Monster/Vampire movies are concerned with sexual transgression,

Authors Avatar

Monster/Vampire movies are concerned with sexual transgression, psychological transformation, and moral retribution. Discuss this statement, using examples where you can.

Vampires, not only lurking in far away lands such as the renowned Transylvania, but also have been said to lie in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. Its home, not a fortified castle guarded by the children of the night, but the realm of the sub-text, guarded by endless narratives. Each, a new bread in themselves, having represented different arenas in the human social order one thing remains true in all the Vampire narratives, they always have something to do with the idea of a being, or way of being, that literally lives off another. What follows, are accounts by various authors on the subject of the vampire myth and ledged, its place in society and in psyche of its people. However, it must be noted that although the realm of the vampire is huge and many have existed, there is none other than Dracula that more writings have been engaged in for which this essay will pay close attention to.

Dracula, Sex & Taboo

“The vampire idea deals in the terror of recognising, challenging or being challenged by dependency, and always registers this through the body: the dependencies of its needs and drives, especially, but not exclusively, sexuality.” (Dyer, 10)

Perhaps if we are to enter the vampires castle of subtext, the front door would be clearly be marked Bram Stokers Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola; US, 1992), for which Richard Dyer pays close attention too. This fascinating look at the vampire leads into the notion that Dracula represents the more vile side of male sexuality; that Dracula acts as an antithesis to how society resides in sacraments of marriage, moral order and structure. “He is an outsider, without being socially marginal,” (Dyer, 10). It deals with the taboos of sexuality in society, the unspoken but certainly recognised acts of randy encounters and sexual perversions. Taboo because this ‘lust’ (although not necessarily for blood) lies within all of us, to which we can all gaze at in vampire films. Perhaps because it is said that in the hierarchy of society, at the top is always the white, male, heterosexual father, but no matter what hold they have over the people below them i.e. women, children, gay, black, Jew or any other, with male sexuality, a true representation is struggled to be achieve so the vampire expresses the profound contradictories of the cultural construction of heterosexual masculinity.

If ‘society’ resides in moral order, in marriage, in the unemotional, unerotic workplace, then it has no place for driving randiness and uncontrollable priaplism, themselves conceived as the nature of male sexuality.”

(Dyer, 12)

If this is struggled to be seen in Dracula himself, then the same understanding is also encoded in the narrative. Looking at Mina who is engaged to be married, and her friend Lucy, who wishes it were possible to marry three men and is clearly sexually active; through the course of the film, we see that in each of them there are polarised fates. For Lucy, she turns into a vampire bloodsucker and dies in a horrific blood bath for her sins, one might argue. Mina on the other hand, who is due to get married to Harker, does indeed follow the same path as her friend Lucy by turning into a vampire herself, but gets redeemed, and becomes human again (saved), thus perhaps the ruling of the film is get married, live, live like a slut, die! This theme would therefore suggest that perhaps the main villain, or perhaps to be more specific to the genre, the element most to be feared, is not the vampire himself, but the horror towards sexually independent women.

Join now!

Whatever the ruling for the film to carry these tones of patriarchy, it is nonetheless carried through in other, deeper contexts of the narrative. Take for example the scene in which Dracula is seducing Mina on the bed.

“This point would appear to erase the former reading of ‘enforced fellatio’ and the equation between blood and semen; it draws attention instead to Mina as a menstruating girl – this is the taboo that is violated in this scene. “

(Gelder, 71)

If we are to believe that there is a true symbolic equation between blood and semen ...

This is a preview of the whole essay