What is Carmilla’s effect on the horror genre?
Few things represent the horror genre as well as monsters. Your Frankensteins, your werewolves, your vampires… These monsters represent our base selves. The parts of us we fear losing control over, the parts of us we find alluring and thrilling. They are how we use horror to understand what it means to be human. And so it seems fitting for this show to make sure to cover Carmilla, also known as Mircalla the Countess Karnstein. The first female vampire. And probably the first openly gay horror monster. She’s endlessly fascinating and has colored not only how we view vampires, but women and queer folks in horror stories.
So. What is Carmilla’s effect on the horror genre?
If you don’t know about Carmilla, here’s a little run down. Her story was originally published as installments in The Dark Blue in 1871 by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu and they were eventually combined as a novella. It’s all written from the point of view of Laura, a lonely nineteen year old woman living alone with her father in a castle in a forest in a remote part of Austria. Carmilla, a young woman about Laura’s age, ends up – through a strange chain of events – staying with them. And, spoiler alert, Carmilla is a vampire. But kind of a special one. She falls in love with Laura. And over a period of time, they both develop an intense emotional bond. The story is unmistakably queer, even if Le Fanu tries to tamper down some of the steamier moments. But there’s kissing, intense professions of love, and sex. All wrapped up in this gothic horror story setting with the backdrop of this vampire. A monster who is killing young women one by one.
Perhaps the most beloved and well known screen adaptation of Carmilla is Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers (1970)
I read a version of Carmilla edited by Carmen Maria Machado, which I highly recommend for its additional contextual information, backstory, and annotations. In it, she includes a preface explaining that Carmilla and Laura were very likely real women – named Marcia and Veronika, respectively. And their affair was very likely fact rather than fiction. Veronika wrote letters that LeFanu adapted, detailing her love and desire for Marcia. Can’t say if Marcia was a vampire or not. But the original letters definitely depicted the sexual awakening and longing of a young woman and her parting from the one she loved. Le Fanu’s story is not as explicit as Veronika’s letters and actually omits many overt romantic sentiments that “Laura” shares. Oftentimes even translating her desire into disgust to create something more palatable for the time. So Instead, we have a vampire tale with sapphic undertones rather than just a story about two women in love.
Drawn by D. H. for Sheridan Le Fanu, in 1872, this is probably the earliest known image of Carmilla and Laura.
Carmilla is important to horror because she inspired tons of vampires and vampire content, including THE vampire: Dracula.
She was the prototype. Not just for lesbian vampire content but all of it. While she wasn’t the first vampire – poems and folklore about the monster existed prior – she was the first “viral” vampire story that bled into popular culture and established many of the tropes used today. From the fangs to the sensitivity to sunlight… Carmilla even includes an early version of Van Helsing in Baron Vordenburg, the vampire hunter who appears at the climax of the story.
Adaptations of Carmilla are numerous. Books, comics, films, music, plays, TV… even video games, anime, and a long-running web series. Carmilla is largely responsible for the entirety of the lesbian vampire trope. Most modern adaptations skew her much more toward the male gaze. As a super slinky seductress toward men, mostly. She’s usually painted as a very sexual creature that relies on violence and her overt sexuality. Rather than the original Carmilla, who relied on her gentle femininity and barely exhibited any real violence at all. It’s not until recently that we’re starting to actually see more even and deep versions of Carmilla.
The Netflix Castlevania animated series portrays her as a multi-dimensional character with goals, a personality, humor, and a multi-season character arc. The Carmilla web series and accompanying movie reimagine her for modern audiences and emphasize placing her in a healthy lesbian relationship, rather than painting her as a villainous predator. But these representations of her are few and far between. Like so many women in horror – hell, in literature – Carmilla has been turned and twisted to meet what’s popular and sexy and exciting, leaving few to really examine the depth of what lies beneath. While Carmilla has been manipulated throughout the years into something for the male gaze, behind all of that is something truly real and important.
Castlevania’s Carmilla deviates some from the original, but she may be one of the deepest and most fleshed out versions of the character.
Premiering on YouTube in 2014, the award-winning Carmilla web series spans 121 episodes and introduces a host of new characters.
Which brings us to Dracula – you can’t talk about Carmilla without Dracula.
If Carmilla was the one-note murderess that many portrayals would have us believe, I don’t think Bram Stoker would have taken to her as strongly as he did.
While there is no hard and fast proof that Stoker read Carmilla, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that he did and that he borrowed quite a bit of her for his own work. Carmilla was published a good twenty five years prior to Dracula’s Guest, the short story that eventually became the Dracula novel. Originally, Dracula hailed from Styria (a state in the southeast of Austria), where Carmilla is from, not Transylvania. In it, a man takes shelter in a mausoleum during a storm and meets a female vampire who arguably resembles Carmilla. Coincidentally, Bram Stoker wrote theater reviews for a newspaper owned by Le Fanu, so we know they ran in the same circles.
In a lot of ways, Stoker took the vampire story and improved upon it. Fleshed it out, added more dynamic characters, and created a more sweeping epic than the small tale Carmilla was. But when I compare Carmilla and Dracula, I can’t help but notice that they each demonstrate such interesting concepts about what it meant to be male or female in their time.
