"This volume is a lively and thoughtful analysis of recent horror films including The Neon Demon (2016), Knife + Heart (2018), and Lizzie (2018). Exploring these films within the contexts of New Queer Horror, Tabet shows how they rescript the 'violent lesbian' to explore concerns specifically related to LGBTQ+ audiences, including assimilation, family and race. Filled with brilliant insights and detailed analyses, Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is an important contribution to the ever-growing field of queer horror scholarship."

Professor Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas

‘Why does the violent lesbian haunt film screens, and what does she want? Beyond the Lesbian Vampire traces the resurgence of this figure in seven queer horror films released between 2016–19, in which the violent lesbian is reimagined as a complex character shaped by trauma, context, and agency. Through close readings of works such as Thelma, The Perfection and Knife+Heart, Tabet analyses how the selected films both reference and revise earlier portrayals, reframing the lesbian’s violence as a site of queer resistance and desire. Long shrouded in invisibility, the lesbian emerges in all her contradictions: powerful, disruptive, excessive and uncontainable. Engaging with debates about queerness, assimilation and representational politics, Tabet situates the violent lesbian as a culturally charged white figure that continues to evoke both fear and pleasure within lesbian and queer communities. Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is at once an examination and a reclamation, an essential intervention for an era marked by conservative populism and cultural extremism. Tabet’s detailed analysis investigating how the violent lesbian subverts patriarchal norms is a critical contribution to horror studies, lesbian studies, queer theory and feminist cultural criticism."

Heather O. Petrocelli, author of Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator