The thesis is a comparative study of 19th-century and 21st-century representations of the adolescent female vampire as a a cultural metaphor of girlhood. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1870 novella, Carmilla, is a textual encounter of the late-Victorian fascination with female sexuality and the Gothic theme of vampirism. The titular female vampire seduces young women in a faraway castle, slowly draining life out of them. As the narrator, Laura, recounts Carmilla’s method of seduction and the passionate relationship they share, it becomes obvious that Carmilla’s vampirism is a source of major apprehensions: she is frozen as a girl-vampire and forced to exist on the perennial threshold of infantile and maternal, girl and woman. On the one hand, her monstrous liminality embodies the anxieties all girls must face before becoming adults; but the narrative, on the other hand, is also a reflection on the social taboos concerning female rites of passage and desire in Victorian culture. Parallel with this, the teen horror film, Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009) appears to be a contemporary, cinematic take on the very same trope of the girl-vampire; where Jennifer, mirroring Carmilla, stands as threshold figure of what is deemed good and bad in girls in today’s Western culture. My research aims to identify the textual and cinematic processes that allow female vampirism to be read as a cultural metaphor of girlhood spanning centuries in these works. I ultimately claim that while Jennifer’s Body may appear at first glance a static reproduction of traditional female vampirism, interpreting it from the vantage point of Carmilla opens it up as a world that maps today’s spaces and forms of girlhood, merging Gothic tropes with contemporary anxieties in an attempt to finally overcome them.