Luella Miller, illustration by Peter Newell (1903)

A while ago a friend lent me an excellent anthology: The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers. It sounded so far up my street I expected to find it waiting for me on the doorstep as I scurried home to read it.

As you might imagine, it includes a lot of creepy old mansions, brave governesses, and ghostly women wandering around in white gowns. I love that stuff. But towards the back I was delighted to discover something unusual: a Marxist Feminist vampire story.

The story was Luella Miller, published in Mary Wilkins Freeman‘s 1903 short story collection The Wind In The Rose Bush. While the events are definitely supernatural, Luella is more of a metaphorical than literal vampire, mesmerising and leeching the life force from her victims by draining their energy rather than their blood.

Her fellow townsfolk, men and women, old and young, literally work themselves to death in her service. One after another they become obsessed with caring for her, doing her washing and sewing, cooking her meals, making her coffee, working until they become ill and eventually die, when they are replaced by another willing servant.

The story is narrated several decades on by Lydia Anderson, the last person alive who knew Luella; she didn’t succumb to her mysterious power. As Lydia puts it: “There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of me.” She tells the story of all the people whom Luella drained of life, including her sister-in-law Lily:

This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone…

…all the time Luella wa’n’t liftin’ her finger and poor Lily didn’t get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin’ that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin’. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she’d go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt, Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever.

Unlike many fictional vampires, Luella does not seem to intend any harm against her victims. She is indifferent, almost oblivious. Her supernatural ability to enslave her neighbours does not seem to be within her control; instead, it is more like a poisonous vapour that surrounds her, simultaneously enchanting and slowly destroying them.

Another interesting aspect of the story is the emphasis on Luella’s infantile need. It is not simply that she will not care for herself, forcing others to look after her, but that she cannot. She is entirely helpless, so that when the town finally begins to keep its distance, she herself begins to weaken.

In her article Dreadful Yet Irresistible Luella Miller: Horror in the Absence of Self (PDF), Chiho Nakagawa sees Luella Miller as a feminist parable about the suppression of agency and independence in the feminine ideal taken to it’s logical, monstrous, conclusion:

By spreading her dependency and helplessness into others, Luella makes others experience her dreadful state… Functioning as an addictive substance, Luella Miller lets us see how fearful it is to be a feminine woman without her own self.

Mary Wilkins Freeman

I think this is an interesting take, as if Luella exists only as an object of others’ self destructive love, with no subjective self, no agency or control. It is this that makes her state “dreadful”. She is parasitic, overwhelming and consuming her host, but unable to survive without them.

Without the contrasting courage, agency and practicality of “hale and hearty” 87 year old narrator Lydia Anderson, the story could seem to be a misogynist attack on wealthy women.

But  I agree with Lynda L. Hinkle and her paper Bloodsucking Structures: American Female Vampires as Class Structure Critique, when she describes the story as: “a stinging critique of a declining but still prevalent social class structure that churned out a large, useless upper class of women whose job it was to be beautiful and consume.”

I read the story as a comment on the economic and social structures which manufactured useless creatures like Luella, wealthy women who were prevented from acquiring ideas, skills, purpose or independence. The same structures, while fetishising helplessness as the supreme feminine virtue on the one hand, forced countless other women (and men) to work themselves into an early grave in the service of their betters.

The columnist after a long, hard day’s reading. Not pictured: my creeping sense of despair.

CONTENT NOTE: Discussions herein of sexual assault, dubious consent, mental health treated badly, homophobia, biphobia and slut-shaming. Oh, and plenty of spoilers.

Welcome back to Hopeless Reimantic Presents! Last time we got our teeth into Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, and I found myself actually saying some pretty positive things about the books. (Honestly, I’m as surprised as you. My fourteen-year-old self is throwing one hell of a sulk.) It’s not the full story, though, and there’s still quite a lot about this series to unpack.

First of all, there’s something I need to make clear: as I said in Part One, I went into this review determined not to talk about the series in relation to Laurell K. Hamilton herself more than was necessary.

I generally hold that unless an author has done something that I can’t reconcile myself to morally, I don’t feel like it’s my business to talk about their personal life when I am supposed to be reviewing their books. And from what I’ve read of Laurell K. Hamilton’s blog posts, she seems kind of entitled and I find her annoying, but…well, let’s just say that as far as I can tell she’s no Orson Scott Card. By and large my problems with the ideas she puts across can easily be expressed in criticism of her work rather than criticism of her.

