The Little Eternal Death
Vampires have been around for centuries, shapeshifting to fit cultural beliefs and aesthetics to embody the anxieties of the time. These worries have sometimes taken the form of xenophobia—like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—or, more recently, colonialism and cultural assimilation¹ in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, but they most often revolve around a culture’s preoccupations with sex, sexuality, and gender identity. In Jewish folklore, the Lilith-derived Estries² represent the threat of female autonomy to tradition and the patriarchy, using their long, unbound hair to fly into homes and prey on unsuspecting men and children in the night. In both Sinners and Robert Egger’s Nosferatu there are instances of death during vampiric sex acts.
While these depictions are meant to evoke fear, they simultaneously conjure up feelings of attraction. It makes sense why Laura might be attracted to a beautiful vampire like Carmilla in Carmilla, but even in Nosferatu (2024), Ellen is drawn to Count Orlock, rotting flesh, rattling breath, and all. And the audience is right there with her. Modern media is much more overt in its depictions, but vampires have always been a sort of sex symbol.³ Drawing in their prey with the allure of mystery, a sense of class and status, or just by being gorgeous, vampires expose society’s paradoxical fear of and obsession with sex.
While not thirteenth century folklore or contemporary horror, the absurd young adult romance Twilight functions just the same, capturing quite elegantly the intricacies of Latter-day Saint fears and preoccupations revolving around sexuality and, more specifically, women’s sexual expression. In the series, underscored by themes of chastity, motherhood, and female desire, Stephanie Meyer makes no effort to conceal her Mormonness, providing a unique opportunity for the reader to peer into the complexities of Mormon sex culture and gender identity. To the untrained eye, the habits and choices of her characters seem off-beat, but to someone familiar with the culture, the Twilight series becomes both an allegorical warning against female sexual deviance and an insight into the sexual mindscape of a sexually repressed culture.
One of these Mormon quirks is that Meyer’s lovers remain abstinent until marriage. Fans love to joke about how horny Bella is for Edward the whole time, while he, in his sparkly, brooding, virtuous glory, constantly shuts her down. Additionally, with the goal of spending eternity with Edward, Bella spends nearly the entire series begging him to turn her into a vampire. Three books later, Bella and Edward compromise—he’ll dick her down as long as they’re married, and then Edward will finally turn her into a vampire.
While becoming a vampire and forgoing chastity seem unrelated, cinching them together in this strange compromise highlights the parallels between vampirism and sex. Even the basic physical elements of vampirism serve as a metaphor for penetrative sex itself: starting with lips on the neck, followed by penetration and the exchanging of bodily fluids,⁴ finally ending in the death of the victim, or, in the strictly sexual sense, “the little death.”
In Latter-day Saint doctrine, the little death might also be accompanied by spiritual death⁵ if experienced outside of matrimony. Edward believes that as a vampire his soul is damned and, having sinned in nearly every other major category including killing, he argues that his “virtue” (meaning sexual purity) is all that he has left. Because Bella is still human, Edward especially wants to protect her virtue, believing that she still has a soul and a “shot at heaven.”⁶ The entwinement of vampirism and sex in this moral dilemma makes Edward’s hesitancy to turn her into a “monster” and to have premarital sex with her essentially synonymous. Edward is protecting Bella from the physical death which would come from transforming her into an eternally undead abomination, as well as protecting her from the spiritual death that would ensue after she gives up her virtue.
In Eclipse, after failing miserably to convince Edward to have sex with her, Bella says, “You make me feel like a villain in a melodrama—twirling my mustache while I try to steal some poor girl’s virtue.”⁷ Edward also points out the fact that it all feels backward—traditionally, shouldn’t he be the one trying to convince her to give up her virtue to him? This is likely for the sake of subtlety, but using “virtue” in place of sexual purity or chastity implicitly equates virginity to moral virtue. Further, asserting that the situation is backwards suggests there is something wrong with a woman pursuing a man.⁸ Bella isn’t the villain and neither is it abnormal for her to want these things, but, when put against Mormon orthodox ideals, she’s a depraved succubus.
