Growing Pains: Breasts, Blood and Fangs

This chapter features a new take on vampires, werewolves and other contrived souls, especially in relation to tortured coming-of-age stories that address social pressure and childhood traumas. After a short encounter with Woolf in the company of a vampire, this chapter commences with a return to Stephanie Rothman’s psychedelic exploitation film The Velvet Vampire (1971) and Katherine Bigelow’s vampire western Near Dark (1987). The vampire as connected to the confusing experiences of coming of age is picked up Moth Diaries (Mary Harron 2011) and in a less explicit but no less horrific way in Sarah Plays a Werewolf (Katharina Wyss 2017). The promise of the myth of eternal life and beauty, and the legacy of Elisabeth Bathory is revised in The Countess (July Delpie 2009) and acquires a particular twist in contemporary Japan in Helter Skelter (Mika Ninagawa 2012). Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) takes the genre to its ontological extremes. This chapter will also turn to Butler’s re-imagination of the vampire in her novel Fledgling (2005) and the imagination of alternative relations between the human and nonhuman and looks at the new ethics of the vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014).