Not confined to the stinking limits of hell…

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

Anne Rice – Interview with the Vampire

One long, lingering sex act…

In Dracula, vampirism is — to be pedestrian in the extreme — a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter; the driving obsessiveness of lust, which destroys both internal peace and any moral constraint; the commonplace victimization of the one taken; the great craving, never sated and cruelly impersonal. The act in blood is virtually a pun in metaphor on intercourse as the origin of life: reproduction; blood as nurture; the foetus feeding off of the woman’s blood in utero. And with the great wound, the vagina, moved to the throat, there is, like a shadow, the haunting resonance of the blood-soaked vagina, in menstruation, in childbirth; bleeding when a virgin and fucked. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck, the draining of their blood over time one long, lingering sex act of penetration and violation; after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed. The women are transformed into predators, great foul parasites; and short of that, they have not felt or known lust or had sex, been touched in a way that transforms being — they have not been fucked.

Andrea Dworkin – Intercourse

satiated its passion…

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. 

J. Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla 

Dead Until Dark

Suddenly the blood tasted good, salty, the stuff of life. 

Charlaine Harris – Dead Until Dark 

the vampire is the physical embodiment of sex

The human condition is vast and multifaceted but few of those aspects are as important or as intense as sexuality. Like other creatures the human body inherently lives to reproduce but it is the ability to reason and feel genuine emotion that separates humanity from the animal kingdom. Over the course of art history, few creations have done more to bring to mind the raw animal nature of sex and the political and social implications of gender like the vampire. Complete with penetration, exchange of bodily fluids, and maturation, the vampire is the physical embodiment of sex: beautiful, powerful, dangerous. Although the focus of the genre has changed over the course of the last four centuries, the reflection of society’s views on sex and gender have always been present. The vampire is a continuously evolving embodiment of the ever-shifting focus on sexuality, sexual politics, gender roles, and their place in society. 

David Ames – The Sexuality of Vampires 

Blood-feeding monsters

The majority of vampire legends popular in modern culture derive from ancient folktales, spread mainly throughout Europe. However, there are similar monsters throughout various cultures across the world, from ancient Israel to Greece. This can be seen in the tales of Lilith, a she-demon, who feeds on the blood of babies and pregnant women, as well as the tale of Ambrogio, who was transformed into a vampire for his lover. Blood-feeding monsters have long been in the realm of folklore and myths, since history first started being written down. The most prominent of these myths was that vampires were evil entities that steal animals and people to feed off of their life source. While the concept of these ancient vampires is similar to modern-day depictions of the monster, they are extremely different from the portrayal of them today. Even the name “vampire” was not seen in history until much later, around the 1700’s, but the true origin of the word is unknown. 

During medieval times, people in Europe were using the term “vampire” to exhume bodies and burn them, as they were feared to be feeding on the towns and villages at night. However, the folktales and myths surrounding the beasts would evolve into the monsters that filmmakers and authors present to their audiences today. It wasn’t until the 1800’s with the release of Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula that the folktales could be recognized as separate entities from modern legends, and modern myths about vampires today… such as the reaction to sunlight and garlic that can be seen through these novels. The novels spread modern legends of vampires, such as the practice of sleeping in a coffin, as well as their superhuman speed and strength. However, the release of John Polidori’s Vampyre in 1819 redefined what it meant to be a vampire. Instead of a bloated, horrid corpse that medieval individuals knew the creature to be, Polidori transformed the beast into a suave and sexual monster, charming its victims to their deaths. He turned the vampire into a sexy, seductive aristocrat, or the villain that people know the vampire to be today. 

Mindie Farpelha – The long, bloody history of Vampires  

Holy places…

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

C.S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces

I felt no love, only lust

We walked on the beach at midnight. Our silence was made more profound by the sound of rolling waves splashing across the sand. Two would be lovers, were we – and yet I felt no love, only lust. 

And was it any different for you? 