Many LDS youth, especially young girls, are taught that their purity is “most dear and precious above all things”⁹ or worse, indicative of their worth. While perhaps now falling out of fashion, many Mormon youth recall the cupcake lesson (or, for others, perhaps the chewed gum lesson) where the teacher tells each boy and girl how they become an unrecoverable, irredeemable, germ-infested, saliva-covered cupcake once they’ve given up their virginity. Young women are also often taught that it is up to them to keep the young men “in check” and prevent both parties from turning into soiled, hell-bound cupcakes. It is up to girls to avoid wearing tank tops at boy-girl activities to prevent any lewd conduct like kissing for more than 2 seconds or allowing each other’s hands to touch while sharing a hymn book. I still remember very vividly the bright purple rubber bracelet I was given that flashed the words “Modest is Hottest.” After all, it’s not like girls are the ones that really need the help. They are asexual, pure, innocent creatures—they don’t even watch porn.
This culture conflates purity with asexuality, producing young women who shriek at the thought of shorts above the knee and villainizing those who dare to have any thoughts regarding the opposite gender. It is a culture in which young girls spend their youth slut-shaming others and equating masturbation to murder and are then left catching amidst a barrage of shame and confusion once they marry at 19. It is this culture which is woven through all 3,520 pages of a series where a shin-skimming, ugly, khaki skirt sends the male love interest into a lustful frenzy and the female love interest is embarrassed at the thought of wearing lingerie in front of her own husband.
Women who deviate from this norm are at risk of becoming fallen, Lilith-like creatures, perverting sex for what it really was intended. Throughout the series, Bella never expresses any interest in children and was willing to give up the possibility of having any by marrying a vampire and becoming a vampire herself. However, motherhood, in LDS culture, is highly regarded and viewed as women’s complementary role to men having the priesthood.¹⁰ In Breaking Dawn, it seems Bella is finally punished¹¹ for turning away from this divine calling after she is unexpectedly impregnated with a rapidly growing, life-sucking demon baby. Of course, Meyer has Bella refuse to terminate the pregnancy, so she spends a third of the book wasting away in agony until she dies a gruesome death. Sex should be used for procreation; instead, female vampires use it for seduction, pleasure, and finally destruction—but not on Meyer’s watch.
Despite pioneering the modern-day sexualization of vampires and influencing racy works such as Fifty Shades of Grey, Meyer doesn’t even read romance novels herself due to them being too smutty, adding that “there's a reason [her] books have a lot of innocence. That’s the kind of world [she] live[s] in.”¹² The irony is that when coupled with mythical forbidden romance, forced abstinence in the name of purity creates its own unique genre of erotica, which inadvertently makes every single “innocent” moment drip with sexual tension. Being a Latter-day Saint, it’s possible Meyer is not fully aware—or at least not willing to admit—that Twilight is simply a mormonized teenage bodice ripper.¹³ In a religious culture where there are married couples who feel sexual shame and women who think it’s normal not to orgasm,¹⁴ it makes sense that the Stephanie Meyer breed of vampire would be the manifestation of this group’s anxieties—and what gets them off.
