The Lady Is a Vamp: 11 Undead Beauty Muses

The word vamp, as most commonly used, is actually fairly new. Ushered into the collective consciousness by early-20th-century silent films, vamp was the slang for the female vampires who seduced otherwise upright citizens, turning them into monsters as well. Granted, it was a popular genre, and as the obviously metaphorical vampire bit fell away, so did the end of the name. Before long, the vamp—with all her derivatives (vamping, vampish, vampy)—was born.

While the classic vampire story, revived in recent pop culture from Twilight to True Blood, would have it that suave antiheroes target the girlish and meek, the female vampire’s presence on film is actually inextricable from modern ideas of unbridled sex appeal, particularly when it comes to beauty. Think of Vampira, whose campy performance in 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space cemented her as a cult figure: Real name Maila Nurmi, she by that time had become one of TV’s first horror hosts, presenting while decked out in long and low-cut black gowns with a cinched waist, her eyebrows arched, eyes darkly rimmed, and her raven hair slicked back. Nurmi drew inspiration from the Addams Family cartoons that ran in The New Yorker, but her vampire-inflected version was far sultrier. Recent reports suggest she was Disney’s live-action reference for Maleficent in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty—their faces are nearly identical.

 

 

Then, of course, there’s the vampire queen. As Akasha in 2002’s Queen of the Damned, Aaliyah wears flamboyant golden headdresses and matching gilded makeup with smoky, kohl-lined eyes and exposed, chiseled abs. Salma Hayek as an undead exotic dancer in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), one of her first big roles, is a study in raw sexuality, her curvaceous frame clad in just a bikini, feathered headpiece, and a swipe of lipstick.

More contemporary iterations have a quixotic kind of sultriness, like Tilda Swinton’s alabaster, bookish vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive—her hundreds of years of reading, tucked away from the sun, have left her with a white-gold mane of hair and a penchant for sumptuous robes. Sheila Vand as the vampire of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has almost nothing to reveal her nature, save for her meticulously lined eyes. Even when subtle, the allure of the vampire is completely divorced from irony—think of it as the antithesis of today’s Sexy Pizza Slice costume, Sexy Big Bird costume, et al. It’s a reminder that, this Halloween and in the days that follow, the scary and the sultry can, and perhaps should, go hand in hand.

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