The World Is A Manpire: Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kumel, 1971)

Today's the day: Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #4, featuring at least one big reveal and the return of several beloved (????) characters, is on sale now at comic shops and the usual digital outlets. Grab it now and put in a pre-order for Issue #5 before final order cut-off on October 19.

The trade paperback of Dead Teenagers is also available in any self-respecting bookstore – and the digital outlets, too. Kirkus Reviews liked it, and I liked talking about it one last time.

Friends: We gather here today to discuss the least sympathetic horror archetype in history. I speak, of course, of The Husband In A 1970s Lesbian Vampire Movie. 

The Husband In A 1970s Lesbian Vampire Movie was a brief, horrible fixture in vampire cinema. There are seemingly dozens of Lesbian Vampire Movies, all low-budget, all terminally horny, in which he and his cuckdom play a role. The plot of the Lesbian Vampire Movie — at least, in the incidences I’ve seen — typically proceeds as follows: 

1) A woman gets married to a man. 

2) The woman, and her husband, run into one or more ageless lesbian vampires. 

3) The ageless lesbian vampires turn the woman into a lesbian (and possibly an ageless vampire). 

4) The husband rapes, beats, and very often murders his wife and/or her vampire girlfriends in order to turn her straight again. 

5) The husband is presented as the hero of this movie. After all, the other characters are monsters (i.e., lesbians). 

Now: We can learn a lot here about the sexual anxieties of the era in which the Lesbian Vampire Movie took off. These movies were all made immediately post-Stonewall, and well into the second wave of feminism; in the 1970s, your wife was more likely to divorce you and come out as a lesbian than she would have been at any previous point in history. For the men this had happened to — or the men who understood, deep down, that it could happen, and that they would deserve it — it only made sense that the world was haunted by ruthless, supernaturally powerful lesbians who were plotting to turn your wife into one of them, that she might satisfy their vile desires. Thus, the Lesbian Vampire Movie: An entire horror subgenre in which men paid to watch other men beat up, rape, and kill lesbians on screen. 

The problem here was twofold: First, in order to show men killing super-hot, immortally powerful, sexually irresistible lesbians, you actually had to depict super-hot, immortally powerful, sexually irresistible lesbians in your movie. Second, women, including lesbians, were legally permitted to buy movie tickets. 

Men watched these movies to see men killing lesbians. Lesbians watched these movies to see lesbians — and they got them, in abundance, and with a degree of overt eroticism that mainstream cinema rarely bothered to depict. A genre specifically created to shame and vilify queer women wound up beloved by many queer women, who realized that if you just went in rooting against the husband, what you wound up with was a movie where a bunch of girls hooked up and killed men and had themselves a great time. 

This is the theory portion of our essay. Now, we come to the practice: The hottest Immortal Lesbian Vampire, and most repugnant Husband, in the genre’s brief history. I speak, of course, of Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig and a man that I hope to never see again. 

Daughters of Darkness is, so far as I know, the only 1970s lesbian vampire movie to make it to the Criterion Channel, and you can see why: It looks gorgeous. The whole vibe is intensely, wonderfully Euro-sleazy: Every character is the last surviving heir of some dissipated minor noble family. The setting — an ancient, vacant palace hotel by the ocean in mid-winter — is like someone doing a spooky riff on Proust. There’s a unique sense of dilapidated grandeur; everything is both unbearably chic and also so run-down that it’s about to collapse into a pile of dust. When the camera fades, it fades not to black, but to bright scarlet red.  

So it’s all pretty hot, even before Delphine Seyrig shows up as “Countess Elizabeth Bathory,” an ageless vampire whose only weakness is that one of her victims might eventually recognize one of the more infamous names in world history. (None of them do.) Once we see her — she’s introduced with one high patent-leather boot and one bright-red mouth speaking through a veil; it’s tremendous — all you, or I, or any reasoning being can do is look at Delphine Seyrig. She owns this movie: Sensual, ethereal, sweet, depraved (there’s a part where she seemingly achieves orgasm by describing the gory details of how she's tortured young women to death) and yet weirdly motherly. Irresistible and sweet and awful, all at once. 

