mini queer-awakenings in my youth, I’m pretty sure this was mini-queer awakening #12.
Item 4: The Descent. Holy. Shit. All women hiking and cave exploring until some crazy monsters who don’t see light come to fuck shit up. I remember my friend looking at me saying, “these women are butch as fuuuuuuuh(ck)!” Is it queer? Eh, but oh so much room to project the queer feels. There were two characters I’d ship like FedEx.
Let me stop here because I could go on for a while!
Oh my god I forgot about the descent. The nightmares are now sure to return…what’s that on the ceiling…oh just a frickin weirdo monster thing that wants to eat you NP. *shudder*
I am just so happy to find out I’m not the only person who loves Ginger Snaps. I even liked the second one up until the weird ending.
A lot of my adolescence involved watching the Craft over and over.
The Descent is one of my favorite feministy horror movies. It’s not explicitly queer, but come on, that many women climbing into a cave together and no one’s queer? Too much suspension of disbelief.
Ginger Snaps is my menstrual werewolf playlist tradition root and it connects possibly too well to how I experience my PMS.
Is this overshare?
Fluffy hair, don’t care.
Very good article. They kind a always look forward to finding when it’s that time of year again. “Tis the season to sound creepy”
There’ve been a few slasher movies with lead heroine are aren’t punished for there sexuality, buy not many. Ginny in Friday the 13th II, Jess in Black Friday, and Alice from Nightmare on Elm Street IV and V are survivors who aren’t virgins and all prove able to death there attacks to varying degrees. See here for more details: http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/the-25-fiercest-final-girls-of-horror#2yeiy1u
Though if I had to pick a truly favorite horror movie with feminist overtones it would have to be Red Eye with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. For more reasons that I can get to right now because it’s 10:40 central time and I’m GETTING RED EYE.
i absolutely love this article! this is so so good.
also i’m a huge werewolf fan and i can definitely vouch for the majority of werewolves being queer. actually, the first things i learned about non-binary gender and transness were from werewolf fans, many of whom were my first queer friends as well.
and i love love love Ginger Snaps, it’s so great. also i feel like at least some of the werewolves in Trick ‘r Treat must be lesbians. i haven’t seen it in a while and don’t remeber if there’s any explicit queerness but it’s an all-women werewolf pack, i feel like it doesn’t get much gayer than that
also i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: Godzilla, though often assumed male, is definitely a woman. she’s often a Mother Nature stand-in and her being a woman just makes sense.
YES!
*fails to find appropriate Godzilla gif*
Horror is fascinating.
Hey, y’all should listen to this podcast http://www.facultyofhorror.com
Horror films dissected by two smart Canadian chicks.
And this blog. http://www.mercurialblonde.wordpress.com/category/horror-movie-of-the-day/
Sarah Horrocks, smart chick extraordinaire, writes about horror movies.
All cheerleaders must die is a super weird queer campy horror film full of witches, possession and almost zombies that I think more people should see. It’s awful, but in a really fun way
I am shocked to see not one mention of Mina and Lucy’s Big Gay Love from Bram Stoker’s Dracula! No-one can tell me they weren’t madly in love with each other and torn apart by society’s heteronormative expectations. Lucy fits the criteria for a hypersexualised (at least compared to Mina, paragon of Victorian notions of chastity and virtue) lesbian vampire if there ever was one. They even kiss under Dracula’s thrall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbbRQj8Oi2k
Full disclosure: I might actually be pretty invested in Lucy/Mina as a ‘ship. Ah, high school, my budding sexuality, and furtively reading terrible fan fiction on the library computers. Good times.
I’m with you on the USS Lucy/Mina. Luna? Micy? Those are both terrible.
But whenever anyone references that movie I’m overwhelmed with the need to shout WINDS WIIINDS WIIIINNNNDS and giggle hysterically.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0syFQLGBjo&w=854&h=510%5D
I have so many horror feelings. Mainly the I hate psycho killer type movies but love all other horror movies type feelings. Lesbian vampire killers is the worst film of all time. I am still struggling to understand how it got made. The Craft is probably the root of why I dated mean Bitches when I was young and dumb. Also can we talk about Resident evil, ok so Milla Jovovich is a troped out clone, it’s got the creepy little girl, and M-Rod dies in seconds but I’m always a fan of a video game-movie.
I would love to see a lesbian werewolf film/comic book/tv show/novel.
Did anyone watch Hex? Lesbian ghost-tacular and super campy.
Really impressed by this. I had no idea so many horror movies were so very gay.
Than you might want to check out this article http://www.glbtq.com/arts/horror_films,2.html
It mostly covers the male aspects of gayness in horror movies, but some of the lesbian elements mentioned on this site are there as well. There are no pictures unfortunately, but it does provide a little more historic context in showing how reoccurring themes and symbols have changed and developed over time. There’s also a good list of larger books on this subject.
when was the last time you actually watched one of the Japanese monster movies (not the american remakes). The girls are always the ones with the telepathic powers to calm the beast!
