Daughters of Darkness

Daughters of Darkness arrived in 1971 at the intersection of arthouse and horror cinema. While neither camp fully embraced the picture at the time, director Harry Kümel’s haunting lesbian vampire experiment achieved cult status in the decades to come. The film emerged amid a flurry of European lesbian vampire fare, most of which preyed upon the patriarchal anxiety that women, motivated by second-wave feminist ideals, had become too powerful and independent, posing a threat to traditional gender and power dynamics. Most of these features ended with the lesbian bloodsuckers getting stakes through the heart, thus destroying their evil, corruptive influence on mainstream values. However, Daughters of Darkness identifies with the lesbian vampires, positioning them as seductive figures pitted against a nasty contingent of masculine violence and patriarchal power. Unlike many films in this genre, it’s less about the phallic penetration of fangs by male vampires than a distinctly female-on-female form of seduction. The result has elements of traditional and postmodern vampire films, both of which the director enshrouds in a somewhat psychedelic formal execution.

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