I ran into some problems with this approach, to be sure; the evidence for Anita Blake being the author’s avatar is pretty compelling. But for the purposes of analysing the text, I’m putting that debate to bed. From here on out, guys, they’re just books, so if anyone is reading this expecting it to be a catalogue of Ms Hamilton’s character flaws, well, it’s not going to be. Hashtag sorry not sorry, or something.

Oh, one more thing: I’m limiting myself to a maximum of one book quotation per point here, because SEVENTEEN BOOKS LORD HAVE MERCY.

Okay! Let’s get started. Where were we? Was I wanting to tear my eyes out? I think I was wanting to tear my eyes out.

…I’m going to need to slip into a more concise format, I think, or that’s just going to be the entire article. Here, then, in no particular order, are My Main Problems with Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter:

1) Anita only has one dating experience that I would describe as fully consensual.

She dates Richard, a werewolf, and then she gets engaged to Richard, and then the vampire she’s been hanging out with decides that he needs “equal time” to win her over, or he’s got no choice but to duel Richard to the death:

“You have dated him for months, and I have said little. Before you marry him, I want equal time.”

…

“I’ve been trying to avoid you for months. I’m not just going to give in now.”

“Then I will start the music, and we will dance. Even if I die, and you die. Richard will die first, I can promise you that. Surely dating me is not a fate worse than death.”

– Laurell K. Hamilton, The Lunatic Cafe, p.221.

(I’m not so sure about that, dude.)

There’s also the shapeshifter leopard who basically just rapes her (it’s okay, she enjoys it) and then is her mate and it’s all fine, and the other shapeshifter leopard who is Terrifyingly Submissive at her until she gives in (more on that later). These are her four main men and, last I checked, the various loves of her life.

There are a couple of things at play here, and I can intellectually grasp them both. One is that an easy way to add darkness and tension to a story is to have your main character interact with a world which doesn’t recognise their morality, which is how we get all those kind of racist “I was ravished by a barbarian/sheikh/otherwise rich and dark-skinned man” stories (remind me to talk to you about The Panther And The Pearl some time). And that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a fantasy world where you are dealing with beings that might have witnessed the greater part of human history. I do take the point that you might well not care so much about pesky human morals when you’ve been living off blood or sex or male tears or whatever for about a thousand years.

And, credit where it’s due, Laurell K. Hamilton does make some effort to deal with the effect this is having on Anita; she agonises, at least initially, over the detachment she feels from her humanity as she gets drawn deeper into the preternatural world. Hamilton doesn’t really take that conflict anywhere, which is a shame because it makes the whole thing feel a bit too insta-conflict for my liking, but she tries.

The considerably more disturbing thing is the second point, which is that this is supposed to be hot. We’ve touched on this before in the column on alpha males, but one thing that I think I missed there is actually what I find grossest about this particular fantasy – that being threatened or coerced, either physically or by other means, into being with someone is supposed to be evidence of part of a woman’s power and mystique. It’s not that these guys are proto-rapists, no – it’s that women are so damned irresistible that they overwhelm men’s judgement and common sense. Basically, they are the full moon to every man’s boner werewolf (link NSFW).

There is an element of pick-up artistry that states that when you overcome LMR (last minute resistance, usually to sex) you’re actually doing the woman a favour, because you’re taking the responsibility out of her hands. She can’t be a slut, because she’s not in control; you’re preserving her purity while still giving her the sex she wants. That is gross and messed-up and a terrible bit of rape apologia, but it’s the same kind of logic that I’m seeing here; it’s a way to skirt around having Anita own her own sexuality. She can’t help it! She’s just got this energy!

And on that note…

2) There’s hella slut-shaming.

It took me a while to realise this. I started out with Danse Macabre, but the more of these books I read, the more I became convinced that having lots of sex was only okay for Anita Blake, and by extension her harem of men, because Anita Blake has sex because she somehow has to – which is a pretty icky sentence to begin with, by the way.

Anita starts out the series not believing in pre-marital sex. She ends up having quite a lot of it, but there’s never a sense that she revises that belief, which would be really interesting if it didn’t have such weird implications for the other women in the books. Anita has sex because of deep love, a deep sense of obligation (erk) and/or because she is a succubus. Metaphysical events or very strong emotion compel her to bone, and the fact that she ends up enjoying it immensely is somehow a coincidence, which is possibly the strangest permutation of the forced seduction trope I’ve ever seen.

And even that would be okay, were it not for the fact that every single other woman in the books who has sex for such a frivolous reason as the fact she just enjoys it is painted as either a) shallow and heinous, b) mentally unstable, or c) both.

Which brings me neatly to:

3) There is gratuitous use of mental illness as a plot device.

Basically every villain is crazy. And there’s Nathaniel, her second shapeshifter love interest, who is super-submissive and utterly traumatised by his past and hey, did we mention he’s kinky too and can take more pain than anybody else? Because he’s damaged?

Urgh. If I had to hazard, I’d say this follows a lot of the same logic that we see in point 1), but let’s just be honest here; this isn’t just offensive, it’s lazy writing, in the same way that blaming serious criminal offences or terrorism on mental illness is lazy journalism. It’s a way to avoid grappling seriously with what could actually be some pretty compelling issues and it’s depressing me. So let’s move on to our final point:

4) Gender essentialism and homophobia.

Hoo boy.

This is a pretty interesting one, actually, because the characters around Anita Blake actually call her on some of it, and it doesn’t work. I skipped a quotation for mental illness and point 2, so we can have two in here because it’s my column and I make the rules.

I feel like I need to include this one because it’s in Shutdown, which was actually only released a few weeks ago – and, again, in fairness to Ms Hamilton, releasing it the way she did was a nice idea (it was a freebie because of the US government shutdown, in solidarity with government workers who were off without pay).

The story itself is interesting purely because the premise is so flawed: Richard, Anita Blake’s erstwhile lover, now-Top, is engaged to another woman, and apparently has chosen only now to mention to her that he’s poly and wants to see other people for wild kinky sex. His fiancee has a problem with this – not, you understand, because somehow they have got as far as being engaged without this ever having come up, but because she’s a crazy jealous harpy who can’t wrap her narrow mind around non-monogamy or sex that isn’t vanilla.

I liked precisely nobody in this short, but Anita least of all:

I hadn’t had to endure this much small talk in years. We’d learned a lot about one another, but unless we were looking to date, I didn’t see the point.

…

Men understood that sometimes you didn’t want to smile, but you weren’t mad either, while women expect other women to be pleasant, and if you’re not they think you don’t like them. There are so many reasons that most of my friends are men.

– Laurell K. Hamilton, Shutdown, pp.6-8

Oh, Ms Blake, you charmer. I could quote this little piece all day, actually, because it shows you a lot about the mess of contradictions that is gender portrayal in these books, but – you guys, I can’t. I just can’t. I think my brain is leaking out of my ears.

Let’s finish up, then, with one final quote, and my witty and insightful riposte.

Look, okay, this isn’t even close to the most homophobia I’ve ever seen in fiction, or the worst. I’ll give you that I really do think this was… misguided, but well-intentioned. For what that’s worth. But the fact remains that I don’t think I’ve seen a non-heterosexual character in the Anita Blake series who wasn’t sex-obsessed, mentally ill (see above) and/or just plain old mean.

Anita Blake herself later gets a girlfriend and starts identifying as “heteroflexible”, which is a completely valid label that I don’t wish to detract from, but in this case reads to me sort of like she’s just started adding “no homo” to the end of all of her sentences about fancying women.

And then there’s…well, this. For context: some of Anita’s male partners are bisexual. She has just had a threesome with one of them and another man, which she feels gives her incontrovertible proof that he is, in fact, also into guys. The other men around her do not seem bothered by this revelation. Which prompts the following:

“In college I had a friend, a girlfriend, a girl who was a friend. She and I went shopping together. Slept over at each other’s dorm rooms. I undressed in front of her because she was a girl. Then toward the end of college she told me she was gay. We were still friends, but she went into that guy category for me. You don’t undress in front of people who see you as a sex object. You don’t sleep with them, or…oh, hell.” I looked up at Micah. “Won’t it weird you out to sleep nude beside him now?”

– Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre, p.188.

Funny story: my original response to this paragraph was a lot more colourful. I’m going to try and discuss it briefly, coherently and without expletives.

I’m not sure which bothers me more, here: the idea that being attracted to members of one gender means you’re attracted to all members of one gender, or Anita’s assumption that everybody around her is going to have the same weird hang-ups as she is. I will say, though, that reading this made me briefly see red. You can come hang out with my friends, Anita Blake’s token lesbian college friend! They’ll hug you! Even the straight women!

What I’m struggling to articulate is why, exactly, this paragraph was the exact point that I fully lost patience with the series, because in context it’s not actually so bad. Anita is laughed at for her small-mindedness, and they all go to sleep naked and it’s fine.

Except…

Except that this never really goes away. There’s a kind of false normal here that you’re not supposed to stray from, and then even when Anita does, all that happens it that it gets this veneer of “exotic sexy sex stuff” that makes the books transgressive and naughty. It doesn’t read like a straight-up sex fantasy. I definitely don’t buy that it’s an honest exploration of sexuality in fiction. I’m not even sure that it’s Laurell K. Hamilton bragging about her sex life with extra fantasy elements.

The best way I can describe it is that it reads like a zoo exhibit, if people who have a lot of sex could actually literally be zoo exhibits. It doesn’t challenge normative attitudes, is what I’m saying. It takes the stuff Ms Hamilton describes as “too underground for the mainstream” and sticks it behind a thick layer of societal assumptions-reinforced glass, so that you can look at it without getting your brain too into all the sex stuff. And then you can go home at the end feeling like you’ve learned something. And perhaps a little icky.

And that brings us to the end of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. If you enjoyed this column and want me to do more like it, consider dropping me a comment, because the experience was…

…it was…

…it’s been an experience, guys. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read something else. Something gentle, with no sex in it whatsoever. Maybe some Catherynne M. Valente.

See you next time!

Basically, at the time of writing it was the month with Hallowe’en in it, and I hate to waste a perfectly good theme. So without further ado, allow me to welcome you to Hopeless Reimantic Presents! In this column I’ll be going in-depth into the works of specific authors who are in – or cross over into – the romance genre. In the spirit of the season, I thought we’d take a look at the stuff of nightmares: let’s talk about Laurell K. Hamilton. More specifically, let’s talk about Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, one of the weirdest and most controversial series I’ve ever interacted with.

I had no idea this existed until right this second, but it actually sums up a lot of these books pretty well. (Via Marvel Wiki.)

First of all, a slightly complicated preface. Before I ever picked up an Anita Blake book I knew quite a lot about them, and while I’d like to stress that I’m here to talk about the books and not Ms Hamilton herself I feel like I’ll be remiss if I don’t at least give a quick summary of some common controversies surrounding the series and its author.

I first became aware of Laurell K. Hamilton via Anne Rice. Well, not Anne Rice herself, but the now-infamous Anne Rice Author Tantrum, which I arrived at a couple of years after the fact and consequently saw linked to…Laurell K. Hamilton’s similarly poor handling of criticism (link to a Wikispace article, as the original blog post has vanished).

Hamilton isn’t quite as vitriolic in her I Can’t Believe Not Everyone Likes My Book-ness, but she’s still pretty irritatingly condescending, although I do agree with her that if someone’s taking their book up to you so that you can sign it, then opening with “I hated this one and what you’ve done with the series” is kind of poor form.

She’s since made a name for herself on Twitter for calling her critics sexually frustrated, jealous wannabes, and a name for herself among readers and other writers for not handling criticism well and shamelessly inserting herself into her books. The LKH_lashouts community on LiveJournal keeps a nice catalogue of her various posts, blogs and misdemeanours, and I’ve been on it all day, which might explain why my brain is starting to feel too heavy for my skull.

As a lot of you probably aren’t familiar with what makes the Anita Blake series so divisive in the first place, I’ll give you a quick, neutral description to start us off (don’t worry, we’ll get to the incoherent ranting later). The Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series started out as a kind of monster-of-the-week dealio, with some romance in it but not a huge deal. The romantic – and sexual – content of the books got a lot more page time as the series went on, and the tenth book in the series, Narcissus In Chains, saw a metaphysical event turn Anita Blake into a succubus who needs sex to survive.

Subsequent books are arguably more “paranormal erotica” than anything else, and the last time I checked in with Ms Blake she was in a polyamorous relationship with five guys and happy as a clam. This, and the fact that a lot of the events of Anita Blake’s love life seem to mirror the author’s, have led to accusations that Laurell K. Hamilton is using Anita to brag about how much sex she’s having, and have turned a lot of readers off the series.

The upshot of all this is that this time three months ago, your intrepid romance novel enthusiast knew of Laurell K. Hamilton and had formed a pretty strong impression of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books – but had never actually picked one up. So when the call came around for horror-themed posts for autumn and winter, and I decided to take them on, I was…nervous, but excited. Here was a series with a strong female lead which had lost popularity as the erotic content had upped and the quality of the writing had deteriorated – the stuff of feminist bad-porn-lovers’ wildest dreams, right?

