Postmodernising the lady vampire:

melancholy, isolation, and the female bloodsucker

Abstract

This article focuses on three films that facilitate a de-mystification of the vampire by resisting the mythological pretext, and often even the horror or romance conventions, of earlier vampire films. While the films in question – The Addiction (Ferrara 1995), Let The Right One In (Alfredson 2008) and Trouble Every Day (Denis 2001) – are undeniably aware of preconceived notions of the vampire, they are more preoccupied with the psychological implications of vampirism as an illness than making reference to any of their precursors. Their emphasis on the burden of vampirism takes away from the conventional vampire advantages such as sex appeal and special powers.

While most recent work on the vampire film has focused on direct comparisons between contemporary films, this grouping of specific postmodern examples considers which traits recurrently stray from the conventions. Thus, the focus is not on the fact that each of the films in question depict protagonists that drink blood and have a propensity to kill, but on the way they exclude aspects such as the mythical background story and the erotically mysterious vampire in order to present a more realistic figure, burdened by the weight of his or her intense desire for blood.