Behind the Couch

1973 Dir. Richard Blackburn Set in 1920s rural America and filmed on an ultra-low budget, this deliciously weird and wonderful adult fairy tale tells of a young girl’s sexual awakening in the rustic abode of a female vampire. When 13-year-old church singer Lila (Cheryl Smith) receives a letter from the titular antagonist (Lesley Gilb) informing the girl her gangster father is close to death and longs to see her one last time, Lila runs away from her puritanical guardian, Reverend Mueller (Blackburn). On her journey she encounters various incarnations of aggressive male sexuality, from the sleazy ticket seller at the bus station and the lecherous man whose car she stows away in, to the coven of undead abominations lurking in the woods around Lemora’s home. Their advances serve to highlight Lila’s perceived vulnerability and objectify her burgeoning sexuality as she wanders somnambulantly through increasingly nightmarish landscapes. When she arrives at the home of Lemora, Lila init...

'The Father of the English Ghost Story', Dublin-born Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, is best known to admirers of Gothic fiction as the influential author of such chilling tales as Uncle Silas , The House by the Churchyard , The Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter , and, perhaps most famously, the short story collection In A Glass Darkly , which contains Green Tea, The Room in the Dragon Volant, The Familiar, and, of course, Carmilla . Carmilla  (1872) was groundbreaking for its time, not least because of its subtle love affair between the two main female characters. Taking his cue from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Le Fanu’s darkly sensual tale, detailing the delicate yet increasingly sinister courtship of a young woman by a female vampire, further entwined the figure of the vampire with notions of forbidden sexuality. Le Fanu was deeply influenced by the historical figure of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess who reputedly bathed in the blood of young...

2009 Dir. Ron Carlson AKA Pear Blossom New Year’s Eve, 1969. Brooke (Sophie Monk) and her girlfriend Rhea (Anya Lahiri) are at a totally swinging party in LA. The evening’s glitter ball-bedazzled festivities are cut short when Brooke stumbles into the bathroom and interrupts Hollywood A-lister Warren James (Justin Shilton) attempting to assault a young fan (Scout Taylor-Compton – Halloween, Halloween II ). Brooke stabs the would-be rapist in the throat. Escaping to the desert in their car (“I just wish I could let the top down and let this warm desert air cleanse my body”), Brooke and Rhea then encounter God herself (Angela Lindvall), who offers to turn the pair into immortal, vampiric angels of death, destined to sexily wander the earth destroying evil wherever they find it. Cut to forty years later. Brooke and Rhea are resurrected from their desert tomb to begin their divine mission. This naturally involves a shot of them strutting along a moonlit desert highway in ling...