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A femme fatale is a stock character, a villainous woman who uses the malign power of sexuality in order to ensnare the hapless hero. The phrase is French for "fatal woman". She is typically portrayed as sexually insatiable.
She has existed, in one form or another, in folklore and myth in nearly all cultures. Some of the earliest examples include Judeo-Christian characters Lilith, Eve, Delilah and Salomé. With the introduction of film noirFilm noir is a genre of film based in large part on the hard-boiled detective novels that grew out of naturalism, a movement in literature based on realism. Film noir is French for "black film", and is pronounced accordingly ("film nwahr"): the plural is in the 1940sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s Years: 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 Events and trends Technology First nuclear bomb First cruise missile, the, the femme fatale began to flourish in pop culture. Examples include espionage thrillerThe thriller is a genre of fiction in which tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary heroes are pitted against villains determined to destroy them, their country, or the stability of the free world. The hero of a typical thriller faces danger alone ors, and in a number of adventureAdventure (from Latin res adventura a thing about to happen), chance, and especially chance of danger; so a hazardous enterprise or remarkable incident. Thus an adventurer from meaning one who takes part in some speculative course of action, came to mean comic strips, such as The SpiritIn June of 1940 Will Eisner created The Spirit a comic serial which would appear weekly in the Sunday newspaper. This comic section would contain 4 to 5 stories, each 7 or 8 pages long. Eisner worked as editor but also wrote and drew many entries. The sto by Will EisnerWill Eisner (born March 3, 1917) is an acclaimed American comics artist who is considered one of the most important contributors to the medium. Beginning with the unique format of The Spirit in 1940, he went on to virtually define the budding genre of the, or Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, she is often of foreign extraction. She is often portrayed as a sort of sexual vampire; her dark appetites were thought to be able to leach away the virility and independence of her lovers, leaving them shells of their former selves. Only by escaping her embraces could the hero be rescued. On this account, in earlier American slang femmes fatales were often called " vamps", a word that is associated with the fashions of the 1920s.
This stock character is celebrated in the song Femme Fatale by The Velvet Underground.