Almost exactly a year ago—Halloween 2007—I was hanging out at Bela Lugosi's grave. (See Lugosi in Dracula, The Black Cat, and The Body Snatcher this week at SIFF Cinema.) He's buried in the same cemetery as my grandfather (Holy Cross in Culver City, also eternal home to Rita Hayworth, John Candy, John Ford, Sharon Tate, Darby Crash, and Uncle Fester from The Addams Family), so, out of curiosity, my sister and I decided to stop by. It's a humble thing, a stone rectangle set flush with the grass, and it reads, "BELA LUGOSI, BELOVED FATHER, 1882–1956."

On Lugosi's grave, my sister and I found a sweet little scene of passive aggression and goth sentimentality. Several someones had been there before us—first, a concerned Catholic from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who left a little pink note taped to Bela Lugosi's (and only Bela Lugosi's) grave: "Dear Patron: The special decoration of graves is permitted only during the Easter and Christmas holidays. HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS ARE NOT PERMITTED." In other words, keep your pagan witchy ways out of our Catholic dead-people depository. Not to be deterred, the goths had been there too. In defiance of the Catholics' small pink decree, they had left the following items on the grave of their 50-years-dead vampire king: one (1) withered red rose; one (1) white calla lily; one (1) black plastic fork, tines broken off, stuck into the dirt; three (3) pitch-black votive candles; one (1) clove cigarette.

Dear Archdiocese: Screw you. Love, Goths.

I was reminded of that rogue clove cigarette at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival's screening of The Hunger on Sunday night, as Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" played over the opening credits. If you haven't seen the 1983 lesbian- vampire classic (I hadn't), it concerns Miriam (Catherine Deneuve) and John (David Bowie), a handsome New York couple who spend their days playing chamber music and their nights drinking the blood of attractive people.

But while Miriam is a centuries-old real vampire, John is only a formerly human semi-vampire. So, just like all of Miriam's past loves, John's immortality malfunctions a few centuries in, and, over the course of a few days, he turns into J. Howard Marshall and his withered but eternally living corpse has to be stored away in the attic. Bummer.

Enter Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a specialist in aging (is that a thing?), who piques Miriam's interest. Her LESBIAN- VAMPIRE INTEREST! There is a brief courtship ("You just met her and she gave you a present?" "Well, she's that kind of a woman. She's... European") and a less-brief consummation. And they roll around all goth together in that smoky '80s way. And someone (1) winds up living forever. Not Bela Lugosi, though. He's still dead.