Ah, yes, yes, I know. Such memories are dead things that we carry around within us. Like ghosts, they haunt us. Haunt me, at any rate. 

And later, in that hotel room you had me rape you like a child and begged me to: ”Pop my cheery, please, pop it…” While I, your stone-white clown, repeatedly stabbed into you with my hard flesh, your long legs up over my shoulders – so I could reach your cervix, your centre and shoot my copious load into your very soul. 

Then fantasy abruptly became reality. There was blood from a ruptured hymen. A virginity first taken decades earlier had miraculously returned. But no. Impossible. Such deep rough fucking had brought on your period a week early.  

We both laughed, crazy as dogs, despite the mess on the sheets. We had become intoxicated – on the wine and each other. Then you said, ‘Do me again. Do me hard. Make me cry with the pain of it. Make me beg you to stop.’ 

And in our performance of various rough sexual acts, we learned how much darkness was contained within us. We come to realize that what we consume will eventually consume us. But you were already aware of this – you were much more experienced in these things, than was I. And later I slept, fitfully, exhausted. But come morning you were gone, fled, disappeared – like a fantasy woman vanished into thin air, leaving me with a thick knot of bloody and sex-stained sheets and this haunting memory. 

sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler

the female predator of Angela Carter’s short story, “The Lady of the House of Love,” is an unwilling one. Described as “the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler,” Countess Nosferatu is the last in a long line of vampires occupying her ancestral chateau. The village below is abandoned, as “all shun the village…in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes” (Carter 93). Carter portrays the Countess as someone who cannot help but feed, someone who is bound by her ancestry to feed on the blood of humans. The Countess is “a system of repetitions…a closed circuit” (Carter 93). She perpetually lays out the Tarot to predict her future “as if the random fall of the cards…could obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden” (Carter 93). No matter how many times she deals the Tarot, which by all accounts should be a random combination of cards drawn from the stack, she receives the same three, over and over: La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie (Carter 95). The High Priestess represents either wisdom, or the inability to make good judgement. The card of Death represents transformation and change, or lethargy and an inability to move on. Finally, the Tower, a card typically depicted as a tower being struck by lightning, is a sign of radical change, or a resistance to that change. In a literal rut of continually drawing the same Tarot cards, the Countess’s fate as foretold by those cards reflects her inability to change and move on from her condition. 

That she is an unwilling predator is made apparent in an early comment that the Countess loathes the food that she eats: “she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce….but hunger always overcomes her” (Carter 96). Even the small creatures she ate as a young girl disturb her, but she has no other means of feeding herself. And now that she is a woman, she must have men. Any man who ventures to the fountain in the village will be led to the Countess’s chateau by her mute keeper. The men “can scarcely believe their luck” when the Countess leads them to her bedroom, where they will be consumed and then buried in the garden. The Countess is a perpetual virgin, dressed in her mother’s wedding gown. Every night would be her wedding night, where she would like to stroke her victim’s “lean brown cheeks and their ragged hair,” but she must eat. Every wedding night ends only in blood and the continuing of her miserable, repetitive existence, as she “only knows one kind of consummation” (Carter 103). Rather than allow herself to be consumed in the marriage bed, the Countess must constantly consume and reject the possibility of change. 

Nadia Saleh – La petit mort: female vampirism, the abject, and sexuality 

more primal and vampiric version…

Just before Lucy Westenra was penetrated with a stake through her heart, Dr. Seward made an observation of her appearance as a vampire which in essence is about the gothic double. The gothic double in this case, is the more primal and vampiric version of Lucy versus her “old self” which had a sweet purity. The “human” Lucy and the “vampiric” Lucy does point out Victorian gender roles; as a human woman it was looked down upon being sexually active before marriage, but after the transition to a vampire state, the Victorian gender roles no longer governed her in how she “should” act and became free to act the way she deep down wanted. 

Kristin F. Jørgensen –  Wooden Stakes and Canine Teeth; The Battle of the Sexes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula