Vampire Clubs
INTRO
In Our Vampires Ourselves, Nina Auerbach makes the claim that we get the vampires we deserve.[1] Even though they don’t have reflections, vampires act as mirrors—they are a cypher for the culturally specific anxieties and desires of their time. Vampires shapeshift through myriad forms: hideous monsters, dapper aristocrats, romantic leads, and club owners. It’s this final category that is of interest here, because one of the many recurring themes of vampire stories is nightlife.
Vampires offer us the chance to think about what happens after dark—what life might be when we transgress normative ideas around how to live and our social hierarchies, and what love should look like. These transgressions are offered in the space of the nightclub. People at a club, like vampires, hang out on the edge of town, stay up until dawn, consume to the point of intoxication, and kiss anything that moves. In this essay we (Sara Clugage, Matilda Moors, and Maike Statz) build on Maike’s previous work in the essay “The Eternal Party: Illusion and Transgression in the Vampire Club Scene.”[2] We examine architectural elements of nightclub spaces—the threshold, the bar, and the stage—in order to see what the vampire club tells us about norms around hospitality, relationships, and labor. After offering these analyses to each other, the authors discussed.
THRESHOLD
—Sara Clugage
Invite the vampire in. She’s hungry, and a stranger, and she needs you.
The threshold is the most important place in a vampire club. Sometimes it has a standard entrance with a velvet rope and a discriminating bouncer, like Fangtasia in True Blood or Nadja’s in What We Do in the Shadows. Sometimes it’s a secret entrance, like the door hidden in the depths of a meatpacking plant in Blade, or a massive set of barred doors, like in From Dusk Till Dawn. This threshold is where the living are threshed from the dead. Someone with the right to control ingress and egress—a proprietor, bouncer, or other sovereign subject—determines if the club will offer hospitality to the one who seeks it.
That a vampire has to be explicitly invited into your home is one of the most enduring, if not precisely universal, pieces of vampire lore. And while there are more ways to approach public spaces than domestic spaces, clubs still require at least an implicit invitation: you enter them when you feel you have a right to be there. The verbal invitation, as a speech act, establishes a verbal contract between vampire and human; in this, the vampire is subject to the laws of language, integrated enough into human society that she must obey the codes of host-guest obligation. Vampire stories sharpen the rules of hospitality with the friction between fear and desire until they have the sickly metallic sheen of desperation. They are our quaintly human attempt to control the unknown danger on our doorsteps. But an invitation happens when both parties want to build a connection—the vampire is a monster, but also a seducer. Want is written into her.
In the first modern vampire novel, Joseph Sheriden Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1892), Carmilla the lesbian vampire crashes the party. She spills out of a carriage accident just in front of the lonely country castle where Laura lives with her father. Laura and her father invite Carmilla into their castle to rest and recover with them. They invite her because they need her; she offers companionship, love, and a hint of opportunity for social advancement. Her carriage, after all, is “the traveling coach of a person of rank.”[3] Even though Carmilla tells them nothing about herself, at first not even her name, she manages to make it seem like she is bestowing an honor on their household. Wherever she goes, she is of a class that belongs already. We later learn that Carmilla has already run this same con with Laura’s neighbor and his young ward, to fatal results. She first approached them at a masked ball—a vampire club with “a very aristocratic assembly,”[4] and appealed to them for hospitality. They invited her home, thinking that by including her, they themselves would be included in the circles they were desperate to belong to.
The class relations of the characters in Carmilla determine their host-guest relationships because, as Jacques Derrida has outlined in Of Hospitality, the rules of traditional hospitality exist only between those with property rights. Derrida looks to guest-friendship (xenia) in ancient Greek literature to trace the restrictions of the contract between guests and hosts. The host offers the guest food, shelter, and safety. The guest, in accepting this limited offer, promises not to exact anything more than what is offered, to respect the property and life rights of their host, and to leave their host’s sovereignty intact. Breaking this contract has dire consequences—famously, Paris launched the Trojan War by taking his host’s wife with him. Carmilla, first in a long line of literary vampires that follow her example, also betrays this contract—by taking (and killing) her hosts’ daughters.
Can we let the right one in? Classically speaking, the sovereignty of the host can only be accomplished with the violence of filtering and limiting access to some. This is a necessary injustice at the root of an otherwise generous act—the host invites someone in while at the same time asserting his right to do so, his identity as master of the house. Were the host to allow unconditional access, his identity as “host” would disappear at that very moment, and the meaning of the home as a space of conditional access would be nullified—hospitality is always limited.[5] When we speak of the host’s generosity, we already have on the back of our tongues the lingering iron-rich taste of their opposite, the uninvited. The positive term is always tinged with the O-negative.
Hospitality nonetheless reaches toward the unknown, always feeling for new ways to encounter the stranger. Derrida questions if it is possible to move beyond the known structural violence of hospitality and invite the unknown, to let in any stranger—“a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.”[6] Carmilla makes herself appear as a person with the means to reciprocate her hosts’ traditional hospitality, staking her claim on aristocratic belonging—without this subterfuge she would be hard pressed to make any claim on her would-be hosts. The vampire, then, is a limit case for the duties and rights of guest-friendship. How far can we extend hospitality toward the undead?
The vampire is an idea through which we work out who belongs. Is this creature before us on the threshold a person to whom I am obligated, or is it a “parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest?”[7] Our anxieties about who has a right to entrance—to the roped-off area of the vampire club or elsewhere—and whom we can refuse, are written all over the class politics of vampire stories. Dracula (1897), written by Bram Stoker under the heavy influence of Carmilla, raises the stakes of aristocratic wealth to the arena of global capital when his vampire travels from Transylvania to London, the beating heart of modern banking. Count Dracula has come to buy up property and infect the bustling metropolis. Played by Bela Lugosi in 1931, Dracula appears only in party clothes: in white tie and tails, he is overdressed, decadent, carrying the still-imposing stature of wealth with a worrying whiff of aristocratic decay.
And yet, the vampire’s dominant note is still seduction; treating with vampires helps us humans negotiate our own desires for sex and violence, to decide what is permissible with a monster and how to be monsters ourselves. In “Ask Before You Bite,” the journalist Elvia Wilk recounts her experience of a vampire LARP. She LARPs a human character in a vampire club, which is in this case a disused factory building outside Berlin (a space for productive labor made decadent). She and her fellow guests develop a system for negotiating as players what their in-game characters will and will not do: sex, violence, biting, killing. Unlike with vampires in movies or books whose welcome hangs on a single invitation, she can give or withdraw consent to her scene partner at any time. At a confrontation point in the game, she lets a fellow LARPer slap her—she is surprised to find the violence feels liberatory. This vampire fantasy has allowed her to surrogate her desire while maintaining a careful boundary around her body and her identity, bleeding as the boundaries are. That is “the revelatory potential of all this artifice and performative negotiation”: her threshold is her skin and she decides what happens at that boundary.[8] She has invited the vampire in.
BAR
—Maike Statz
The bar is disturbed.
The bar is a fixture of nightclubs, and the vampire club is no exception. What differs in the vampire club is that the bar, like the vampire herself, shapeshifts and the drink on offer is blood. The bar is a sprinkler system spraying blood over a crowd of vampires in Club Blood in Blade (1998). The bar is a private supply of O Negative sipped surreptitiously from a silver flask snuck into the rock club in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The bar is a body lit by flashing lights in an unnamed underground club in The Hunger (1983). These transformations challenge the idea that architecture is static, a heavy and unmovable thing. Through the architectural element of the vampire bar we catch a glimpse of spaces shaped by relationships between people, rather than one-sided consumption.
The bar, as we know it, is primarily a space of consumption (alcoholic or otherwise), but also one of conversation, seduction, and disinhibition. Bars are typically defined by a long horizontal countertop, about one meter high, constructed in a hard moisture resistant material. This structure divides party-goers from bar tenders—consumers from service workers—and “front of house” from “back of house.” The height allows for customers seated on bar stools to be eye level with a person standing beside them, given those people align with the normative conception of the body on which architectural standards are based. The horizontal counter disperses the queue in a way that allows for conversation and multiple bar tenders to attend multiple customers at once. At the bar things are exchanged—glances, money for goods, unheard sentences, and unwanted advances. Some vampire bars replicate this meaning, simply replacing alcohol with blood, however others disrupt it, focusing on vampire-human relations.
At a glance Fangtasia in True Blood appears to be a standard type. When Sookie Stackhouse first visits the after-dark bar with her vampire companion Bill Compton, she describes it as “a little bit like what a vampire bar would look like if it were a ride at Disney World.”[9] The bar serves bottled synthetic blood in a dark red interior with its own merchandise stand. On the surface Fangtasia packages, markets and sells a palatable vampire fantasy. As Bill warns Sookie, however, looks can be deceiving, “Well, don’t get too comfortable. It tends to get more authentic as the night wears on.”[10] In the series vampires consume synthetic blood, called “Tru Blood,” in order to be accepted into mortal society, specifically American human culture. This synthetic version is depicted as less satisfying and the vampires who consume it are described as “mainstreaming.” Fangtasia is actually a hotspot for humans seeking out sex with vampires and consenting to be bitten, both dissident activities. Perhaps, in this instance, the actual bar is located behind closed doors, in the bathroom or back rooms. At the point where vampire and human relations are centered, the bar is dislodged from its conventional form.
An unquenchable thirst for blood is a defining characteristic of vampires. In vampire mythology, the act of drinking blood is often portrayed as erotic, pleasurable for both the hunter and hunted. Vampire offspring is created through an exchange of mortal and immortal blood. Blood can therefore be read as a stand-in for other bodily fluids such as milk or semen, and the bite as a stand-in for sex, readily offering the association of bad blood to perverse sexuality.[11] Blood nourishes and sustains as much as it corrupts. Indeed, as Donna Haraway describes, the vampire is:
…the one who pollutes lineages on the wedding night; the one who effects category transformations by illegitimate passages of substance; the one who drinks and infuses blood in a paradigmatic act of infecting whatever poses as pure; the one that eschews sun worship and does its work at night; the one who is undead, unnatural, and perversely incorruptible.[12]
Vampires transform normative categories, infecting what is seen as natural or true, such as heterosexual familial structures. The troubling and enduring nature of vampires is exactly why they matter. Vampires are able to represent otherness in terms that are more complex than positive or negative due to their liminality—they are in between, marginal, at once vital and dead.[13] Vampires endlessly evolve, holding up a mirror to the context they are in and the humans that surround them.[14] Modes of nourishment have transformed from animalistic in Nosferatu (1922), to seductive in The Hunger (1983), synthetic in True Blood (2008-2014), and consensual in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023). In essence, their existence is relational. Vampires need humans to survive, and, I would argue, humans need vampires too.
The Hunger (1983)[15] is a darkly glamorous exploration of human and vampire desire. Set in New York City the erotic horror film delves into a shared hunger for beauty, companionship and immortality. The opening scene begins in an anonymous underground club. The immaculately dressed vampires Miriam and John Blaylock, played by Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie, stalk the club for prey. A ticking drum rhythm, metallic electric guitar, high pitch feedback and ominous bass line echo noisily over one another. Gothic rock band Bauhaus are playing “Bela Lugosi Is Dead,” and an androgynous bat-like figure obscured behind a cage occupies the stage. In fact each shot is veiled—as Miriam and John watch a darkly clad couple dance through a metal mesh ceiling, shots freeze and jump sporadically. As the vampires return with the dancing couple back to their home, the seduction is like a performance. It builds in intensity until the vampires cut the humans’ throats. Their hunger for mortal blood is momentarily satisfied.
The whole opening sequence is disorientating and laced with desire. There are moments when it feels like the movie glitches, and I have to check that my computer hasn’t frozen. In Queer Phenomenology (2006) Sara Ahmed describes the disorienting effect of queer desire as a result of deviation from the straight line. She also points to the spatiality of perversion, a term that describes what is wayward and therefore turned away from what is right, good, and proper. The perverse, Ahmed clarifies, is helpful when thinking about the disorientations of queer, and how it contests heteronormative assumptions, social conventions and orthodoxies in general. “What is astray does not lead us back to the straight line, but shows us what is lost by following that line.”[16] In The Hunger the sexual orientation of the vampires remains undefined and open in a way that feels transgressive for a film from the 80s. Perhaps because vampires are inherently corrupted, we more easily allow them to lead humans astray, showing us what is possible.
Vampires and parties are both disorienting, dissolving a sense of time and space and the boundaries between the self and the other. In The Hunger, we never see a bar. There are no drinks in sight. The frenetic energy of the party is fueled by the potential of corruption. The bar, in its recognizable architectural form, is disturbed by the vampire. The bar becomes a space of relation between bodies, dancing to an eternal beat.
STAGE
—Matilda Moors
Stages are structures of transformation. Just a few centimeters of elevation or a line on the floor is enough to lend someone the power to captivate and seduce their audience. A stage then, is a lens for focusing attention. This makes vampires particularly well adapted for the stage because they share some of these same powers. They captivate, they seduce. But what happens when vampires get on stage? “What kind of performance does the vampire offer that cannot be equaled by any other mortal?”[17]
Most stages vampires perform on are grubby, housed in clubs that used to be meat packing plants or factories, run-down buildings on the edges of town. Spaces that used to be sites of industry and productive male labor. These are abandoned buildings revived by leisure industries like clubs, undead spaces of excess and carnal pleasure. In this, vampire-owned businesses, mostly nightclubs, in post-industrial buildings represent the fear of vampires as a fear of feminization. The feminization of traditional spaces of manual work to sites where money is made through harnessing pleasure. Spaces where the productive male body of capital is possessed and replaced by a body which isn’t a body at all, or at least not a living one. The service industries and the vampiric female body come to represent a fear of the same thing, the prioritization of relation over production.
If the dancefloor represents a place of non-hierarchical relation, a kind of collective space of communion where enlustment[18] is a co-created practice, the more rarified space of the stage acts as a mechanism for valorization and enticement, à la the rock god or the stripper. Then how does the stage in a vampire nightclub complicate the relation between seduction, control, and power? The infamous dance scenes in vampire strip clubs in Vamp and From Dusk Till Dawn hinge on the idea that no one can elicit desire quite like a vampire. But these two stripteases are more than just the moments of seduction you would expect from cinematic erotic dances, they are glamours.
Though colloquially the word “glamour” conjures ideas of beauty, it has its roots in suspicion of the supposed illusory nature of femininity. This is the fear that accompanies seduction, the idea that you might be tricked into believing the chimeric surface is not a veil for something darker or plainer underneath. Whereas a glamour, in the vampiric sense, is about compulsion; you know there is something darker underneath and you are compelled anyway. During a glamour a vampire uses their preternatural charm and influence to coerce the human they are speaking with into doing or believing something they wouldn’t otherwise. This generally happens one-on-one, with the vampire drawing in close and looking deep into the human’s eyes. There’s an intimacy to it, as well as a horror. The risk of this intimacy is that, through a deep connection with another being, we might be manipulated, might lose control of ourselves. In this there are sinews of shared meaning between the vampiric glamour and the more general usage of the word. “Glamour, with its etymological roots in magic, enchantment, and the casting of spells, is also that thing that cannot be fixed or contained… [It] produces a space of desire that appears to be vivifying, although this space itself is an illusion.”[19] Both types of glamour then have a relationship to the illusory, seduction and to undercurrents of violence.[20]
So then what happens when the technology of the nightclub stage, which focuses attention, meets the technology of the vampiric glamour?
