I don’t know why I start so many of my introductory monologues saying I was a horny teenager, but… to elaborate on what I’ve stated before, I was a horny GOTH teenager. Black clothes, black hair, leather spiked chokers, a love for vampires and – much like Ellen in Nosferatu – I didn’t know the source of my obsession. Now I do: I was 14 and felt like an outcast, and Spike from Buffy was really hot. Sometimes it’s just not that deep. As mentioned in the intro, the immortal vampire is so back in cinema’s this year, and I started wondering: how did we get here? How did we move from the bat-like creature to, like… Robert Pattinson with sixpack abs.

In film we often refer back to Dracula, the book written in 1897 by Irish author Bram Stoker, but the idea of blood-drinking night-walkers goes back way further. One of the earliest known vampire legends comes from ancient Mesopotamia and, even with being blood sucking pests, women did it first and get very little credit for it. The Lilitu or Lilith was said to be a demon-like entity who loved sucking blood, which like: don’t tempt me with a good time am i right?

But since the invention of cinema, Dracula has been the gold standard. Famously Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu pulled a “can I copy your homework, I won’t make it obvious” in 1922, which got him sued by Stoker’s estate for copyright infringement and all copies of the film destroyed. That iteration of vampire mostly represented sexual repression, an unholy power against the catholic church aaaand fear of immigration, with some saying Max Schrek’s Nosferatu quite closely resembles some pretty bleak antisemetic stereotypes of the time. The big hooked nose, thick brows, hunched back and, you know, immigrating from the east bringing plague and destruction…

But vampires, both as a myth and as a figure in cinema have evolved to reflect whatever society fears at the time, as well as its desires. Over time vampires have come to represent so much more: desire, immortality, loneliness. Each era’s vampire tells us something about the culture it came from; the fears of disease from the black plague to the AIDS epidemic, the sexual liberation of the ’60s, the yearning for eternal love in the ’00s.

While we mostly think of vampires as bloodthirsty monsters, in recent decades, the idea of the “good vampire” has become popular. With Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, but also characters like Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Edward Cullen from Twilight show hot vampires struggling with their ‘can’t have your cake and eat it too’-nature, where they’re like: “oh no I wanna suck your blood but also: I love you.” Self aware kings, capable of love, remorse and self-control, making them more than the blood-thirsty symbol of pure evil, and more like tragic heroes.

At the end of the day, the vampire is a – pun intended – reflection of our darkest longings and our most painful realities. Whether it’s a grotesque, blood-drinking heavy breather or a sparkling himbo, the vampire continues to capture something about what it means to be human. And maybe that’s why we keep coming back to them—because, in the end, the vampire story is just a story about us.

In the darkness of a movie theatre we can pretend to be all alone with the bright figures on the screen. These people might seem ordinary, dressed in ordinary clothes. Yet they are not ordinary. They move smoothly and without effort, their bodies are weightless. These humans are elevated humans, approaching perfection, and we long to be with them. In the darkness, we can imagine we are with them, at least for the duration of the movie. Cinema offers a distinctly erotic experience. Imagine how the first movie audiences must have felt, sitting in the dark, watching those moving images for the very first time. How exciting it must have been for people that were used to looking at paintings and plays, circuses and carnivals, photography and pornography. None of these spectacles stir as much desire in a person as the movies do. 

            And yet, there has always been a difference in the way we, the audience, view men and women. Whether you identify as a man or a woman, and whatever sexual preference you may have, most movies have, since the very beginning of Hollywood and its international counterparts, encouraged you to view the world through the eyes of the male, heterosexual protagonist. In other words, you are encouraged to desire women and to identify with men. Which means that whatever happens in the story, the woman is a passive character and the man an active one.

            Film journalist Jessica Kiang writes about this disbalance in a collection of essays about female desire and film called She Found It at the Movies: ‘[quote]Within those men’s lusty, id-driven narratives, the women who show up are almost always there “to-be-somethinged”: looked-at; rescued; decoded; denuded; mistrusted; relied on; adored; despised; idealised; castignated; won; lost; unzipped by virtue of a magnetic watch; or smooshed in the face with a grapefruit. We are there to have things felt about us.[unquote]’

            Of course this disbalance is problematic, and one of the ways to solve this problem is for heterosexual men in the movie industry to make room for other voices that focus on other perspectives. (Of course the same goes for racial disparities.) But there’s something else too – I think there’s an enormous erotic potential in restoring this balance.

            Let me quote another writer who contributed to She Found It at the Movies. Sarah Elizabeth Adler writes about Grease and the erotic appeal of butch and femme lesbians she recognizes in “pink lady” Rizzo and “T-bird” Kenickie: ‘[quote]I loved watching [Kenickie] sit on the bleachers on the first day of school, legs splayed out, jeans cuffed. He’s smoking a cigarette and the next one is already tucked behind his ear. (Kenickie-ness, like butchness, is all in the details.) His shirt is light blue, cottony, a little boy’s colour under a leather jacket. You can see the crescent of his white socks over the edge of his mean black boots. The soft under the hard. Kind of like how, in the opening sequence, cartoon Rizzo wears a white bra with hearts –  hearts! – under her black shirt. These details thrill me because I view eroticism as a matter of sacred contrasts: the difference between butches and femmes, the baby blue T-shirt under a black leather jacket, the difference between the hardness that someone shows to the world and the secret softness that lurks beneath.[unquote]’

            I too believe that eroticism is to be found in balance. A precocious balance, or in other words: tension. Watching a man dominate a woman, or the other way around, is boring. But watching them find a balance is interesting. Looking and being looked at is part of this balance. We have looked at women endlessly, and we have looked at men looking at them. Now wouldn’t it be interesting to have these women look back? Or to let them tell you about what it is like for them to be looked at? Which is not just fair, or feminist – it’s hot.  

            One director who has always been interested in telling stories about what it is like to be looked at, and who turns those stories into gorgeous, sensual movies, is Sofia Coppola. She invites us into worlds that are filled to the brim with pastels and pink clouds, cakes and champagne, pretty faces and soft voices, sparkling diamonds and the finest clothing – only to show us how passive the women (and sometimes men) are that inhabit them. Her movies are melancholy, lighthearted, funny – and sensuous. And in The Beguiled, in which a wounded corporal is placed in front of a group of women of different ages, she not only tells a story about balance between the sexes, or actually a downright battle of the sexes, a power struggle – but she also shows us how to tell a story that is balanced out. The women desire this man, he desires them; we sympathize with all of them. This gaze is neither male or female; it’s just horny.