The Vamp / Live-Action Films

This is the wrong way to exercise on this equipment.

Examples of The Vamp in live-action film.

• Mandalay: Tanya as "Spot White". Granted, she didn't want to be a sex worker but, in an attempt to make the best of a bad situation, she takes a fellow prostitute's advice to heart and uses men's lust to her advantage. One clear example is one she blackmails herself out of prostitution by seducing a policeman — he used her services during a masquerade party. She also threatens him with revealing their encounter.
• The character of Irma Vep in the 1915 french silent film serial Les Vampires. Her name is an anagram of "Vampire".
• Played with in Beyond the Lights. Noni is clearly NOT a vamp. However, thanks to the hyper-sexualized image forced upon her by her record label, Kaz's father THINKS she is and warns his son not to get involved with her because "this one ain't First Lady material". Needless to say, Kaz does NOT take his advice!
• In Body Heat, Mary Ann Simpson is explicitly labeled "The Vamp" in her high school yearbook. She's Kathleen Turner's character, which we've been lead to believe is Matty Tyler Walker, and is playing Ned Racine, the real Matty Tyler, and her husband for all they are worth.
• Black Widow (1987), played by Theresa Russell, a serial killer of rich men she married, ostensibly for their money. Has a strong bisexual theme as well.
• The Parent Trap (1961) and The Parent Trap (1998). In this case, it takes the twin girls wreaking havoc on The Vamp to make Dad realize that he's about to marry a gold-digging bitch, which was completely obvious to everyone else from the moment the woman appeared on the screen. She'll likely overlap with the Rich Bitch in this case.
• The 1967 version of Bedazzled (1967) has Lust, played by Raquel Welch. The Devil herself (played by Elizabeth Hurley) is one in the 2000 version.
• Silent film actress Theda Bara in...pretty much anything, but especially 1915's A Fool There Was, where she's actually billed as "The Vampire". The film even quotes Rudyard Kipling's poem (see Literature below).
• A whole series of Film Noir movies made in the 1940s and '50s: Phyllis in Double Indemnity, Kathie from Out of the Past. Even Marilyn Monroe's character in Niagara.
• A significant portion of Marlene Dietrich's career was built on such titles as Devil Is a Woman.
• Conchita in Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire. Hell, it took two actresses to carry all this vampishness.
• Kara is even referred to as such in the 2006 high school noir, Brick.
• Cthulhu (2007). Susan tries to seduce the protagonist, Russell Marsh, as part of the Cult of Dagon's plan to have him pass on his seed (creating a Hybrid Monster). As Russell is gay, her charms don't work on him, so she drugs and rapes him instead.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, amazingly hot college girl Alice is intent upon getting with Sam for unclear reasons. She's a Decepticon spy. Pretender-style Decepticons can take on a human form.
• Bridget in The Last Seduction (1994).
• Suzanne Stone, the Villain Protagonist of To Die For (1995), is a partial parody of The Vamp - she's beautiful, utterly ruthless, manipulative...and dumb as a post.
• Lady Kaede in Ran starts out as a Lady Macbeth to her husband. After he's killed in battle, she becomes a Vamp to his brother, seducing and becoming a Lady Macbeth to him and making him order the death of his wife, Lady Sue.
• In Dr. Jekyll & Ms. Hyde, Dr. Richard Jacks tampers with his ancestor's formula and adds estrogen, hoping to eliminate male aggression. His female alter-ego, Helen Hyde, uses her beauty and feminine charm to seduce the men at Dr. Jacks' company and climb to the top. She'll even injure anyone who gets in her way.
• In Dracula's Daughter, the actual vampire Countess Marya Zaleska tries to play this role with Dr. Geoffrey Garth. This is lampshaded when the Head of Scotland Yard tells his man-servant that he is going hunting "vampires", to which the latter replies: "But I always understood you went after them with chequebooks, sir."
• In Ghostbusters, Dana Barrett plays this role once she becomes possessed by Zuul, one of Gozer's demonic Terror Dogs. She becomes a wanton seductress whose sole mission is to bring about the coming of Gozer through mating with another demon, Vinz Clortho. She first tries quite aggressively to bed Peter Venkman when he arrives for a date with Dana, then later completes her mission when she finds and mates with Vinz, who has possessed her neighbor, Louis Tully.
• Nazi Vamps like Ilsa Haupstein (from Hellboy (2004)) and Dr Elsa Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Unrepentant and black-hearted bitches.
  • The Trope Codifier for this particular sub-group is the titular Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.
• Myrna Loy was stuck playing this type of role for years in early Hollywood, often with an additional ethnic flavor; the success of The Thin Man helped her escape to better parts. Ironically, she ended her career being best known for wholesome wife-and-mother parts.
• Lady Marsh in The Lair of the White Worm seduces both men and women to their doom.
• Mini from Mini's First Time has elements of Femme and Fille Fatale, but her utter soullessness qualifies her for this trope.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the castle Anthrax is filled with 160 young blondes and brunettes who lure handsome knights by lighting a grail-shaped beacon. Once a handsome knight arrives at the castle, they try to tempt him into sexual activities. This is a subversion though, as these women don't seem to have any evil motives for doing this. Their only stated reason for doing this is loneliness.
• Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough. She's really keen on having a relationship with Bond and guilt-tripping him, and the reveal that she's the true Big Bad of the film cements her as this, to the point that she thinks that Bond wouldn't shoot her. She's wrong.
• The leading role of the theater troupe's play in the silent comedy Exit Smiling is a vamp, and is the role that the heroine is constantly trying to score.
• Not only was Francesca in Ghost Ship involved in the mass murder, but she also seduced one of the crooks into killing his comrades before offing him herself. Unfortunately for her, her feminine wiles don't work on supernatural beings, but even after death she's still just as much a vamp as she was in life, tempting Greer and leading him to his doom. Inverted when Francesca's backstory reveals that said supernatural being actually seduced her into playing her role in the scheme.
  Benvenuto a bordo ^note Welcome on board
• Angelique in Hellraiser: Bloodline is a demon currently occupying the body of an attractive woman and seduces her victims only to kill or torture them to death later on.
• Invoked by Kelly in Neighbors. Her plan to break up Teddy and Pete's bromance is to make out with both Peter and Teddy's girlfriend and then coercing the pair into have sex. She also claims that this isn't the first time she came between two guys.
• In Ex Machina, when he reveals that the test was actually to see if Ava could manipulate Caleb, Nathan claims that she used her feminine charm to deceive him and does not care about him at all. This turns out to be true - she escapes the facility alone and leaves Caleb locked in it to die.
• Doctor Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a male example, albeit a Creepy Crossdresser (or in his words, "a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania"). Note that while many other seductive male crossdressers in fiction try to manipulate other men's libido by posing as sexy women, Frank is quite openly a man, just one who prefers feminine clothing. And he doesn't limit his targets to men either; he's quite good at seducing just about anyone. Of course, what else would you expect from Tim Curry in his prime?
  I'm not much of a man by the light of day, but by night I'm one hell of a lover...
• In The Shining, the ghost in room 237 seduces Jack with an illusory youthful form, only to reveal herself as a necrotic old woman during their embrace.
• The Amazon Queen Farida in Sinbad of the Seven Seas is a beautiful evil enchantress employed by Jaffar to enthrall Sinbad and his crew.
• The World of Kanako: Akikazu's daughter Kanako. She uses her charm and femininity to screw everybody around her. When Ogata is bullied she acts disinterested since she doesn't seem to care for the weak. Then she saves the narrator from some bullies just to set him up and completely destroy him afterwards, after he has fallen in love with her.
• One villain in Freaks is the golddigging trapeze artist Cleopatra, who marries Hans (a sideshow performer with dwarfism) with the intent to kill him for his fortune and then marry the strongman Hercules.
• In The Phantom of Crestwood, Jenny Wren is an extremely attractive young woman who earns her living through her 'relationships' with older, wealthy (and usually married) men. Her plan for retirement is to blackmail her paramours for a staggering amount of money.
• In Thirteen Women, Ursula keeps the swami and Burns under thumb through a combination of hypnosis and raw sex appeal.
• Vamps: Despite the film's title, only Cisserus qualifies for this. She hypnotizes or seduces men to feed on.
• Dame Vaako in The Chronicles of Riddick. She uses her charms to lure Riddick into the Necromonger stronghold for interrogation. She also uses sex to manipulate her husband, Vaako, to overthrow the Lord Marshal.
• Santánico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn.
• Yan Erh is one of the main villains from Heroes of Sung, who seduces the film's main hero by pretending to be a mugged victim, and coerces him into bedding her while intending to have him killed after stealing a valuable jade seal from him.
• In Lust for Gold, Julia Thomas strings both Pete and Walz along, playing them off against each other to her advantage.
• M.F.A.: After her rape and her Accidental Murder of Luke, Noelle reinvents herself as a vamp: using her newfound confidence to seduce sexual predators to their deaths.
• Alexa in Seven (1979), who uses herself as bait to lure the Hermit into a position where she can kill him.
• In .45, Kat uses what Liz describes as her natural weapons ("tits, hips, and lips") to seduce Vic, Reilly, Jose, and Liz and drop hints until one of them decides to take out Big Al for her.
• Mexican Hayride: Played with by Dagmar, who tries to seduce Bascom in order to apparently steal the money he's earned by selling stock in a phony silver mine. He's turned off by her coming on so strong though, and she later turns out to be legitimately trying to help him avoid being robbed by his partner.