A few years ago, when I was only very recently out of the closet and it was still a delicate subject at home, I made the mistake of watching a series called Motherland: Fort Salem with my parents. Minutes into the first episode, I commented that two of the leads — both women — were going to get together, to which my mother snapped, “Not everything has to be gay, Samantha!” 

It didn’t take long for the episode to prove me right in spectacular fashion, leading mum to sheepishly ask how I had possibly figured it out so fast. I told her that I can read subtext. As a queer viewer, I’ve been doing it all my life. 

Until fairly recently, queer women tended to be less visible than queer men in horror (except when we had our tits out, that is). But we were always there, even if many portrayals aren’t the most flattering. And while the history of lesbian horror is intrinsically connected to LGBTQ+ horror as a whole, we’ve also taken some wild detours along the way. From repressed outsiders to hypersexual predators to (gasp!) just normal people trying to live our lives, here’s a quick guide to lesbian horror movies through the ages. 

Some sapphic spoilers ahead.

The Old Dark House (1932)

1930s and 40s: Psychiatry (Won’t) Save Our Sinful Souls 

Queer dabblings were a staple of early monster movies, thanks in no small part to openly gay filmmaker James Whale and the four iconic horror films he made for Universal Studios. These include The Old Dark House (1932), Whale’s most overtly queer film, which features among its queer cavalcade of characters a repressed lesbian in the form of Rebecca (Eva Moore), who casts judgment on women for being “brazen, lolling creatures in silks and satins” but can’t help stroking the heroine’s supple skin when the chance presents itself. 

Just two years after the release of The Old Dark House, the Motion Picture Production Code began being enforced. Under the Hays Code, as it’s more commonly known, “sex perversion or any inference of it” was forbidden, and you better believe that included homosexuality. Queer coding became the name of the game, and since the Hays Code also banned any picture that might “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” those queer-coded characters tended to be villains who could be comfortably vanquished by the end.

Enter the trope of women driven to madness and murder by their (implied) lesbian desires. Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), in which the evil housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) attempts to goad the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) to take her own life because she’ll never compare to her predecessor, the titular Rebecca. The horny housekeeper remains enamored with her former mistress, who we learn wasn’t afraid to step out on her husband. “Have you ever seen anything so delicate?” Danvers asks the second Mrs. de Winter, lovingly fondling Rebecca’s transparent negligee. “Look. You can see my hand through the lace.” The implication, of course, is that she not only saw Rebecca wearing the negligee but saw everything underneath. Scandalous. Naturally, she goes down with the burning house. 

While the queer-coded celluloid women of this era might have been beyond help and doomed to an early grave, that doesn’t mean that no “help” was offered. As World War II loomed on the horizon, horror films began positing psychiatry as a possible way out for these damned dames. 

We see this in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), in which the titular vampire, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), ashamed by her “ghastly” urges, puts all her eggs in the basket of psychiatrist Dr. Jeffery Garth (Otto Kruger). If you know anything about the real treatment of queer folks at the hands of medical professionals during this era, you’ll know how misguided Marya is in thinking Garth can help her live a “normal life,” and she’s soon out on the streets again, luring young women to her art studio under the guise of painting them in the nude (no such foreplay is involved when she feeds on men). “Why are you looking at me that way? Won’t I do?” asks half-naked Lili (Nan Grey), shortly before Marya attacks. “Yes,” the Countess replies, staring at Lili with aching desire. “You’ll do very well indeed.”

A psychiatrist also factors heavily in 1942’s Cat People, with immigrant Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) being sent to Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway) after refusing to put out for her husband for fear of becoming a panther woman. Dr. Judd’s “cure” seems to involve his penis, and what lesbian hasn’t heard that one before? 