Twilight may not be as explicit as a traditional bodice ripper, but it still allows readers to explore their sexual desires in a vicarious and more covert way. In a culture that tells its youth, “do not do anything to arouse the powerful emotions that must be expressed only in marriage,”¹⁵ it feels much safer and less shameful to explore sexuality in this innocent world Meyer herself lives in.¹⁶ Being a vampire, Edward is, in his words, “the world's most dangerous predator,” “designed to kill.”¹⁷ Throughout the series, Edward also displays some extremely possessive tendencies. This predatory and proprietorial nature makes it so much more comfortable to just give in. In Carmilla, Carmilla says to her victim and object of desire, Laura, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.”¹⁸ Similarly, Orlock in Nosferatu tells Ellen, “As our spirits are one, so too shall be our flesh. You are mine.”¹⁹
But again, what takes Twilight a step further is that in spite of Edward’s possessive nature, he is extremely chaste. That isn’t to say he doesn’t want Bella’s sweet, sexy blood or her body, but he subdues this desire in an extremely PG-13, Mormon way. Vampires are meant to “embody disease, death, and sex in a base, brutal, and unforgiving way,”²⁰ something the victim is meant to resist while being enticed by it. Twilight subverts this, and the result is Robert Pattinson in a peacoat and chastity belt, and that is what makes Bella, and girls everywhere, truly lose their minds.
Vampirism tales have and always will be a deadly concoction that simultaneously warns and seduces, unveiling how closely, complexly, and confusingly intertwined a culture’s fears and desires can be. The Twilight series appears to stray heretically far from the vampire tales of yore. Yes, Edward sparkles and refrains from drinking human blood, but Twilight still serves the same purpose of nearly every vampire narrative in history. It is a grim allegory of desire, consumption, and female sexuality, this time fueled by Mormon purity culture. And, in true vampire fashion, amidst its warnings of spiritual death and lost virtue, it paradoxically stirs up the very feelings it threatens to damn its heroine for.
Citations
Maya Phillips. “The Symbolism In ‘Sinners’,” The New York Times, The New York Times, April 26, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/movies/sinners-symbolism.html
Adam Rosenthal and Jennifer Frazin. “The History of Estries, aka Jewish Vampires,” Hey Alma, 70 Faces Media, January 8, 2024. https://www.heyalma.com/the-history-of-estries-aka-jewish-vampires/
Ronald Hutton. “Why are Vampires so ‘seductive’?” University of Bristol, November 8th, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a8h2ROvJzNk
Maranda Wabik. “Vampires and Sexuality”, White Rose of Avalon, White Rose of Avalon, June 1, 2024. https://whiteroseofavalon.life/2024/06/01/vampires-sexuality/
Death, Spiritual”, Topics and Questions, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, May 5, 2025.https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/death-spiritual?lang=eng
Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2007) 452
Stephanie Meyer, Eclipse (New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2007) 453
Lois Drawmer, “Sex, Death, and Ecstasy: The Art of Transgression”, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolutions of a Legend, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013, 39
Moroni 9:9 (Book of Mormon)
Sheri L. Dew, “Are We Not All Mothers?”, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 2001. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2001/10/are-we-not-all-mothers?lang=eng
Angela Tumini, “Vampiresse: Embodiment of Sensuality and Erotic Horror in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr and Mario Bava’s The Mask of Satan,” The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolutions of a Legend, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013, 122-124
Kira Cochrane, “Stephanie Meyer on Twilight, feminism, and true love”, The Guardian US, The Guardian, March 11, 2013.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/11/stephenie-meyer-twilight-the-host#:~:text=%22It's%20too%20smutty.,of%20a%20generation%20of%20girls
ContraPoints, “Twilight” March 1, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48
Angela Andaloro, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' Layla Taylor Says She 'Recently' Experienced Her First Orgasm (Exclusive)”, People, Dotdash Meredith, September 7, 2024
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, For the Strength of Youth (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2001), 27
Hyun-Jung Lee, “One for Ever”: Desire, Subjectivity, and the Threat of the Abject in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla”, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolutions of a Legend, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013, 24
Melissa Rosenberg, Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke (2008; Pasadena, Summit Studios, 2008) film
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (London, British and Colonial Publishing, 1871) 16
Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker, Nosferatu, Robert Eggers (2024; Prague: Barrandov Studios, 2024), film
Robert Eggers, “‘I had to make the vampire as scary as possible’: Nosferatu’s Robert Eggers on how folklore fuelled his film”, The Guardian US, The Guardian, December 27, 2024