There is something inherently erotic about certain forms of horror. The modern incarnations in slasher movies have nothing erotic about them, but much of older horror did. Vampires are particularly evocative in this context. Vampirism, after all, has always been a metaphor for sexual congress.
Curiously, one of the oldest English vampire stories, Polidori’s The Vampyre, recalls an older form. Lord Ruthven is a vampire from the beginning of the story, but during the first part of it he is clearly still living. He dies, or becomes un-dead, partway through the story. One might say that the story is also a cautionary tale, and even something of a condemnation of the exaggerated sense of honor in vogue at the time. After all, our hero could have saved his sister if he hadn’t thought that upholding his oath to Ruthven was more important than her life.
Lord Ruthven is also, like most pre-1922 vampires, not particularly bothered by sunlight. That vulnerability seems to date from that year, when it was first used in the unauthorized German Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu. Count Orlock, to be sure, did not burst into flame, which seems to be the modern standard. He simply faded out of existence.
The Irish writer, J. Sheridan LeFanu, provided a different vampiric milestone. Carmilla, the title character in his novella, is also seemingly comfortable moving about in the daylight. She is also, rather clearly, a lesbian, and her vampirism seems to be connected with this sexual appetite. LeFanu might be given credit for the notion of the vampire as shape-shifter, for Carmilla often commits her depredations in the form of a large cat.
Hammer’s 1970 adaptation, The Vampire Lovers, emphasizes the lesbian aspects somewhat more than LeFanu, who had to contend with Victorian standards that allowed only oblique inferences. It also contains a good deal of nudity, with the sort of natural, unmodified female bodies that still prevailed in the early 1970s. It’s just my opinion, but I can’t help thinking naked women looked better in those days than they do now. I’m not sure that I did, but I was five when this movie came out, so I was kept well covered up. Particularly in the household where I grew up. No one went to horror movies because, you know, Jesus wouldn’t have approved, particularly if there was nudity.
It would be another thirteen years or so before I got around to experimenting with sex. Mostly with the other cheerleaders. We had these weekly Bible study sessions after games, you see, where we’d read all the dirty parts, such as Lot and his daughters, or where Abraham admits that Sarah, his wife, is also his half-sister, or David and Jonathan (those two were gay as shit, trust me), or just about anything in Song of Songs. Reverend Killjoy insisted Song of Songs was an allegorical ode to Jesus’ love for the church. In our opinion, it was mostly about fucking and pussy eating.
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, spent several years working for LeFanu before taking on the role of Henry Irving’s theatrical manager. His research into central European vampire legends rounded out the literature. His imagined world still dominates, and there are constant references to Dracula in literature and film. There are certainly vague hints at a lesbian relationship between Mina and Lucy, at least as school girls. I’ll admit that I rather picked up on that, then took it all the way, when I was writing Lust for Blood, which not only has vampires but a good deal of explicit (in a Victorian sort of way) lesbian sex.
Originally, there was going to be a bit of incest, too, but I decided that this was something that might appeal to a broader readership than most of my books, so that came out. We have to make compromises if we want to sell anything on Kindle or iTunes. (The iTunes version, along with any other non-Amazon eBook versions, should be along sometime in February, after the Kindle Unlimited enrollment expires.)(So if you want to read it free, you need to do so now.)