This is the dread face of Homosexuality, and also Vampirism. I trust you ladies in the audience are rendered faint with disgust at the very thought. Why, ladies, why would you ever allow the immaculate lesbian fingers of Delphine Seyrig to beckon you toward the grave and the Life Eternal, when you could have a perfectly normal life, married to simply the most hideous man alive???? 

Words cannot describe how horrible this man is. He’s like a half-melted Luke Skywalker action figure infused with the spirit of an ancient, evil troll. Maybe you think I’m being unfair to this man, or overly cruel about his appearance, which — when you think about it — suffers only from the same problem that you and I do, which is not being Delphine Seyrig. But this man is not hideous in his face. Oh, no: He is hideous in his very soul. Consider:

1) He’ll cheat on you!!! Immediately, constantly, and in a manner that constantly escalates in scope and complexity. 

2) He’s a rapist!!! Scenes of marital intimacy in this movie are upsetting. If I were you, I would fast-forward. 

3) He wants to fuck a corpse!!! At one point, this guy pops a boner at the sight of a mutilated female corpse. In fact, he is so incredibly horny that he slaps his wife to the ground when she tries to get him to stop looking at it. In the next scene, when his wife is like, “so… the necrophilia,” he’s completely unrepentant. “Look, baby, you said ‘for better or worse,’” is this man’s attitude. “The ‘better’ part is that I fuck corpses. The ‘worse’ part is that you’re still alive.” 

4) He’ll lie to your face!!! For most of the movie, he’s promising to introduce his new wife to his rich mother, only to produce elaborate lies and live-action roleplay bits with hotel clerks in lieu of said introduction. Which leads us to: 

5) He’s actually kind of gay!!! He does not have a rich mother. He has a rich boyfriend, who grows orchids, and has a fun pastel eye look, and doesn’t deserve this weird little corpse-fucker and his never-ending magician’s scarf of bullshit either. So now, not only is this man laying waste to the straight and bicurious female population of Belgium, the homosexuals have to deal with him. Chilling. 

My point is, ladies: You can have Delphine Seyrig make sweet love to you for eternity in the finest of European seaside accomodations, or you can be married to this.

At a certain point, any sentient organism watching Daughters of Darkness will realize which is the better option.

Daughters of Darkness works because it agrees with you. Somewhere in the third act, the makers of this movie just throw up their hands and recognize that Delphine Seyrig is unstoppable, and that she has to be the hero and romantic lead of this movie, heteronormativity be damned. The genre requires a certain number of dead lesbians by the end of the story, and we do get them. But we also get one dead husband, which is a significant improvement on the formula.        

“Reclaiming” is a fraught thing. I don’t think queer people should always have to identify with monsters, because we’re not monsters — “drinking blood” is not a useful metaphor for “gay sex,” no matter how many times we use it that way, because drinking blood hurts and kills people, whereas gay sex is just two or more human beings, seeking the kind of pleasure and solace that human bodies have built in. 

It’s weird that we have to see ourselves as monsters in order to see ourselves. But seeing ourselves as people who escape our terrible husbands and get to be happy? Seeing ourselves as Delphine Seyrig and/or companions of Delphine Seyrig, lounging in couture in European lobbies, drinking bizarre mid-century cocktails that may or may not be paint? That sounds fine.

I hesitate to call Daughters of Darkness a queer masterpiece — this is a movie by straight men, for straight men, whose only victories are accidental. But it does, at least, capture one of the most important things about being queer: For those of us who are, it’s the better option. 

Because the other option, to be clear, is this guy. I’m not judging. I’m just putting it out there. The choice is yours.  

Daughters of Darkness (1971) is streaming on Tubi.