In From Dusk Till Dawn Salma Hayek (as Satanico Pandemonium) performs a fairly “straight” striptease. Her movements are smooth and undulating, her body very much the subject of the gaze as an objectifying force. She starts the dance wrapped in a huge albino boa constrictor before shedding the snake and leaving the stage to dance on the club tables (another stage of sorts) with the act culminating in her pouring whiskey down her leg to be drunk from her toes. Undoubtedly her presence as an ancient Mayan vampire “explore[s] how the figure of the monstrous female challenges … American cultural values that are rooted in foundational patriarchal and frontier fantasies that denigrate ‘others.’”[21] But though the raucous crowd at the Titty Twister is rapt by Satanico Pandemonium’s moves her dance only goes part way to becoming a glamor in the vampiric sense because the camera in the film reinscribes typically gendered modes of gaze. The eye of the camera is the eye of the bikers at the Titty Twister, lustful and desiring of seduction. The men in the crowd are aware of the power dynamics at play, understand the effects of Pandemonium’s dance and are active participants in this interplay of power, seduction, and control. They want to get hot for her.
Grace Jones’s performance as Katrina in Vamp is altogether different. Her movements are angular and jolting. Her makeup, wig, and outfit (a metal bikini) are harsh, alarming even. There is nothing naturalistic about this performance, no flowing hair or slow, sensual movement. Throughout the dance the camera keeps cutting to Jones’s eyes, by turns searching, sorrowful, frantic, menacing, lustful, and probing. Here Vamp upends typical representations of the gaze in strip scenes. Katrina looks back, and that look has bite. Katrina is in full command of a crowd of punters who don’t know what’s hit them. This is clear when the dance ends and the camera pans the audience, taking in the stunned face of man after man. They are completely dumbfounded by what they’ve just seen; they are hot for her but it’s not clear if they want to be. One of the onlookers tries, “She’s…uhh, umm [vocalizes],”[22] but his words fail him. Her performance is indescribable. Vamp acknowledges the strangeness of Katrina’s performance, its oddly hypnotic quality and its undeniable impact on the crowd. So here, the stage works to amplify the intimacy of a vampire’s glamour to achieve a “collective glamour” experienced by everyone who watches Katrina dance. This shifts the horror from its location in the quasi-romantic intimacy between two people to the more nebulous and complex site of mass intoxication by looking. The performance of the feminized labor of a vampire striptease brought into focus by the technology of the stage leads to a sort of mass hypnotism that leaves the crowd compelled and vulnerable.
This is the horror of the feminization of industrial spaces, the incursion of glamour where it “doesn’t belong,” “the beauty that overlays the ugliness of modern life and persists in feminized form, creating a beautiful and deathly aesthetic effect from the industrialized landscape.”[23] The horror is the deep fear of ceding power to a captivating and seductive force, the vampire body, amplified by the stage and able to entrance and compel on a mass scale. Yet again vampires are proximate to death, whether that death is of a person or an industry.
DISCUSSION
Sara: We all made a similar move, where we set up this architectural element as fixed and then we’re like: it’s actually everywhere.
I tried to set up the threshold as a formal space for encounter where an invitation is issued in language. I did not distinguish between human clubs that a vampire is entering and clubs that are run by vampires, or explore the ways the rules are different in each story. In the movie version of What We Do in the Shadows, the vampire characters want to go to the cool human clubs, but the humans know not to invite them and every bouncer turns them away. They finally end up at the one vampire club in the city, and it’s deserted and boring. A sea of empty bar stools. I liked the reversal of vampires feeling unwelcome or vulnerable in human spaces. There are also vampire clubs like Fangtasia in True Blood that have no magical barrier to entry, even though a vampire needs an explicit invitation to enter a private domestic space. In Blade, the daywalker vampire Blade barges past a bouncer who explicitly tells him he is not invited. In From Dusk Till Dawn, it’s the human character played by Harvey Keitel who is required to present his Class C driver’s license gain entry. He has to prove he belongs in a vampire trucker bar—the twist is that it’s the trucker part that matters.
All of these stories are thinking through what establishes our right to belong somewhere. Derrida talks about hospitality as a fundamental injustice, always based on this winnowing, this threshing that happens at the threshold. In the classic Greek system, the only person who can decide whether to let someone in is the pater, the patriarch, because he controls the household—notably, the home is not a free space, and the women and enslaved people who also reside there do not have any rights within it. So the host and the guest face each other across this threshold, and they define each other through their opposition (although in this very deconstructionist move, each term contains the trace of its opposite).
