Vagina Dentata: Underworld (US, GB, H, D 2003)

The film Underworld is set during a centuries-old war between vampires and werewolves. It shows us the heroine Selene, a vampire warrior who uncovers a conspiracy: A high-ranking vampire is cooperating with the werewolf chief and secretly trying to create a superrace by crossing the two species. For certain reasons, the human Michael is essential to those experiments—this is why Selene wants to protect him and even falls in love with him. Conflicts with her vampire family are inevitable! In the article, we collect psychodynamic remarks on the vampire film genre, especially the classic constellation according to which the prototypical vampire is always a male seducer who is after his submissive female victims. In Selene, on the other hand, we recognize one of those rare female vampire figures that break out of this apparently prototypical perpetrator-victim constellation—and therefor even undermine patriarchal structures symbolized in the classical vampire genre. Such vampire figures are often presented with a femininity that turns out to be ‘monstrous’: We explore the monstrous aspect of their femininity using the example of the ‘vagina dentata’ motif—the culturally and historically widespread ominous fantasy of seductive women who aim to castrate men.