Carmilla

"Carmilla is by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, and it was first published around 1872. Carmilla gave us, firstly, the trope of the lesbian vampire, which just goes on and on. I mean, Hammer Films practically made sexy sapphic vampires a sub-genre in the ’60s, and it continues today. But he also gave us a vampire that preys on human kindness. The story is very simple. It’s about a young girl who lives with her father out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a carriage accident in their drive one day. In the carriage is a mother, who says, “Can you take care of my daughter for a while?” because she has to rush off to some European location. So they take Carmilla into the house, and Carmilla and the hostess are both teenage girls, and they become obsessed with each other. The hostess is repulsed by Carmilla, but attracted to her. And what follows is a very graphic, very overt, sexual vampire seduction. The reason I love Carmilla so much is it really makes your hair stand up. I mean in the shocking, heavens-to-Betsy-I-need-to-open-a-window sense. It is some pretty sexy, very lurid stuff. And some of the writing is absolutely beautiful. Vampires weren’t really sexy until later. Dracula is not a sexy vampire. He has hairy hands, he’s old, he smells bad. But Carmilla is the vampire who exploits our desire to be desired. When someone else is hungry for you, that kind of activates you – makes you take risks. It makes you walk around with your neck exposed. Their desire for you makes you want to be desired. And where that ends with a vampire is with you getting consumed, literally. What makes vampires different from zombies or werewolves or ghosts is that vampires are the monster that looks like us . They’re the ones that can move amongst us undetected. They’re the closest thing we have to a monstrous form of a serial killer. And they exploit our desire to be desired– they bring out the self-destructive urge in us. Yes, by the time The Hunger came out, vampires had already gotten sexy – they started their association with sex in 1931 with the film version of Dracula . Before the 1931 Universal horror movies, the scare films that people went to see were venereal disease scare films, and often the plots of those were that young girls would meet an older, cultured man from the big city at some roadhouse, and he would lead them astray and then disappear, leaving them with a venereal disease. Or a young man would find a more experienced woman, say in France, and he would bring home a disease to his family. Dracula the film really takes a lot of cues from venereal disease scare films. And then you had the Hammer films of the late ’50s and into the ’60s, where Dracula was still evil, but he was becoming this romantic, brooding, gothic presence; then came Dracula on Broadway with Frank Langella, and the comedy Love at First Bite in the ’70s, and Blacula . That was when Dracula fully became a romantic partner and someone who was sexually desirable."