Queer Vampyres

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural

movie      fiction

  • Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural
  • AKA:
    Lady Dracula (1973)
    Legendary Curse of Lemora(1973)
    Lemora, the Lady Dracula (1973) (USA: TV title)
    Blood Kiss
    Lemora
  • Author: Richard Blackburn
  • Director: Richard Blackburn
  • Producer: Robert Fern
  • Year: 1973
  • Country: US
  • 80 minutes
Warnings
 
Nudity:2
Sex:2
Violence:3
 movie cover Other images

Description:
A young girl, who is an innocent singer in the local Baptist church, receives a letter that says her gangster father is dying soon. She must travel alone in order to be with her dying father, and the bus driver that brings her there warns the girl that the town is seized by an epidemic. This epidemic causes some of the inhabitants to be pale with fangs, others to have decaying skin and an animalistic nature. Reaching the house her father is in, the woman is locked in a stone shed to be taunted by vampire children.

The young girl soon finds herself under the spell of a female vampire called Lemora. She is the leader of some sort of religious cult in a small village deep into the woods and she plans to initiate the young girl in the cult's activities. The young girl, sensing that something is wrong, flees from Lenora's grasp and tries to find a way out of the labyrinthine woods.

Qvamp says:

This vampire film was banned by the Catholic Film Board for 21 years.

I wasn't overly impressed by the movie, and it had very little queer content. The vampire Lemora would constantly compliment the girl's figure, and enjoyed bathing and tickling her. But that's the totality of 'lesbian' content.

From Halloween Candy, by Thomas M. Sipos, p. 225:

Something about Lemora invites misinterpretation. The film's been described as 'leavened with a fierce anti-Catholicism' (The Overlook Film
Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy, Overlook Press, Woodstock, 1995, p. 279). And Barry Kaufman writes 'the entire plot of the film reeks of anti-Catholicism' (Demonique #4, FantaCo Enterprises, Albany, 1983, p.3) and recounts Lemora 'shedding Lilah of her Catholic inhibitions' (sic; ibid p. 4). Yet Lila's guardian is a southern Protestant minister, and
Lila specifically refers to herself as a Baptist. Both Hardy and Kaufman state that the Catholic Film Board condemned Lemora, but a CFB condemnation does not alter the story, converting Baptist characters into Catholics. Silver and Ursini further obfuscate matters, writing that Lila wishes 'to escape the sexual advances of the minister' (The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker's Dracula, by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight, New York, 1993, p. 194). However, the minister makes no advances. It is Lila who embraces him, while he recoils in guilt and disgust. Silver and Ursini also write that Lemora was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, rather than by the Catholic Film Board. On this matter I don't know who is correct; Hardy and Kaufman, or Silver and Ursini.

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Rating C
Queer Vampire Rating D-
Amount of Gay Content alluded to

 

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