“I feel it in my bones, the night is dying….” whispers the glamorously decadent Countess Bathory, played by the estimable French film star, Delphine Seyrig in Harry Kümel’s art house lesbian vampire flick, Daughters of Darkness. Standing today as a cult classic, Daughters belongs to a unique group of films from the early 1970’s that similarly exploit lesbian vampire thematics. The sub-sub-genre reached it’s most notorious peak with the mainstream American film, The Hunger (1983), starring French icon Catherine Deneuve, music legend David Bowie, and a fresh faced American star, Susan Sarandon. However, whereas Tony Scott’s 1983 film is an important artifact of lesbian exploitation, Kümel’s earlier 1971 flick surpasses its brethren due to its actual existence as a true art house film, and also one that, under reexamination, can be interpreted as more than mere sexploitation. Andrea Weiss, author of Vampires & Violets : Lesbians In Film, echoes similar thoughts on the early 70’s outcrop of lesbian vampires, insisting they are a product of the burgeoning feminist movement of the time period. Weiss claims the lesbian vampire “provokes and articulates anxieties in the heterosexual male spectator, only for the film to quell these anxieties and reaffirm his maleness through the vampire’s ultimate destruction” (90). Though Daughters of Darkness is credited as less sexploitation and more or less gay positive picture than some of its sister films, Weiss, and author Bonnie Zimmerman vaguely point to Daughters as being open to a positive lesbian interpretation. Zimmerman goes so far as to insist that “when the viewer is herself a lesbian and a feminist…it shows lesbianism as attractive and heterosexuality as abnormal and ineffectual” (24). “It gives the last laugh to the Countess Bathory and not to the vampire hunters,” she states, which, unlike films from 30’s-60’s Hollywood produced under the Hays Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency, were condemned to punish any “devious” characters. Despite having what seems on the surface a prototypical condemnation of lesbianism, Daughters of Darkness instead supports lesbianism as not only a positive force, but also an eradicable one that conquers and supersedes heterosexuality/bisexuality, whilst, more importantly, voices the often tenuous differences between gay men and gay women, therefore creating a positive, lesbian-specific film.

Lesbian vampires were hardly an invention belonging to 1970’s exploitation films—it seems the lesbian vampire theme comes from two distinct sources and are either directly related to one of these sources or a combination of the two. Predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the Victorian novel Carmilla (1871) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose heroine, Countess Millarca Karnstein happens to be an aristocrat and a vampire. And a second source, which Kümel’s film uses, is the historical figure, Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, who, in the seventeenth century would kill virgins and bathe in their blood, among various other fun activities. No joke.

Daughters of Darkness centers around a newlywed couple arriving at an out-of-season Belgian hotel, an abandoned mansion much like The Shining (1980). Stefan and Valerie have barely met before tying the knot, and Valerie is in a hurry to meet her new in-laws, which Stefan seems strangely nervous about from frame one. Come to find, there are no in-laws and Stefan is postponing the inevitable truth of confessing to Valerie that he has run away from an aging, orchid-eating homosexual (whom some sources claims is a transvestite, but in his single on-screen appearance he seemed to be wearing men’s attire). Add to the mix the stunning Countess Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) and her, ummm, assistant-creature, Ilona, (Andrea Rau, sporting the biggest lips this side of Angelina). Right away we’re suspicious of the Countess and her troubled imp, as the hotel clerk has the audacity to exclaim that he recognizes her from when she visited before, which was over 40 years ago. The countess, consistently dressed like a Weimar era cabaret dancer, takes an immediate interest in the rather Child-flowery vacuousness of Valerie (Danielle Ouimet). It’s a bit unclear of the dynamics between the Countess and Ilona, but the Countess uses her assistant to tempt Stefan while she convinces Valerie not to leave him, since his closet-case turmoil, turns out, has created a sadomasochistic attitude towards women. In short, the Countess succeeds in making Valerie infatuated with her, whilst Stefan does sleep with Ilona, but their lovemaking is immediately followed by one of the most bizarre death scenes I’ve ever seen in a film, involving a lot of sliding around the bathroom and an unfortunately placed straight edge razor. The Countess and Valerie end up feeding off Stefan simultaneously and as they drive away into the approaching daylight at the film’s conclusion, a car accident renders the Countess an impaled, burning figure in effigy. However, Valerie’s body is shown to inhabit the Countess’s soul while the corpse burns, which is where the positive depiction of lesbianism really gets its mileage.