Interestingly, despite getting panthered to death in Cat People, Dr. Judd crops up in another Val Newton/RKO production, nihilistic The Seventh Victim, a year later. Judd is no more effective in this film, failing to stop the depressed Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) from hanging herself as the evil Palladists — the Satanic cult she has escaped from — intended. The Palladists are heavily queer-coded, as is Jacqueline herself, who is implied to have been in a lesbian relationship with close friend Frances (Isabel Jewell). “The only time I ever was happy was with you,” Frances tells Jacqueline, who can’t live with Frances, but can’t seem to live without her, either.

Blood of Dracula (1957)

1950s and 60s: From the Lavender Scare to Sympathetic Mistakes

The idea that science could help the queers fell out of fashion in the horror films of the 1950s. With the “lavender scare” raging, horror became gripped with a fascination around queer-coded authority figures — often representatives of science themselves — corrupting the youth. 

These narratives primarily involve men, but 1957’s Blood of Dracula takes a stab at a lesbian twist on this sordid material. In the film, young Nancy (Sandra Harrison) places her trust in Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), the chemistry teacher at her all-girls boarding school, only for Branding to manipulate and control Nancy by placing her under a hypnotic spell that turns her into a vampire. 

Nancy ultimately kills Branding, but she’s been tainted by lesbianism and can never return to her boyfriend Glenn (Michael Hall), for fear of killing him. She dies the death that most lesbian vampires are confined to: impaled by a phallic object. And thus, heteronormativity is restored. 

As the 60s rolled around, we began to see more sympathetic sapphic portrayals. Director Herk Harvey’s mesmerizing Carnival of Souls (1962) follows Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), an outsider trying to start over in a new town after surviving the watery car crash that killed her two best, uh, let’s call them gal pals. Mary is a church organist who shuns the religious trappings of the job, repeatedly stating it’s just a way to earn a living. She’s also indifferent at best to male attention, seeming utterly miserable in the presence of suitor John Linden (Sidney Berger) and stating that she has “no desire for the close company of other people” (though, as her doctor notes, she specifically seems to have no desire for a boyfriend). 

Unwilling or unable to subscribe to heteronormative Christian society, Mary disappears and is later found at the bottom of the river, still sitting in the car with her drowned companions. There was no escape for her. 

She was simply too queer to exist in this world.

The following year, director Robert Wise’s The Haunting would offer a similarly sympathetic lesbian in Theo (Claire Bloom), a fiercely independent psychic who comes to Hill House to help investigate the paranormal activity reported there. The Haunting walks right up to the line of calling Theo a lesbian without crossing it; she is unmarried yet alludes to sharing an apartment with another woman. The original script made the nature of their relationship even more explicit, with Theo’s lover leaving an angry break-up message on the mirror in lipstick. Given that the censors were reportedly vigilant about how the relationship between Theo and fellow investigator Eleanor (Julie Harris) was portrayed, it’s unlikely that this early scene would have made it into the final cut even if Wise hadn’t decided to strike it. 

Theo is the rare lesbian in horror films of this time period to survive to the end credits. But she doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, having to listen to Eleanor calling her a “mistake of nature.” Ouch.

Despite the censors’ sensitivity to sapphism, the 60s also ushered in the first of what would become a slew of erotically charged lesbian vampire movies. Indeed, the trailer for Blood and Roses (1960) promises “the ultimate in adult and unadulterated horror,” though its U.S. release omitted all the sauciest scenes from this French-Italian production. A stylish adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Blood and Roses takes full advantage of the novella’s lesbian implications, which were dropped from previous adaptation Vampyr (1932). And things would only get more explicit from here. 

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

1970s: Titillation Takes Top Billing 

Historian Andrea Weiss once noted that “outside of male pornography, the lesbian vampire is the most persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema.” This was especially true in the horror films of the early 1970s, where one can hardly move without being slapped in the face by the exposed breasts of a seductive sapphic bloodsucker. That’s not a complaint exactly, but it’s also blatantly obvious that the entertainment of real lesbians was not top of mind for the filmmakers. The male gaze watches lustfully over the subgenre, a stake clutched tightly in one fist. 

Scrappy British horror studio Hammer Film Productions was quick to pick up on the lesbian vampire trend, releasing three of these films between 1970 and 1971 that would be known as “The Karnstein Trilogy” collectively. Feeling pressure to sex up its output to continue competing at the box office, Hammer cast the voluptuous Ingrid Pitt in the role of Carmilla in The Vampire Lovers (1970), titillating the audience with scenes of her bathing and chasing nude co-star Madeline Smith around the bedroom. “Don’t you wish some handsome young man would come into your life?” Smith’s Emma asks Carmilla, who laughs. “No,” Carmilla replies. “Neither do you, I hope.”

When Pitt declined to return, the sequel Lust for a Vampire (1971) replaced Pitt with the equally beautiful Yutte Stensgaard. Carmilla (now going by Mircalla) infiltrates a finishing school for girls — a classic setting for some hot lesbian action — leading to kissing and bare breasts aplenty, if little in the way of plot. Later that year, the final entry in the trilogy, Twins of Evil, would make a splash by casting Playboy’s first identical Playmates, Mary and Madeleine Collinson, as the titular twins. However, the lesbianism in the film is limited to a little breast biting (not between the sisters, thankfully). 

1971 was a big year for sapphic vampires, also seeing the release of Jesús Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos and Harry Kümel’s superb Daughters of Darkness. More lesbian and bisexual vampires followed at the box office, including 1972’s The Blood Spattered Bride (another Carmilla adaptation), 1973’s The Devil’s Plaything, and 1974’s Vampyres. 

But 1974 also saw the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which changed the trajectory of horror forever. Suddenly, Gothic castles seemed quaint, flirty lesbian vampires a little toothless. Yet the image of the lesbian vampire as a powerful, wealthy seductress who owns her sexuality endures, no matter how many stakes patriarchy has driven through her heart over the years. 

Prince of Darkness (1987)

1980s and 90s: Stepping Out in the Shadow of the AIDS Crisis

Even with horror heading in a brutal new direction, the lesbian — or, in this case, bisexual — vampire climbed out of her coffin once again in the 1980s to gift us one of cinema’s most well-known sapphic sex scenes. In The Hunger (1983), Catherine Deneuve’s vampiric Miriam Blaylock seduces and beds Susan Sarandon’s Sarah Roberts while her former lover John (David Bowie) writhes in eternal misery upstairs. 

Sensual and sexy, this scene nonetheless plays into a trope of queer horror that would become even more prominent as the AIDS crisis took hold. As Harry M. Benshoff explains in Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, “The modern horror films’ focus on visceral gore and bodily fluids neatly dovetails into AIDS hysteria… even when the monster queer is a lesbian rather than a gay man. […] The scene slowly turns from tender and erotic to menacing and evil, as ominous bass tones sound discordantly under the soothing classical music, and flash cuts of red corpuscles punctuate the lovemaking. Soon enough, the blood flows, and what had begun as a beautiful scene of making love ends as yet another monstrous horror: the ‘foul disease of the vampire’ has been passed on once again.” 

AIDS panic would, unsurprisingly, have a bigger influence on queer films focusing on men, but it wasn’t absent in the lesbian horror of the 80s. As Benshoff points out, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987) features a woman infected with Satanic green slime attacking another woman in what is initially mistaken for a lesbian advance. And in 1988, The Kiss would take things to a gross new level as a parasite is passed from victim to victim through sloppy smooches.

By the 1990s, the LGBTQ+ community was more visible than ever, and huge strides were being made for equality, even as discrimination raged on. The lesbian horror of the decade is not particularly notable, however. Francis Ford Coppola slips a sapphic orgy into Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a film otherwise primarily preoccupied with a heterosexual love triangle, while the remake of The Haunting (1999) transforms Theo into an openly bisexual woman who gets side-lined by the ludicrous plot. With so little going on for us in the 90s, is it any wonder queer women everywhere claimed The Craft (1996) as their own?