All that given due consideration, I wanted to approach the series with an open mind, but I didn’t want to actually buy any of the books because a) this isn’t somebody I want to give money to and b) there are approximately bleventeen of the damned things and I don’t have a job. I put out a call on my social medias for donations to the cause.

Three weeks later, I had seventeen Laurell K. Hamilton books. And with various deadlines coming up? I had a week to read them in.

Some would have panicked. Some would have faltered. Some would have done several noisy circuits of the living room, sobbing about the hilarious injustice of life. Some would have said, “Well, that’s okay, I don’t have to read all of these, I’m not that much of a masochist”, picked out a selection, and called it a day.

I did all of these things except the last one. Here’s how I got on. The following are my initial notes:

Initial thoughts on LKH: The Anita Blake series is not as bad as I thought it would be for the reasons I was told I would hate it, but it is creepingly terrible in ways I didn’t really anticipate.

Day 3 of LKH immersion. Eyes gritty. Legs heavy. Some subcranial tenderness. Seem to have “What Does The Fox Say” stuck in my head.

Laurell K. Hamilton Immersion Week, Day 5. Sore throat, some muscle ache. Have been reading some of the earlier books, which are much better even if I don’t like murder mysteries that much. I’m sad that her deep love of stuffed penguins seems to be worn away by all the sexy sexy sex she starts having in a book or so’s time. What happened to Sigmund, Anita? Did Sigmund mean nothing to you? Developing protective feelings for all penguins.

LKH Immersion Week, Day 6. I…I just don’t even know anymore, you guys. Just leave me alone. I’m going shopping for leather.

By the end of the week I’d contracted a stomach virus, although the medical jury is still out on whether or not this was a symptom of my burgeoning lycanthropy. The next full moon isn’t until December 17th, so I guess we’ll find out then.

This is going to be a difficult bit of analysis to write, because – well, I read seventeen books, you guys. I’m having to be extremely choosy about which books I quote and why. Maybe I’ll upload a list of Supplementary Supportive Material, but, um, I wouldn’t count on it.

Broadly speaking, dear readers, here’s the thing: I didn’t hate these books the way I was expecting to.

Look, fourteen-year-old me assumed I’d hate these books because they were a self-insert Mary-Sue-type series that ended with the main character having far too much ridiculously improbable sex and being the best at everything. Fourteen-year-old me was also scared of non-monogamy, kind of selective in her feminism and a lot more judgmental. Fourteen-year-old me would probably have written this bit of the article in a far more entertainingly vitriolic manner.

Unfortunately, you’re stuck with twenty-three-year-old me, and twenty-three-year-old me doesn’t have a problem with any of these things on principle. Look, okay, self-insert Mary-Sues aren’t my cup of tea, and I can see why a sharp rise (hurr) in sexual content in a series which basically had no sexual content at all for the first four books might turn readers off – but those two facts don’t make either of those authorial decisions inherently wrong.

For all her flaws (and she has many – and I’m not just talking about the fun kind of flaws that make a character seem real, either) Anita Blake has some nice bits of refreshingly feminist outlook. One of the best story arcs in the series comes in Danse Macabre, when she has a pregnancy scare. She talks it over with all of her partners, one of them says he’ll stay at home and raise the baby so that she can keep working, and another says he’ll marry her:

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Richard, is that all you think it takes to fix this? Marry me so the baby won’t be a bastard, and it’s all better?”

“I don’t see anyone else offering marriage,” he said.

“It’s because they know I’ll say no. Every other man in my life understands that this isn’t about marriage. It’s about the fact that we may have created a little person. And we need to do whatever is best for that little person. How will marrying anyone make this work better? … What do you think having a baby will do to me, Richard? Do you think just because I have a baby I’ll become this other person? This softer, gentler person? Is that what you think?”

– Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre, pp. 162-164

Whatever else I think about Anita Blake the character, I wholeheartedly rooted for her throughout this story arc. Would it have been unrealistic for her to keep being a federal agent who has all the sex and also a baby? Sure, maybe. But this is a fantasy series and clearly delineated as such, so if that’s too much suspension of disbelief for you then allow me to refer you to Scott Lynch.

Regarding the non-monogamy…well, there are not a lot of mainstream series that won’t even touch non-monogamy with a bargepole, and twenty-three-year-old me quite likes the normalisation of non-mono and monogamous relationships here. What I’m basically trying to say here is that if Laurell K. Hamilton wants to chronicle her sexy adventures as Badass The Vampire Slayer (And Harem) and people want to read it, I’m honestly okay with that. I wish she’d be more honest about what her books are (she seems to do a lot of If You Don’t Like It You’re Just Too Mainstream For My Awesomeness-ing), but – whatever. Fine.

However. The fact that I didn’t hate these books for the reasons I’d assumed doesn’t mean that they in no way made me want to tear my own eyes out. Unfortunately this article is skittering dangerously close to its word limit, so stand by for Part Two, in which I attempt to explain why cleanly and concisely but inevitably deteriorate into wordless, feeble sobbing.

Can’t wait! See you then.

• Check out other Hopeless Reimantic columns here!

Vampires have appeared in various incarnations throughout the history of cinema. From lonely Nosferatu, to Dracula, to vampire cowboys, vampire teenagers¹ and, erm, vampire motorcycles.²

For a stylish, slinky and subversive depiction of a bloodsucker, Daughters of Darkness (directed by Harry Kümel, 1971) is well worth a look. It’s a hypnotic cocktail of horror and arthouse. The DVD has a campy Hammer-style cover and the tag line, ‘An erotic nightmare of vampire lust!’ Subtle. For some reason, there were a lot of lesbian vampire movies released in the 70s. However anyone looking for straight-up naughtiness will be disappointed with Daughters of Darkness. The vampires are beautiful women, but it’s not about titillation. It’s a lot weirder than that.

The story: a pair of newlyweds arrive at an out-of-season hotel in chilly Ostend. The bride – Valerie – is dressed all in white and appears to be the picture of naïve innocence. The groom – Stefan – has a handsome face, but there’s something not quite right about his smile. It almost looks like a sneer.

Their relationship appears to be a bit, well, peculiar. She’s concerned that he hasn’t told his mother about their marriage. He seems to be in no hurry to do so. Prior to their unscheduled stop-in at this beautiful but lonely place, they have both confessed that they don’t love one another and both seem okay with this. And then, during dinner, the sapphic vampire aristocrat arrives with her assistant/lover.

The Countess Bathory, played with otherworldly grace and just a hint of vulnerability by Delphine Seyrig, tells the couple that she is a descendant of the infamously murderous Hungarian countess. (A real historical character and template for the ‘glamorous female vampire’ archetype, Elizabeth Bathory was supposed to have been a serial killer but apparently wasn’t really into drinking virgins’ blood. That was a rumour that came about years after her death. The real Countess was never a vampire, just as Catherine the Great probably never even got to first base with any horses.)

Her loving description of the horrors her ancestor inflicted on young ladies gets Stefan a bit excited. Valerie is horrified. At first. And then the couple are drawn into the vampire’s world. In which the notions of victim and monster get turned sideways. And then the film briefly shows us Stefan’s ‘Mother’. (As the the none-more-seventies voiceover man enthuses in the film’s trailer, ‘She’s something else!’).

And there are some deaths. Including death by bowl.

Yes, bowl. And a lovely crystal bowl it is too. And someone knocks an entire lobster on the floor in the act. Such decadence! The film could be read as a mediation on power and relationships. (In their own ways, Countess Bathory and Stefan are both bullies.) Or an exercise in playing around with genre tropes. Or a daft-but-enjoyable confection of crazy featuring some splendid outfits (sequins, feathers, PVC capes!).

Actually, it’s probably a bit of all of these. It’s a strange and beautiful work. Even the bits that make you snigger might crop up in your dreams a long time after you’ve seen it.

• Emily McQuade is the co-author of Film Burble, where she likes to discuss all things cinematic. She’d like to live in a world where action figures are manufactured for all Mike Leigh characters. When not thinking about films, she likes to skulk around London in search of books, comedy and mandrills. She can also be founding loafing about on Twitter: @missmcq.

1. I once had to walk through a cinema foyer full of Twilight fans and had to restrain myself from bellowing, ‘It’s not as good as The Lost Boys.’ In a couple of decades hence, they’ll probably have to resist the urge to be similarly snarky about some future vampire boy-fest.
2. Yes really. I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is a British horror/comedy from the late 80s. I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it, so can’t comment on its quality.