Previous work has established that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet offers gothic authors, directors, and other artists a hospitable topos for their works. I extend this critical corpus to consider the way in which young adult (hereafter YA), undead novels written within a few years of each other, in the early twenty-first century read, and write, the Capulet crypt as a gothic space. I use the term ‘undead’ throughout since although the focus of this fiction is on vampires, some texts also include zombies and other revenants. The chosen novels belong to a moment of extreme popularity for Romeo and Juliet vampire fiction, usually by women writers, the best-known example being Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. The texts of Meyer, Claudia Gabel, Lori Handeland, and Stacey Jay appropriate diverse elements from Romeo and Juliet, ranging from fleeting quotations to sustained reworkings of characters and plot. I conclude that a shift away from the confining and distressing gothic space in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the Capulet crypt, onto Juliet’s body itself, is discernible in most of these retellings. I demonstrate that these Juliet figures are gothically confined within their bodies – as the result of vampire contagion, supernatural pregnancy, and reworked versions of Friar Laurence’s potion, which render Juliet paralysed but fully conscious. This shift is explained with reference to the growth in popularity not just of female, but feminist, gothic. It is also explained in relation to the turn to the body in literary criticism from the 1990s onwards. In this way, Romeo and Juliet can be further understood as providing a hospitable topos for the twenty-first century feminisms of these authors of YA, undead fiction and, implicitly, their young, predominantly female, readers.