First Advisor
Hildy Miller
Date of Award
Spring 6-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English and University Honors
Department
English
Language
English
Subjects
Film and television studies, LGBTQ studies, Spectatorship studies, Feminist studies
DOI
10.15760/honors.1846
Abstract
From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, a wave of lesbian vampire themed exploitation films proliferated through UK, US, and Western European cinemas. In critical literature on this subgenre, camp reading is often dismissed, unacknowledged, or understood as circumscribed by authorial intent and/or intended audience. With this alternating lack of attention to and dismissal of camp, the interpretive agency of the queer spectator is constrained, their spectatorship implicitly subordinated to that of the "conventional" horror audience—the voyeuristic-sadistic male spectator. Through a reading of The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 British production from Hammer Studios, I seek to explore how camp enables alternate identification for the queer spectator—even (or especially) as applied to objects of a culture profoundly hostile to such interpretation.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44779
Recommended Citation
LeMay, Mirielle, "A Twilight World of Unspeakable Horror: Lesbian Camp and The Vampire Lovers (1970)" (2026). University Honors Theses. Paper 1808.
https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.1846
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Visual Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons