Moistening the dry lips of Dracula: postmenopausal anxiety and mimetic fertility

ABSTRACT

Screen vampires define themselves through dominant or subliminal variations on the loss of, and desire for, fertility. Taking the gender-fluid figure of Dracula from Bram Stoker to the 2020 Netflix series as prototypical of traditional vampirism, it will be argued that while simulating youth, beauty and menstruation through biting and sucking, the Count defaults to a state of dehydrated infertility. As male-female shape-shifters, Dracula and the vampire more generally present as regressive constructs of the feminine. They return us to romantic ideals of the youth-desire equation, signifying both its ubiquity and the terror of its passing. As bodies unable to generate their own blood yet craving the bleeding of others, vampires harness the irrational fear of female ageing. They are, in effect, politically symbolic spectres of postmenopausal anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

• Perimenopause
• menopause
• postmenopausal anxiety
• vampire
• Dracula
• female ageing

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Griffith University – The School of Languages, Humanities and Social Science, the editors of this edition, and La Trobe University– School of Humanities and Social Sciences for the Outside Study Program that enabled the completion of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terrie Waddell

Dr Terrie Waddell (PhD) is Adjunct Associate Professor/Reader in Creative Arts at La Trobe University. Her research focuses on the relationship between creativity, screen media, gender, popular culture and psychology – her most recent book, The Lost Child Complex in Australian Film: Jung, Story and Playing Beneath the Past (Routledge), was released in 2019. She is the co-founder of ‘Psychology of the Moving Image International’ (PAMII).