Bathory’s Daughters: The Lesbian Vampire in Kink Context

Often dismissed as titillation for male audiences, the figure of the lesbian vampire functions as a vital window into kink, ritual, and leather history.

by Annie Rose Malamet // Illustration by Sam Hindman

The lesbian vampire remains a figure rafted between two schools of popular feminist discourse.¹ 

The first school of thought emerged from the film journal Jump Cut in 1981, where Bonnie Zimmerman analyzed lesbian vampire films through the lens of Laura Mulvey’s oft-cited work on visual pleasure and the male gaze. Zimmerman likened these filmic images to pornography created by men and proposed that they appeal to masculine fantasies and audiences by flirting with girl-on-girl sex and female violence.² And indeed, the propensity of horror directors to end these films with the murder of the lesbian vampire character at the hands of a male hero reifies a proper heterosexual order. 

The second school of feminist thought surrounding lesbian vampire film is found in Andrea Weiss’ 1993 film text, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema. Weiss toyed with the idea that these sapphic bloodsuckers are a potent erotic symbol of empowerment, but she ultimately concluded that “these scenes invariably cater to male heterosexual fantasy.”³

Both Zimmerman’s and Weiss’ theses have steered the discourse from the ivory tower to the art house screen. And decades later, the erotic potential of the lesbian vampire outside of a patriarchal framework and these particular feminist responses remains woefully untapped. 

Feminist writers have typically written off sadomasochistic imagery in this sub-genre of a sub-genre — pun intended — as yet another violent male fantasy. But what to make of women whose sexual modalities incorporate violence and fear into the erotic experience? A binary is reinforced in these texts that male fantasies are uniformly violent, and that conversely women’s desires are delicate, almost chaste. As one kinky and perverted lesbian of many, my being rails against these established theories. Lesbian vampire films utilize a host of traditional imagery associated with sadomasochism, including bondage, domination, and submission; practices that have only been improved upon by queer people throughout leather history.⁴

Feminist writers have written off sadomasochistic imagery in this sub-genre of a sub-genre — pun intended — as violent male fantasy. 

Of particular interest are films that cast a real historical figure, the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, as the lesbian vampire. This set of films uses kink aesthetic as a pleasurable counterweight to its aristocratic excess and matriarchal fealty. Furthermore, the matriarch is ultimately positioned as an incestual ‘mother.’ This taboo posture only feeds back into the ouroboros that is kink and its relationship to primal, infantile urges. Just as in erotic play, it becomes impossible to parse the vampiress’ image from her unorthodox urge. Within the visuals and plots of these films, blood continually courses through the veins and arteries of symbology and carnality. 

Elizabeth Bathory is best known in the annals of morbid history as a prolific serial killer. According to lore and testimony from her trial, the 17th Century countess believed that bathing in the blood of young girls would preserve her youth and beauty — purportedly to the tune of 300 exsanguinated virgins in Hungary. Yet several of the country’s own scholars have speculated that Bathory was the victim of a patriarchal conspiracy; in such theories, a cabal of men, blood relations of Bathory’s, strove to take over her land and wealth after her husband’s death.⁵ If one is to accept the theory of power-hungry misogyny, the details of the Countess’s various murders do indeed read with a feverishly sadomasochistic bent, and it is not hard to imagine these unsavory descriptions being manufactured by sexually repressed Hungarian noblemen who could not handle this one woman’s autonomy. Bathory has been heavily filtered through the language of men. 

With that, I turn to Andrei Cordescu’s filthy 1995 novel Blood Countess.⁶ Cordescu’s fetid prose exorcises the full erotic potential of the Countess as a sadistic woman of yore. It’s true that the eroticism in the novel is largely symbolic and related to a larger plot surrounding Hungarian sovereignty and political intrigue—but, hat aside, it is rare that horrific acts can be rendered with such genuine erotic abandon. Men are free to make this kind of work as they are unburdened by the specter of the generations of raped and abused women that ride on the backs of the masculine creative’s choices.⁷ Still, the male pornographic ability to re-contextualize Countess Elizabeth Bathory has led to pleasurable depictions of her as a sapphic sadist. Regardless of whether she was femicidal or a feminized casualty, the horror of Bathory’s history echoes back to us and we are compelled to consider it over and over. Queer women spectators with a history of sexual trauma and an inclination towards BDSM will understand this eliding of femicide with eroticism. 

Since her death in 1614, Bathory has enjoyed a rich history as a seductive villain in art, literature, and — over the last 50 years — film. Polish director Walerian Borowcyk’s pornographic drama Immoral Tales (1973) contains a beautifully bloody vignette featuring the Countess Bathory and her submissive handmaid, the latter of whom also appears in Cordescu’s Blood Countess. While not a “true” lesbian vampire film given that Immoral Tales lacks a supernatural element, it is often included in the pantheon of the genre due to the same highly erotic depiction of ritual and blood worship that makes vampire narratives continually sought after, from Dracula to Twilight. As devotees, we accept the film into the canon because it captures the titillation of blood worship. 

The male pornographic ability to re-contextualize Countess Elizabeth Bathory has led to pleasurable depictions of her as a sapphic sadist. 

In this short sequence in Immoral Tales, we are treated to an elaborate ritual that Countess Bathory, played by the stately fashion designer Paloma Picasso, performs before she bathes in the blood of the nearby village’s virgins. Bathory and her handmaid (played by Swedish actress Marie Forså in male Hungarian soldier drag) methodically bathe and strip the women, the camera lingering lovingly on ample, naked flesh. In a stylized ritual, Bathory—finely draped in sheer white lace and diamonds designed by Piet Boshcher—allows the naked underlings to swarm her and tear away her riches. As the violence between the women escalates to a mad dash to claim their prizes, Bathory cooly leaves the scene, allowing her submissive servant to slaughter the brood. Bathory then bathes naked in an iron tub full of the virgin blood, a process we are treated to in close-up. Crimson blood pours over naked skin as Paloma smolders, her mouth in a smirk, before her maid rinses her body. Bathory, now in another white gown, dresses her handmaiden in matching white bridal lace, complete with veil. The ritual complete, the two women sexually consummate their bloody pact. 

What plays out in this Immoral Tales’ vignette is akin to a kink scene.⁸ Just as in a religious rite (and this scene certainly has religious connotations related to baptism and marriage), there is a progression from each act of service; each woman part of an intricate ritual leading to devotion and worship of an erotic matriarchal figure. Bathory fulfills the role of ultimate mother, as an aristocrat to whom allegiance is pledged without question. The virgin girls are displayed before being sacrificed to the Countess, who acts as a goddess figure to her submissive. Elizabeth engages in a queered cuckolding by capitulating to the din in front of her lover. The servant-lover is likewise degraded by appearing in male drag, positioned as an outsider to the girlish festivities. In bathing her Countess, the servant performs acts of service as one would in a Dominant/submissive relationship. The ritual culminates in a “wedding night” between the two women, wherein the submissive is rewarded with a return to femininity and sexual satisfaction. In this depiction, Elizabeth’s crimes are rendered erotic by likening them to a ritual based in kink with an elaborate system of service, devotion, worship, punishment, and recompense. 

Harry Kummel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971) is a Bathory lesbian vampire narrative that centers on the seduction of a newlywed heterosexual couple on their honeymoon at a desolate Belgian inn. Accompanied by her submissive consort Ilona (Andrea Rau), Bathory (the orchidaceous Delphine Seyrig of Jeanne Dielman fame) sets her sights on innocent wife Valerie (Danielle Ouimet). In a particularly mesmerizing scene, Bathory engages the couple in a graphic discussion of her bloody crimes that is framed as a sadistic history lesson. Stefan, the husband of the couple who has already made his violent proclivities known, joins Bathory in enumerating these graphic descriptions. Bathory puts her arms around him, the two languidly touching and stroking each other in an erotic revery as the Countess relives these images: 

“She clipped off their fingers with shears… yes, she tore out their nipples with silver pincers… Their white bodies pumped out blood over naked skin. Blood, beautiful red blood… over her hands, and her arms, and her legs, and her face.” 

