CW: Discussions of misogyny, homophobia, and internalized homophobia.
As the spooky season rolls around, a pantheon of iconic horror villains prepares to dominate pop culture once more. From beloved slasher villains to bona fide horror classics, underpaid employees around the world fill our shops with familiar faces (or at least the copyright-friendly versions of them). Hordes of children get ready to don their masks and dangerously flammable cloaks, waiting to return to our streets and descend on their elderly neighbours, clawing for their next packet of Halloween-themed Haribos.
But amongst the werewolves and Draculas and Ghostfaces, one monster lurks within the darkness, waiting to strike. A demon so dreadful, a fiend so foul, a creature so creepy that you won’t find its costume stocked on any supermarket shelf. It is described with hushed voices, cloaked in whispers, buried within the depths of only the most terrifying books and films. Even as a certified horror nerd, for years its name alone was enough to send chills down my spine.
I am, of course, talking about the lesbian.
Much like a thirteen-year-old girl with barely repressed feelings for her best friend, lesbians have haunted the minds of creators for centuries. Whether in literature, like Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), or in horror’s film origins, such as The Old Dark House (1932), trope-heavy sapphic sagas have become an impossible-to-ignore horror mainstay. Portrayals range from hypersexualised predators to miserable misfits, to — perhaps most shockingly of all — random people who would prefer not to be sliced to death, please and thank you.
And yet, although homophobia is undoubtedly a cornerstone of lesbian horror media, something about this delightfully sapphic subgenre has spoken to me for years. Once a wimpy twelve-year-old who shut her eyes at the sight of gore, it has thrust me into one of my longest obsessions to date. A plethora of unanswered questions have, like an enthusiastic zombie, eaten at my mind for years. Why must sapphic characters always be punished? Why are we scared of — or made to feel scared of — lesbians? And why were these bigoted portrayals somehow so special to me?
Perhaps one of the most prolific tropes across lesbian horror is that of the predatory female. From the inception of Carmilla in 1872, stories following lesbians — often older women or aristocrats — seducing innocent, young feminine girls and destroying them with their wiles have been staples of the horror genre. Often vampiric in nature, these horrific women operate as succubi, their predatory gaze darting to find fresh (female) blood. They lurk in the realms of subtext, their appetites for young women being heavily implied rather than outright stated, such as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936). But make no mistake: these women are undoubtedly lesbians. That’s why these books and films have been so heavily restricted, with even the concept of such villains being deemed too scandalous for polite society. Yet neither censorship nor a stake alone is enough to kill the idea of the predatory vampiric lesbian, with imitations of her echoing throughout the genre for years to come.
But, just why is this trope so undefeatable? Throughout much of horror, as in society at large, women are denied agency, instead being rendered passive props waiting to be victimised or rescued by men; the existence of lesbianism destroys this system. In a genre where women exist as prey, the male predator is an ingrained trope. A male pursuer is just a character. A female pursuer, however, is a monster. Not only is she a predator, but she is a woman with active desire that she gladly acts upon, feeding on the spirits of poor passive straight girl props who have to be handheld from one destination to the next, lest they never move at all. The demonisation of lesbians in horror, therefore, is not merely homophobia; it is a hatred of women having desires at all.
Even as the censorship that forced lesbians into villainous roles disintegrated, this trope only grew stronger. Coming off a decade of cheesy lesbian pulp novels that furthered the idea of the monstrous lesbian predator, the 70s saw a wave of often male-directed lesbian vampire “sexploitation” flicks, from Vampyros Lesbos (1971) to Daughters of Darkness (also made in 1971). I have complex feelings towards such films. Whilst these movies created a plethora of demonic predatory lesbians and heavily sexualise sapphism, they also saw their “victims” take far more agency, removing ideas of purely passive straight women being seduced by grinning monsters and replacing them with queer women actively chasing their desires — and their demise. So whilst I will not claim the world of Lust for a Vampire (1971) to be a progressive feminist utopia, this subgenre was indeed a step forward in the portrayals of complex sapphic characters.
Of course, not every lesbian is a vampire. Looking at horror more broadly, queer women who aren’t “evil” are often relegated to a perpetual state of victimhood. In all forms of fictional media, lesbians die at a disproportionate rate, with the world of horror being no exception; for sapphics it is one filled with tragedy, depression, and doom. This is worsened by the genre’s generally poor track record of women, with female characters taking twice as long on average to die as their male counterparts, as well as the longstanding punishment of queerness within horror. This intersection between misogyny and homophobia thus concocts the perfect recipe for lesbian victimhood.