Where Dracula has lofty ambitions of taking over the world and has a coven of women living in his basement – most likely an example of his desire to make more Vampires like himself… Carmilla’s goals are a little more basic. She’s, ironically, not interested in reproducing and it isn’t known that she creates more vampires like herself. Instead, she has a reliable pattern that she uses for acquiring and leisurely feeding on her discerning choice of prey until they die. She kind of just wants to hang out with pretty girls in luxurious castles, feed, and be left alone. She uses her beauty and grace and charm to take advantage of men’s chivalry, gaining her open invitation to their homes and their daughters. She develops emotionally significant relationships with her victims, rather than just treating them as food. She falls in love with them and makes them fall in love with her without the use of magic or glamor. Not just feeding on them to survive, but feeding on their affection and devotion. Instead of Dracula who tries to make a companion out of Mina, Carmilla is happy to take Laura as she is without turning her. How sweet.
Carmilla set the stage for more vampires to follow in terms of her powers as well. Both Carmilla and Dracula follow the same sets of rules. Some of which existed from vampire tales of old, some inventions of Le Fanu. For example, prior to Carmilla, there is no mention of vampires having particularly pointed or sharp teeth. Carmilla has needle-like teeth she uses for drinking blood, she can shapeshift into an enormous cat, she can move through walls and even teleport. She has to return to her tomb each night to sleep, balks at displays of religion, and daylight is harmful to her. Some of her powers are more ambiguous. It’s not clear whether she needs to be invited into a home to enter. And she seems to have a crew of people – not sure if humans or vampires – to help her exact her plans.
Carmilla uses all of these things to her advantage and in most cases, uses them to avoid all-out violence. Instead gently feeding on her victims as they sleep until they waste away to nothing. Interestingly, unlike Dracula, she doesn’t seem to turn others into vampires to join her. Maybe there’s something about consent in there?
While the novel contains no gore or violence, Carmilla does appear to Laura one night covered in blood.
Horror is usually a vehicle we use to explain the things that scare us. It’s why I find horror so interesting – it morphs and changes as society does. But so many of the core fears that appear in horror content stay the same. The themes in Carmilla tell us a lot about what scared people in the late 1800s and to some degree what scares people about women now. The obvious Gothic horror tropes present in the novella – the isolated castle, the ailing damsel, themes of dreams and nightmares, the evasive supernatural mystery affecting the main character – serve what entertainment was popular at the time. But we also see sexual empowerment and independence experienced by women that was highly unusual for the time. Carmilla’s true nature represented the anti-woman. Contrasted with the sheltered and devout Laura, Carmilla was sexually motivated, she lied constantly, and abhorred religion. She used men rather than relied upon them. She was dangerous and sneaky and cunning.
Horror can be used as a social commentary or lens by which we may access other perspectives. And Carmilla is one of the first and most interesting examples of that.
The queer community has long since rallied behind Carmilla as one of the first examples of queerness in popular horror. While it is unfortunate that the queer character of the tale is also the monster, it is telling. It’s much more likely that Le Fanu was trying to disavow the lifestyle as evil and hedonistic. But modern viewers see in Laura and Carmilla an otherness, loneliness, a vulnerability, and fierce sense of self and freedom that resonates deeply with the LGBTQ+ community. In years to come, this otherness, this feeling of being the freak or odd one out, of having to hide what you really are and conform to survive, has connected queer folk to horror in so many ways. Even if it was meant to be a condemnation, it doesn’t matter because queer women can see themselves in Laura and Carmilla’s isolation and desire.
Carmilla: The First Vampire is a graphic novel series that places Carmilla in modern day New York City against a vastly more diverse backdrop than the original tale.
When I hold Carmilla up to other examples of women in horror, I see her influence everywhere. Or perhaps, women in horror just have these roles regardless of each other because of the roles they have in our societies.
Like so many other female characters in the genre, sex is at the forefront of Carmilla’s story. I mean, while Le Fanu tampers much of it down, he basically describes an orgasm halfway through the story. So there’s no mistaking what he was going for. We’re meant to get that, and every other sentence about Carmilla describes how disarmingly beautiful she is. She doesn’t outright use violence, but is more of a succubus. Entering a girls bedroom at night and crawling into bed with her. Doesn’t really get sexier than that. Like so many women in horror, Carmila don’t need no man. Which is incredibly refreshing for Victorian literature. She has perhaps two conversations with Laura’s father and all of her other scenes directly involve Laura. Carmilla’s story speaks to the horror of women being lonely, controlled, and silenced. How women are so often defined by men, owned by them, and forced into both physical and emotional restrictions. Carmilla shows us the horror and thrill of being flung free from all of that.
It’s why I enjoy so many women in horror, because for the most part, protagonists or villains, they tend to intentionally fly in the face of what is normal or expected of them. It’s why Carmilla works so well set in Victorian times or even in the antebellum South. Where and whenever women are subjugated, the Carmillas of the world will find a way.