If we were to follow Zimmerman and Weiss’ logic, an initial reading of this sexual exchange would be that lesbianism is likened to predatory male violence. However, it is disingenuine to interpret this exclusively as a negative comparison. The scene is highly eroticized, lushly colored and softly lit, and scored by François de Roubaix in ominously alluring tones. In Daughters of Darkness, sadism is positioned as a forbidden delight. 

In Daughters of Darkness, sadism is positioned as a forbidden delight. 

The most potent example of kink dynamic in the film, though, is the relationship between Bathory and Ilona. Ilona is submissive to Bathory, performing acts of service for her, and is generally shown in physical positions of subordination. In one scene she bemoans her immortality, laying her head in Bathory’s lap, a red scarf around her neck to indicate ownership. She is petted and cooed over by the Countess, who acts as the ‘mother’ in this intergenerational queer kink dynamic. It is implied through red transitions that Bathory gifts her progeny with blood, a twisted form of mother’s milk.⁹ The Mother/girl dynamic between the women is codified through various symbolic positional and costuming choices. For example, Ilona’s legs are always bared, while Bathory’s are covered. Of particular interest is the Peter Pan-collared dress that Ilona wears, which recalls a schoolgirl uniform. In fact, costuming is a potent symbol throughout the film.¹⁰ When Elizabeth wishes to seal her relationship with her new victim in front of Stefan, effectively cuckolding him, she places a black choker around Valerie’s neck in a collaring ritual. Once more, a ritual is complete and Valerie now belongs to her, body and soul. A girl could only dream of such divine servitude. 

As in certain queer kink practices, vampiric transformation and the exchange of blood is a highly ritualized process in horror cinema. The passing of the affliction between ideologically disparate generations is evocative of the way queer people imbue knowledge and trauma intergenerationally. The comparison between the vampire and the outcast homosexual begs to be made. In a discussion of Daughters of Darkness, Bonnie Zimmerman posited that the ending—in which victim Valerie takes on the persona of (the now officially dead) Bathory, who turned her—contains some appeal, as it suggests that lesbianism is eternal, passed between generations.

The fraught history of queerness and social taboo necessitates the value of far-reaching relationships and oral history. The history of queer leather community remains measurably more maligned: our rituals, relationships, struggles, and the way we fuck are rendered cloak-and-dagger to avoid the social pillory. Perhaps Bathory isn’t dead after all, but waiting in the velvet beneath her coffin’s lid for a certain imaginative and depraved feminist to, once and for all, sufficiently defend her depraved honor.

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1. Yet what has often gone unmentioned is that Jewish women scholars theorized both of these postures.This would be merely anecdotal, were the vampire mythos not indebted, in part, to anti-Semitism and the fear of the exotic Jewish “other” that feeds on the blood of Christian children. Likewise, anti-Semitism, as we all now know too well, shows no sign of abating. Neither does the lesbian vampire. See: Paul Marchbank, “Dracula: Degeneration, Sexuality and the Jew,” Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil 6 (May 2003): pp. 31-38.
2. Bonnie Zimmerman , “Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampires,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media , no. 24 (March 1981): pp. 23-24.
3. Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Pandora, 1992).
4. The leather subculture refers to practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sado/Masochism) practices and its many iterations.
5. Namely scholars László Nagy and Dr. Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss.
6. I mean filthy here as a compliment, of course.
7. This is not entirely true. Men are certainly burdened with this history—but as perpetrators, something they have yet to fully reckon with as a gender.
8. A “scene” is a pre-planned space where BDSM activities take place.
9. Barbara Creed, “Woman as Vampire: The Hunger,” in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Abington, Oxford: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1993), pp. 59-72. 
10. Ms. Seyrig’s gowns were costumed by Bernard Perris. The production also boasts separate costumers for both “furs” and “shoes.” How gay is that?