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This chapter compares and contrasts, as well as analyses, aspects of the film against its peers and contemporaries within the wider playing field of lesbian vampire cinema in general. It argues that the brilliance of Daughters of Darkness lies in the way it plays with Gothic tradition, embraces the essence of French Fantastique, and the fact it takes advantage of the erotic film market and loosening of censorship. All these serve to not only thrill audiences, but provide them with a film that delivers plenty of substance and subtext. As a lesbian vampire film, above all other things, Daughters of Darkness has a direct connection to literary tradition, as well as to an entire canon of lesbian vampire cinema, which developed from the early 1930s up until the 1970s. The chapter examines some of those cinematic connections to see where the film fits with its peers and contemporaries.

This chapter studies the vampire movie, which has undoubtedly been the most enduring sub-genre throughout the history of horror cinema. From the German Expressionism of Nosferatu, through the Universal and Hammer versions of Dracula, George A. Romero's modernist Martin, the genre-busting From Dusk 'Til Dawn, to the Twilight saga and beyond, they have remained popular with audiences the world over. Once confined to the cobweb-filled cellars of nineteenth-century European castles, since the 1970s the cinematic vampire is more likely to be found in contemporary suburbia. The chapter looks at the history of movie vampires and how they have evolved to their current form. It considers Tomas Alfredson's Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2008), a film that takes the conventions laid down across a century of vampire cinema to produce something that still appears fresh and exciting.

Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.

This chapter discusses Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In as one of the best new horror films since the genre's last great creative flourishing in the 1970s. It highlights some of Let the Right One In's back story and compares it with other horror movies made in the 1990s or the 2000s, such as The Lost Boys (1987), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993), and Blade (1998) as venerable classics of vampire cinema. It also describes Let the Right One In's Eli as a type of vampire that is very different to Twilight's (2008) Edward Cullen, the undead hero. The chapter reviews movie vampires that come in all shapes and styles, and the vampire myth that is both durable and flexible enough to embrace many different permutations. It cites a vampire that appeared in an episode of Doctor Who called Journey Into Terror in 1965.

This concluding chapter provides further quotes from director Harry Kümel, which illuminate the prospect of a contemporary sequel to his original 1971 film. It also expounds on the sense of pessimism and cynicism rife in vampire cinema of the 1970s. Daughters of Darkness has an allegiance to many of these films in the way in which it channels the cultural climate of the period and gives vampirism a modern slant. Furthermore, the film's heritage angle directly links to a trend evident in some of the other genre cinema of the period, especially that which critiqued capitalist and class-driven facets of society. The chapter also includes a brief analysis on the lesbian vampire films that followed much later on, into the 1980s and beyond.