High Tension (2003)

2000s: The Lesbians Are Not Alright

If the 90s were light on lesbian horror, the new millennium came out the gate swinging, though it was still heavily weighed down by the tropes of the past. 

The predatory lesbian would have a big comeback (did she ever leave?) in this decade. Anna Farris’s oversexed, pussycat-loving lipstick lesbian Polly invites workplace harassment lawsuits in May (2002), while repressed lesbian desire erupts into murderous mayhem in New French Extremity classic Haute Tension (2003). Growing up in the U.K., I first saw the latter film under its alternate title, Switchblade Romance, which perhaps says a lot about how my country viewed people like me at the time: harmless on the surface, but with something dangerous hidden inside, ready to be sprung at a moment’s notice. 

The U.K. was also responsible for one of the worst entries in the lesbian vampire subgenre: Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009). A James Corden vehicle that feels like it was ripped right out of the sticky pages of a lads’ mag, it’s proof that old habits — and misogyny — die hard. 

But there were signs of what was to come. In 2002, low-budget Make a Wish, aka Lesbian Psycho, succeeded in being one of the first lesbian horror movies to feel like it was actually made by and for lesbians (imagine!). Is it any good? It depends on who you ask. Is it a teensy bit biphobic? Sure. But it’s still a scrappy slice of lesbian horror history that is unfortunately difficult to track down.

Lyle (2014)

2010s and 20s: Cue the Queer Trauma and Queer Joy

If you believe Twitter, every scary movie made in the past decade is pushing the gay agenda. Queer characters are certainly more visible and prolific in horror than ever before, especially attractive gay men, but lesbians are clawing their way out of the graves dug for them by cinema past, too. What’s more, many are bucking trends, rejecting the male gaze, and even surviving to the end credits. 

The 2010s saw an uptick in films centering on lesbian couples as opposed to solitary sapphic figures coming to steal your girl, show you their nipples, or both. Lyle (2014) offers a lesbian take on Rosemary’s Baby in just over an hour, though it falls back on some convenient evil butch stereotypes. What Keeps You Alive (2018) subverts the predatory lesbian trope by uncoupling the villain’s queerness from her murderous nature while pairing her with a resilient queer final girl. And The Perfection (2018)… Uh, come back to me on that one. 

As for the 2020s, that story is still being written, but what we’ve seen so far bodes well for the future. The lesbian horror of the past few years has drunk deeply from the well of queer trauma, delivering impactful stories of forbidden love like The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) and extremist violence like The Retreat (2021). But it’s also tapped into queer joy, with films like Attachment (2022) proving you can pack your demons in the U-Haul and still have a romantic old time. The Fear Street trilogy (2021) did both, exploring generational queer trauma while imagining a brighter future for its queer leads.

Lesbians have recently been thriving on television — a medium that once loved to bury them — too. The Haunting of Hill House (2018) treated us to a fully realized, out lesbian Theo (Kate Siegel), complete with a same-gender relationship tied to her character arc. Hannibal (2013-2015) gave canonically queer Margot Verger (Katherine Isabelle) a kaleidoscopically beautiful sex scene with Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), with whom she later has a child. And just last year, British horror-comedy Wreck graced us with Vivian (Thaddea Graham), one of the best lesbian characters horror has seen in a long time. Thankfully, the series has been renewed, so we’ll see her on our screens again soon.

As for Motherland: Fort Salem, I must confess that I dropped off after a few episodes, so I have no idea if it made good on the sapphic promise it set up. But I do know that lesbians are gradually becoming so visible in horror that even my sweet oblivious mother will soon be able to spot them. We’ve come a long way from repressed murderesses and breast-baring bloodsuckers. And while some tropes will never die, neither will our will to survive and thrive, even in a genre that isn’t always kind to us.