What I liked about Elvia Wilk’s story “Ask Before You Bite” is that it changes the structure of consent, so that the boundary is not at the threshold to a house but at a person’s skin. There is no one formal invitation at a designated space: invitations are happening all the time, and it’s meant to be a healthier relationship, where you can give or withdraw consent as you go along. The threshold moment in vampire stories makes you cringe—you as the viewer or reader, who knows this stranger on the outside is a vampire, are yelling at the character to not be so gullible! But in the vampire LARP, even if you issue that invitation you can withdraw it in the next moment. And Wilk does this as a human woman character, a person who, in the Greek system, would have no right at all to participate in hospitality.
Matilda: What was really interesting about the way you used that LARP piece is that through the violence of vampire fantasy, negotiations around thresholds and how to care for them becomes possible. You need the corruption of the vampire to expose the true limits of that constant need for negotiation.
Maike: The negotiation allows for more transgression, rather than less. That’s the point that Wilk makes, that the difference between the more traditional LARPs and the Nordic model is that the violence and its negotiation opens up more space.
Sara: Yes, it’s obviously so similar to BDSM structures of consent. And I liked that there’s a desire to encounter violence. I think you see this with Laura and Carmilla, that they are obsessed with each other, and they both want a transformational experience that is outside the boundaries of a guest-host relationship. The vampire LARP allows that kind of transgression to occur in a way that doesn’t seem life-threatening, that allows for you to transgress and then go back.
Matilda: The idea of transgression as opening up a space for a true kind of transformation links all our texts, whether that’s in terms of consumption, shifting labor relations, or pre-existing structures.
Maike: So the main feature of the bar in the vampire club that I wanted to draw attention to was how it shape shifts, or changes in different settings. There are ideas around architecture, that it’s this fixed space, this sort of unmoving thing. But what the vampires do in the club shows this to not be the case: the bar is a relationship between people.
I start by pointing out how bars are typically constructed and how their meaning can start to change in the vampire club. Initially I made this point a little bit too black and white, because as you point out Matilda, there are examples of vampire bars that are closely tied to consumption or capital. But the argument I want to make is that drinking blood has another meaning than alcohol or drugs. It’s more about seduction, as well as causing disinhibition and a change in behavior or identity. The space of the bar adapts to this different substance and what it means.
So I speak a little bit about The Hunger, an erotic horror film set in New York. So much of the movie revolves around the seduction that takes place between the vampire and human characters. The whole film is about a longing for companionship. And the bars in it, where blood is sourced, are shaped around the relationships between humans and vampires, rather than as a static serving space. I end the text talking about what draws me towards vampires, which is the possibilities that open up through their transgressions, and how these shift the bar from a fixed thing into a more open relational space.
Matilda: Reading your piece, I was thinking about the differences between blood and booze. Though they both serve as intoxicants, obviously one has zero nutritional value, and the other one is literally what a vampire needs to survive. The kind of intoxication that humans seem to get from vampire blood, and that vampires (to a lesser extent) get from human blood, is a sort of vital clarity. Whereas alcohol has a fuzziness to it that makes the space of the club slushy or fuzzy, whereas maybe drinking blood does not. It’s enlivening, quite literally, but also often seems to give this sense of clarity.
Sara: There’s a helpful fuzziness around intoxication and nutrition in the conflation between alcohol and blood. I’m thinking again of True Blood where vampires drink synthetic blood from bottles, or any number of vampires who drink from rats or other animals. That’s the sober experience of nutrition—it doesn’t give you the high that human blood does. We feel a bit sorry for vampires in that circumstance because they don’t get to experience the transgression, right? Transgression is what vampire stories are for. It’s how we can imagine experiencing that sexual or drug-induced high, or having a brush with violence but surviving. Maike, at the end you say something we’re all saying, that vampires need humans to survive but humans need vampires too. I would add that we need the concept of vampires, not vampires themselves. I realized that in this kind of bar scenario, we never think of ourselves as the one who gets fed on and dies. That’s always someone else.