We have seen the Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, it provides everything you expect :D
While not a horror movie exactly you can have a good laugh with Cannibal Women in the avocado jungle of death.
Two pretty cheesy lesbian themed vampire flicks, Temptation and We are the Night. Then there is Lesbian Vampire Killers.
I love scary movies but I hate scary movies (because I am secretly a literal infant), so this list is the best/worst thing ever.
I’m really glad Teeth got a nod, though, because it’s honestly one of my favorites. I love how bad it is.
Though it has no queerness in it whatsoever, I will always utterly adore Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods. I don’t know how strictly it falls within the horror category, because, as per usual, Whedon’s entire point was to fuck with the genre. There are so many tropes (like punishing women’s overt sexuality) that are used in brilliantly, intentionally uncomfortable ways. Plus *MAJOR SPOILER ALERT* weed ends up saving the world (well…almost).
*applauds*
What, no mention of Chick Tract adaptation Dark Dungeons? Its surprisingly gay.
Also, there’s a zombie show in the UK called In the Flesh that’s also pretty gay (but dude gay).
Right on! I was just about to recommend In the Flesh. So good, so gay. But yes, dude gay.
Stef I am so glad you and Shannon made me watch The Craft in the past so that I could appreciate this article in the present.
Need to share this one cause it discusses the very theme of the film in the film while dicussing Joseph Le Fanu’s Camilla. Let’s just go with it relates:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp_luBLwsN0&w=560&h=315%5D
It talks about tradition but it also violates it. Cinematically any way, but in someways it follows folkloric tradition long forgotten. The vampire being a malevolent spirit of a person who died a violent death that feeds off of living people. Not an immortal being who can roam the world feeding orally off the blood of mortals just can’t be in the sun, wear silver or bare the presence of christian artifacts.
Thought that would embed dang it. Well the film is “The Moth Diaries” and Lily Cole is in as the antagonist :3
Has anyone seen the MST3k episode of the 1958 B horror movie with the severed head The Thing that Wouldn’t Die. They put a found a surprising amount of lesbian subtext in that. Here’s just a taste:
“Do you like Amanda Bearse? Boy, I sure do. Come on.”
Oddly enough Amanda Bearse had a much better horror movie credit to her name in the original Freight Night from 1985. That had movie had some more overt queer overtones, though there strictly boy queer.
I was four years old when The Craft came out so I have no idea about any of that, but I’m watching it now and I’ll let you know how it goes
All I want from life is a closely knit group of friends who often make oddly specific references to The Craft.
Am I asking too much?
I consider the ability to make, or at least understand, oddly specific references to the Craft and Buffy to be standard features on friends.
Wow that scene with the centaurs in the pool… I always LOVED that scene as a kid. Maybe should have thought about that more.
Also I have SO MANY FEELINGS about werewolves as a metaphor for queerness, especially closeted queerness. When I was little I had a deathly fear of werewolves and this fear lasted for a long time. I think part of this was that I found it terrifying that there could be parts of someone you care about that you don’t know about at all, or even… things about yourself that you can’t control and seem scary and like a secret that should be kept from everyone. Interestingly, I also developed a recurring character in my dreams, of a young werewolf my own age who became my friend. I was never scared of this werewolf in my dreams, but awake, I was still terrified of them. I feel like maybe I was trying to tell myself something? This is all complete theorizing of course.
But it makes sense to me that werewolves could represent queerness, in how it’s often feared and reviled, both by others and the person in question, and how it’s something you can’t control but you often try to, by locking yourself up and not letting your true self out. And just a lot of things. I don’t know, it’s interesting…
I have to be a HUGE NERD and say that Mothra already IS a giant lesbian caterpillar/moth. She’s explicitly called female (except in the shitty dub of some) and pretty much all her wrecking stuff shenanigans come from people kidnapping her tiny bitches.
Also Biollante is a girl, but she’s more about daddy issues. Caaaaaan’t think of any other lady giant monsters off the top of my head. The female MUTO from Godzilla 2014, sure, but she was totes hetero.
OH WAIT!
1998 American Godzilla (also known simply as Zilla) was also female down to the giant monster labia visible in some shots.
Though they do keep misgendering her. Or maybe they had a very long talk to Zilla about Gender Identity off camera.
Hey, stumbled on this article. Great read – but also kind of amazed that you referred to Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space as a completed film. I’m the writer and would-be director, and sadly the movie never got made. It is however now a comic book, about halfway done with the limited series.
I just wanted to say: if what was written in the synopsis – the whole “show her why God created Man and Woman” was meant to be taken seriously by the reader, I’d say you’d be right to move on and not review it. However, much of the story is meant to mock the whole flawed male fantasy of sexy lesbians being somehow also attracted to dudes. Don’t get me wrong, the story isn’t for everyone; it’ll probably offend plenty of people; and the target audience for the most part is male — but it’s supposed to be a comedy with some satire thrown in, rather than porn with an underlying conservative message.
Anyway: thanks for noticing!
Jave Galt-Miller
Heh. I guess I’m a little late to this party.