As Zimmerman points out, the ending is “suggesting that lesbianism is eternal, passing effortlessly from one woman to another” (24). I completely agree with Zimmerman, but I believe the film is taking this one step further and does more than merely suggest lesbianism is eternal. Rather, Daughters of Darkness is lesbianism eternal, and points to lesbians as a powerful alternative for the heterosexual woman, who has been trapped by either a heterosexual male, or homosexual male posing as a heterosexual male.  The Countess points out to Valerie that her husband will only want to use her as a toy, as all men use women. Furthermore, neither of them know his true secret—that he is either homosexual or bisexual, suggesting that beyond the use of a toy/slave, women are used by men as a convenient social marker of normalizing masculinity/heteronormativity.

Additionally, Daughters of Darkness is a film rife with yonic symbolism (the opposite of phallic symbolism). The ocean is an excellent example of yonic symbolism, and I would posit darkness itself as a concealing, cloaking, all encompassing symbol often representing mysterious femininity. (Keep in mind that the Yin is the dark lobe of the Taijitu and represents femininity). The word ‘daughters’ implies a familial connectivity, and that they are all ‘of darkness’, or of the same parentage/lineage—leaving behind an incestuous interpretation, let’s focus on the seemingly endless connectivity this implies in an all encompassing state of being, which is darkness. This interpretation lends a certain eeriness to Seyrig when she states she can feel that the “darkness is dying,” which becomes a premonition of her approaching demise.

Yin/yang, night/day, dark/light, male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, the daughters of darkness flourish together and their power is everlasting—that’s what is left during the last frame of Kümel’s film. Certainly this interpretation is more gay friendly than anything that can be gleaned from the excellent, though problematic interpretation of lesbians in 70’s art house cinema like Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, in which the female lovers hypothetically feed off one another. Delphine Seyrig, whose mere presence elevated Kümel’s film project above the ranks of exploitation cinema (apparently he wouldn’t film it without her) actually resembles and dresses eerily like Margit Carstensen’s brilliantly cracked Petra. And while The Hunger may arguably  portray a loving (though vampiric) lesbian relationship between Deneuve and Sarandon, a bisexual angle also runs through Scott’s relevant film (recently Tony Scott has announced a planned sequel), but Daughters of Darkness posits itself as a film specifically about lesbian attraction and the worth of the love between women over the selfish love of men. Weiss points out, and I agree, “outside of pornography, the lesbian vampire is the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema” (84). Which makes Daughters of Darkness, in this context, a noteworthy and important piece of queer cinema.

At a time in cinema when genres of exploitation (like horror) were the only modes of queer representations, seemingly sensational films like Daughters of Darkness and The Hunger are worth some second looks, and possible reevaluations. The world slowly but surely caught up with genre, and as Weiss states, “the lesbian vampire was no longer necessary to circumvent censorship regulations” (88). However, it seems cinema may finally turn to one of the actual roots of the lesbian vampire. Two highly anticipated projects are in the works about Countess Elizabeth Bathory—Julie Delpy’s The Countess, which just began the festival circuit and will hopefully find a distributor (though it’s doubtful to touch on any lesbian themes) and also stars William Hurt and Anamaria Marinca. The second project rumored is The Blood Countess, appropriately to be filmed by Ulrike Ottinger, and starring incomparable actresses Tilda Swinton and Isabelle Huppert. I have my fingers crossed for this one.

Works Cited

Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbian In Film. New York: Penguin Books,      1992.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut. March     1981: 23-24.

Tags: Daughters of Darkness, Delphine Seyrig, Elizabeth Bathory, Lesbian Vampire, The Hunger, Yonic Symbol

This post was written by Nicholas Bell, Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Diversionary Tactics, Does It Hold Up?, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.