Matilda: I sometimes think of myself in that position, as the one who’s fed on. I’d be up for it. But I think I occupy quite a strange position in that.
Sara: But structurally, as a viewer, you always exist beyond seeing someone die on screen, right? You are never the person whose story is at an end. One thing I liked in this Elvia Wilk essay is that she describes people who die during the vampire LARP. Their characters get bitten and they go lay down dead in a closet until the end of the night. Matilda, maybe you’d be one of those! And to your point about consumption, something about the desire for this violence is a desire to be someone who brushes with it and escapes. That way you can ignore the fact that vampires are literally killing people, that they are stealing from the living. That’s really clear when you talk about Blade in your previous essay, Maike, that the vampires are a ruling class that feed on the living population, in this very Marxian sense of dead labor consuming the living. But I want to hear more from Matilda about dying.
Matilda: I don’t have any very good reason for it other than I think it would be hot. It’s not at all intellectual. It comes from a very base place.Though it is slightly related to my understanding of Mario Perniola’s writing about the vampire, where he talks about their porosity and about forming an open relation with the thing that feeds on you, which brings us back to the idea of the bar. Being needed in the deep way a vampire needs a human for sustenance is a kind of love, or at least that’s what the romance in vampire stories implies. Love as a deep compelling need, that feeds you in a way that moves beyond exchange.
Sara: That’s the part of the allure, and maybe where you get past money. There’s an intense relation between a vampire and a human where there’s no external input to the system. They sustain each other, and so you have a materialist system with no colonialism or extraction or theft—it’s a closed-loop economy. That gets you out of the predatory aspect of vampirism. In Carmilla, Carmilla kills peasant girls to eat, but she only loves Laura. That’s a class thing, that Carmilla is a countess and her mate needs to be properly aristocratic. But it’s also a deep compulsion between the two of them to only see each other. That’s a fantasy of love as well, a fantasy of exclusion, that you would only need the other person. Who doesn’t want that fantasy?
Matilda: We’ve talked quite a lot about a one-on-one relationship, but the bar as a human body, or as a blood sprinkler system (in Blade), is a way to make drinking blood in some way communal, and fun. I don’t know about the people who had their blood drained for that sprinkler system, but I think the person being fed on by lots of vampires also kind of wants it. That’s what’s happening at a party as well, this kind of collective erotic experience.
You’ve got to share your date! A couple who are exclusively into each other aren’t fun, but when a couple spreads that kind of intimate, interpersonal relationship around via the bar or dance floor—that’s what makes a good party, when you share your date with everyone else.
Sara: That’s such a good closing line.
Matilda: The crux of my writing is that the stage as an architectural feature in vampire clubs allows for a glamor to move from this one-to-one intimate relationship of coercion to a collective relationship of coercion. This plays out to greater and lesser extents in Vamp and From Dusk Till Dawn, respectively because of the type of gaze the camera employs and the types of dance Grace Jones and Selma Hayek perform. Both are erotic but Grace Jones striptease is erotic in the Audre Lorde sense of the word—it’s not titillating. My contention, then, is that is a collective glamour, which I don’t think I’ve read about or seen anywhere else, is possible because the technology of the stage and the technology of the vampire are related, so the stage is a super magnifier of traits that vampires already have, like the ability to seduce and an ineffable charm—as you so clearly wrote, Sara, “want is written into them,” and I suppose I’m saying that the stage also writes want into the performer.
Sara: Is it part of the feminized labor thing in the Salma Hayek scene that she’s this powerful deity who’s reduced by the camera’s game to a servile position, because her performance is about pleasing this dirtbag?
Matilda: I’m quite on the fence about it, because she potentially flips this later in the film when she talks about making George Clooney her slave, and how he’s gonna have to lick the dirt off her shoes.
Sara: So it is a power assertion, but it needs to be cloaked in traditional femininity.
Matilda: Essentially yes. Interestingly, in the TV series, which I’ve yet to watch, they make that assertion much more clearly. In the film I couldn’t quite make up my mind about whether she’s being reduced, or whether she survives the reduction of the camera’s gaze.
