It's my very big pleasure to introduce our special guest today - a true connoisseur of the erotic genre - the delightful Ms Emmanuelle DeMaupassant...
Sex and horror: dark pleasures of fear and desire
By Emmanuelle de Maupassant
Horror is seductive.
It’s like the promise of
sex, inviting us in.
It pulls at your guts and
prickles your skin, and works icy fingers through your blood.
It demands a visceral
reaction.
How delicious is the
sensation of fear, an echo of carnal pleasure. Like sexual desire, it titillates
not only the mind but the senses. As we know, a good ‘scare’ is a wonderful
aphrodisiac.
‘Horror’, as a genre, has a
great deal of the erotic about it. It crooks its finger to entice you.
Here is the most intimate
of relations between author and reader. You bring yourself to the page not only
mentally, but physically. ‘Come closer,’
whispers the writer, ‘let me crawl inside
you’. In reading erotica, you beg ‘seduce
me’. With horror, it’s ‘frighten me’:
there can be little to choose between them.
And anticipation is all.
You lick your lips, waiting for the ‘forbidden’, or to be ‘devoured’. You keep
running, but you know you want to be caught.
Reading tales of horror is a
masochistic act. It’s hard to say where pain ends and pleasure begins in those
dangerous undercurrents, on the razor edge between light and dark.

Harking back to 19th
century Gothic fiction, ghosts, family curses, vampyres, demons and
superstitions dominated. An atmosphere of brooding unease was vital: one of
mystery, pushing the reader towards their own state of ‘madness’.metaphorical,
but a reality we confront consta
The most famous example
is Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’: darkly malevolent and laced with eroticism. Think
of Jonathan Harker’s non-consensual ‘blood rape’ at the hands of the three
vampyre women in the Count’s prison-castle.
He recalls,
with shame and fascination, his temptation to submit: ‘There was a deliberate
voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her
neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the
moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white
sharp teeth Lower and lower went her head as the lips went
below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. I could
feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my
throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there.
I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited - waited with beating
heart.’
There is the sensual
portrayal of Lucy, most acutely rendered in her ‘undead’ state, and the slow
seduction of Mina by the Count: a domineering, unfathomable stranger. The story
is filled with references (veiled or explicit) to eyes blazing with desire, to
blood, to submission, to death, to longing, to violence, to the devouring of
flesh, and of course, to biting and sucking!
What other story, before
or since, has so perfectly combined the luxurious pleasure of horror with
eroticism?

Carmilla
opens a door to young Laura, awakening her to awareness of her sexuality. Once
open, the door cannot be shut. Even when Carmilla has been staked and
dispatched, Laura is haunted by memories.
In both stories, female
sexuality is equated with ‘vampyric-bloodlust’: wanton, uncontrollable, and beyond
civilised norms. It is as if, in succumbing to such a woman (or women in
Harker’s case), we forfeit our very life-force.
In keeping with the age
in which the tales were written, sexual pleasure is to be feared and resisted rather
than welcomed. However, what danger can be more alluring than that of casting
aside propriety and embracing abandoned, illicit sexual appetite? It’s little
wonder that Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and all its descendants have enjoyed so many
decades of popularity.
The stories
can be viewed as more than horror. They explore awakening: awareness of self as
a sexual being; and understanding of elements previously hidden. Within the
velvet embrace of sexual arousal and heightened sensation, a cloak of
‘propriety’ is lifted, allowing us a glimpse of self-knowledge.
As Jonathan Harker admits,
afraid of what awaits him at the hands of the trio of vampyre-seductresses: ‘I
doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own
soul.’ The same words could easily be
later given to Mina, as she struggles with her attraction to the Count: her
inner fear of opening herself to desire.
In reading
erotic fiction, we accept the apple of sexual self-knowledge. In biting its
flesh, we may discover that which we wish to refute: dark fantasies of pleasure
and pain, of voluptuous abandon, of wild promiscuity, of being ‘taken’ against
our will. Between the pages, there are no bounds on sexuality, all is rendered
‘permissible’ by the veil of fiction.
The monsters
and supernatural seducers of ‘horror’ cannot be resisted; we are forced to
succumb. Here, if nowhere else, we may embrace dual-edged fantasies.

Author Bio
Emmanuelle de
Maupassant is the author of ‘The Gentlemen’s Club’: an erotic
novella set in Victorian London, exploring the darker elements of desire.
Bibliography
Sheridan
Le Fanu: ‘Carmilla’ – a short story from ‘In a Glass Darkly’ (1872)
Bram
Stoker: ‘Dracula’ (1897)
Thank you for being our guest today - what a richly seductive post...
x x x
Thank you for hosting me Brit Babe ladies
ReplyDeletex
All love
Emmanuelle
Lovely post :)
ReplyDeleteGreat post - I found the Gary Oldman Dracula to be very erotic and still do to this day...I just love it.
ReplyDeleteFantastic post x
ReplyDelete