Lesbian vampirism is a trope in 20th-century exploitation film and literature that has its roots in Joseph Sheridan le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872) about the love of a female vampire (the title character) for a young woman (the narrator): This was a way to hint at or titillate with the taboo idea of lesbianism in a fantasy context outside the heavily censored realm of social realism. Also, the conventions of the vampire genre—specifically, the mind control exhibited in many such films—allow for a kind of forced seduction of presumably heterosexual women or girls by lesbian vampires.