Maike: I feel like she survives the reduction. After she goes through this seduction, the big twist is that her monstrosity is revealed at the point where she’s entranced the whole crowd. It feels like she is very much in control, transitioning from this sexy, beautiful striptease to attack mode, with this really monstrous, animalistic face. The illusion breaks.
Matilda: That’s what I thought, but when I re-watched it, the fight has actually already started before she transforms into a vampire. I really wanted to make that argument, and I think I probably still could: she isn’t reducible, because her monstrosity does give her this kind of power and shifts her out of being easily-consumed into a more powerful position.
Sara: But the distinction you’ve drawn between Hayek and Jones still holds, where there’s a necessary subterfuge for Hayek to seem unthreatening in order to get closer to actualizing her own desires. And Jones has none of that nonsense. It’s just straight-up aggression.
Maike: I love that scene. When I watched Vamp recently, I was like, how did this performance come into this movie? The movie is typically male-gazey: teenagers go to a strip club to look for a stripper to take to some bros. And then there’s this really avant-garde performance.
You made an interesting point about post-industrial settings. The Titty Twister also has a kind of post-industrial feel, even though it’s in the middle of a desert, because you have this amazing aerial shot where the back of the club is revealed as a Mayan temple with a bunch of truck debris around it. It’s like a mix between an archeological excavation and a trash pit. These themes of extraction and excavation relate to feminized labor at the sites of these clubs.
Matilda: In Vamp, the Renfield stand-in who works at the strip club says to one of the wanna-be frat boy protagonists: this bar serves a purpose, and it’s cleaning up trash. He’s alluding to the fact that leisure industries in run-down bits of town serve the function of keeping the people who frequent them away from suburbia, and in the case of the vampire bar, kill them and dispose of their bodies. This is true for the doomed itinerant truckers killed at the Titty Twister as well—the bar, this place of transgressive excess, skims off the kind of people that suburbia doesn’t want to have to deal with.
Sara: It’s necropolitics written like fantasy. There’s a surplus population that can’t be absorbed by the productive economy of the area and somebody needs to do something with them. So vampires turn them from people who consume into people who are consumed. It’s all so literal. It all seems to come down to: who are we okay seeing killed?
[1] Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
[2] Maike Statz, “The Eternal Party: Illusion and transgression in the vampire club scene” in Party Planner, Vol. 3, Party Trick (Office Party, 2023).
[3] Joseph Sheriden Le Fanu, Carmilla, ed. Carmen Maria Machado (Philadelphia: Lanternfish Press, 2019), 27.
[4] Le Fanu 97.
[5] Michael Naas, Threshold Phenomena, Derrida and the Question of Hospitality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 35.
[6] Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77.
[7] Derrida 61.
[8] Elvia Wilk, “Ask Before You Bite” in Death by Landscape (New York: Soft Skull, 2022), 225.
[9] “Escape from Dragon House,” True Blood, season 1, episode 3, directed by Michael Lehmann (Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, HBO, 2009), online.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
[12] Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness @ Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (New York: Routledge, 1997).
[13] Peter O. Campbell, “Intersectionality bites: Metaphors of race and sexuality in HBO’s True Blood” in Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui (eds) Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
[14] Auerbach.
[15] The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott (MGM, 1983), online.
[16] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 78.
[17] Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, ACET Series (Continuum, 2004), 78.
[18] McKenzie Wark, Raving, Practices (Duke University Press, 2023).
[19] Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Cornell University Press, 2009), 55.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Atalie Gerhard, ‘“The Monstrous Return of the Commodified Female: How Zombie Strippers (2008) and From Dusk Till Dawn (2014) Transgress Foundational American Cultural Values,” [Inter]Sections – The American Studies Journal at the University of Bucharest, no. 25 (2022), 33-52,, https://intersections-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/AG-FINAL.docx.pdf
[22] Vamp, directed by Richard Wenk (New World Pictures, Balcor Film Investors, Amaretto Films, 1987).
[23] Brown 15.
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