If you go to any Letterboxd list of vampire films, it’s easy to see how male-centric they are. At the beginning of the 20th century, and a hundred years later, this niche is dominated by stories that necessarily feature a male protagonist who has some sort of supernatural power with which he terrorises everyone around him, especially women. Indeed, these films cross genres, from horror to camp-comedy and back, their core patterns remain tied to male heteronormativity. Take Nosferatu, Friedrich Murnau’s original film, which has been exhumed by male directors almost every decade, and here we are again with the same story of an overbearing foreigner who drinks blood, filmed by popular director Robert Eggers with the even more popular actress Lily Rose Depp. What new message do films like this, using this pattern over and over again, convey? Nothing, really. Moreover, the situation is similar when directors place a female vampire at the centre of the story, but that also fatalistically falls into a clichéd image. These are usually hyper-feminine, sexualised characters for whom blood is a symbol of passion and whose vampiric danger is an element of deadly attraction.

But is the vampire genre limited to this? 
Among hundreds of vampire films tight to clichés and heteronormativity, there are films in which the image of the vampire is original and deliberately departs from its initial genre tropes. Probably the most remarkable example in this paradigm is the film Addiction (1995) by the American director Abel Ferrara, which was released exactly 30 years ago and has not lost its relevance. At the centre of the plot there is a woman. She is a PhD candidate in philosophy who becomes the victim of a vampire attack by another woman.

Ferrara’s film is unique in that he takes the metaphors of vampirism and places them in a completely original story, which allows him to do two things at once: place the vampire image in a queer space and at the same time use this narrative to communicate his personal problems – that is, his heroin and sex addiction, which is where the film’s title comes from.

Take the scene that turns the heroine into a vampire. After pushing the heroine into the basement, the stranger sucks her blood. The tight space in the shadows and the sounds that the women make indicate a sexual subtext, or to be more precise, the rape of one woman over another. Vampirism here is not a romantic sexual dream, but a tragedy that the heroine has to live with and adjust her trauma accordingly. Having become a vampire, the heroine is forced to look at her victims, i.e. potential partners, differently and her spectrum of queerness expands accordingly. She looks at the world differently and becomes barrier-free in choosing her partners in their race sex or gender, simply because that is how she can survive.

Moreover, it is interesting how Ferrara departs from the sexual objectification of his heroine against the genre canons. Instead of focusing on the appearance of his female vampire, he instead absolutises her cognitive abilities, and they are actually the main construction of the character’s image. Although after the bite her life becomes an absolute nightmare and a total addiction, yet this experience helps her complete her PhD as she learns the philosophy of being that she has been researching.

Addiction is unique in the way it superficially uses canonical vampire film rituals such as blood sucking, transformation and subsequent addiction, yet at the same time on a plot level these structures lead us to a completely different experience from any other vampire film. It speaks of queerness as a transformative experience and uses vampirism as a straightforward problematisation of addiction as a phenomenon. It’s that universal spectrum of meaning that very few films in this genre niche could ever achieve.