From its inception, as an outsider within polite society, the artistic vampire has been consistently linked with homosexuality. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel" (1797) portended a lesbian vampire, while John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) depicted a young man's desire for the dominant male vampire.

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While this association pervaded much of the Victorian era, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the sexual vampire gave way to a more horrific image, and the first vampire films, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1919) and Tod Browning's London After Midnight (1925), reflect this trend. Early vampire cinema is remarkably heterosexist, belying the literary tradition that spawned it.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, coupled with the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and a new public awareness of homosexuality, soon altered things, and gay and lesbian themes became commonplace in vampire cinema.

The first important homosexual vampire film was Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers (1970), an adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla." Other gay vampires appeared simultaneously in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Lancer Brooks' Sons of Satan (1973), Ulli Lommel's Tenderness of Wolves (1973), and Jimmy Sangster's Lust for a Vampire (1973).

This marriage of metaphor--vampire to homosexual--remained a constant throughout the 1970s, culminating in Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983).

Now permanently linked with sexuality in such films as Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire (1994), Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995), Michael Almereyda's Nadja (1995), and David DeCocteau's The Brotherhood (2000), homosexuality remains a common if not constant theme, a sexual metaphor that continues to bind representations of vampires with homosexuals in the arts.

Both male and female homosexuality or homosexual elements appear throughout the broad scope of ghost and horror fiction.

The monsters of horror films may frequently be read as mirrors of societal views of homosexuals as predatory, amoral, perverse, possessed of secret supernatural powers, and threatening to "normal life."

Award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer Alan Ball, whose work frequently features glbtq characters, has had great success in both film and television.

Acclaimed as the greatest director of the German Expressionist period (1919-1933), F.W. Murnau created the first masterpiece of the horror film, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1921).