For as long as the lesbian predator has existed, so too has her sapphic seductee, a disposable victim denied desire and lost to the appetite of her lover, such as in The Vampire Lovers (1970). If not victimised by other lesbians, she is treated poorly by society at large. The reasons for this were often practical; the Hays Code from the 1930s notably banned any portrayals of homosexuality unless the characters were villainised and/or punished, relegating sapphics to doom and taboo. There were exceptions to this, with 1963’s The Haunting, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s (deeply queer) novel The Haunting of Hill House, using its already provocative status as a horror film to work around censors and portray a sympathetic, feminine, and non-predatory lesbian character — one of the first films to ever do so. Yet in this very film, said lesbian is called a “mistake of nature.” Even in more positive portrayals, lesbians who weren’t actively evil were only allowed to be miserable.
That being said, in the last decade or so, there has been a marked shift in lesbian horror. Following the incessant “meta” trend of 90s and 00s horror, the genre became rapidly aware of its own tropes and shortcomings, an evolution which, alongside social change, has allowed for some uniquely brilliant explorations of sapphics throughout this genre. The aughts may have brought us James Corden’s Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009) — yes it’s as bad as it sounds — but the sapphic succubus was also reframed in Jennifer’s Body that same year. Instead of feeding into the stereotypes of old, the film subverted expectations, using familiar tropes to explore the sexualisation of women, misogyny, and homoerotic female friendships.
Since then, countless historically sexist and lesbophobic tropes have been reframed. New sapphic characters range from witches in Netflix’s incredibly queer trilogy Fear Street (2021) to Claudia and her vampire girlfriend in Interview With The Vampire (2024) to… people who happen to be gay — shocking, I know — like in Bodies Bodies Bodies (2023). It is also worth noting every one of these examples prominently features Black queer women; though the genre still has a long way to go, many inspiring filmmakers have been revolutionising and diversifying horror from within.
Overall, the lesbian, problematic as she can be, has and will always be a crucial staple of the horror genre. And yet, although I’ve answered why and how lesbians have been portrayed in horror, this still doesn’t explain why these undoubtedly homophobic depictions are still so important to me. This is partially because of my deep love for the genre’s history as a whole. Its inherent proximity to the taboo and the moral panic it created gave it a unique opportunity to explore queerness at a time when sapphism was rarely discussed, if ever at all. Dracula’s Daughter (1936) may have used the fear of lesbianism to market itself, proclaiming “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!” on its posters, yet for many it was the first time they had seen female homosexuality acknowledged by the society that wished to eradicate them. As such, many lesbians have reclaimed the very film made to demonise them.
But here’s the thing: I would be lying if I said my interest in these films was a purely historical or intellectual one. I did not obsess over these films despite their problematic tropes; rather, because of them. As lesbians, we sit at a lovely intersection between homophobia and misogyny that tells us any and all of our desires are ontologically evil and must be repressed, if not destroyed. Our gender and sexual orientation make us uniquely aware of how horrible being sexualised feels. So we stare at changing room walls, hopelessly horrified that we’ll accidentally make someone uncomfortable, and if we talk to girls at all, we mask our flirtation in fifty layers of “you’re so pretty!” in the desperation that the girl we’re talking to will somehow psychically sense just the appropriate amount of desire cloaked within the compliment.
As someone who grew increasingly more dykey (to put it bluntly) throughout my teen years, I felt like an outcast, and as a girl who didn’t like men, I felt like a failure. Thus, through a thousand cycles of internalised homophobia and self-flagellation, the lesbian villain of days passed didn’t feel like an outdated figure to scoff at; she felt like me. In a strange cathartic way, I identified with her. Even to this day, as an out and proud lesbian, I still feel a gnawing guilt at my core telling me that my existence is wrong. Faulty. Monstrous, even.
Whilst correcting these offensive tropes is important, without a societal shift away from the bigotries that fuel them, the sapphic villain will only continue to haunt the minds of queer people everywhere. And so, as the horror genre moves on from its problematic past, I truly hope we as a society can also learn to put the idea of the lesbian monster to death once and for all.
…Let’s just hope she doesn’t come back for one last scare.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- Russo, Vito. Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York, Harper & Row Publ, 1981.
- White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington, In, Indiana Up, 2000.
- Noriega, Chon. ““Something’s Missing Here!”: Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934–1962.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 1000, no. 1, 2018, pp. 20–41
- Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London, British Film Institute, 1996.