🐈 Carmilla
The languid vampire of Styria who loved her victims before she drained them
Also known as Countess Mircalla Karnstein, Mircalla, Millarca
📺 "Tonight's guest arrived by carriage, rather suddenly, and would love to stay a while. She's a little tired in the mornings, so do keep your voice down, and your collar up."
💀 Facts
- Carmilla was published 25 years before Dracula
- The story is narrated by Laura, the vampire's victim and friend
- It is set in Styria, in Austria, where Stoker's early plans put Dracula's castle too
- Carmilla, Mircalla and Millarca are all anagrams of the same name
- She can take the form of a huge black cat
- Her tomb is opened and the body found lying in blood, with a faint heartbeat
- The story was serialised in the magazine The Dark Blue and collected in In a Glass Darkly in 1872
📜 Legend
Le Fanu, a Dublin journalist and novelist, serialised Carmilla in the magazine The Dark Blue from December 1871 to March 1872 and collected it that year in In a Glass Darkly, framed as a case from the papers of the occult doctor Martin Hesselius. Laura, a lonely girl in a castle in Styria, takes in the survivor of a carriage accident, who turns out to be the long-dead Countess Mircalla Karnstein with her name reshuffled. It came out 25 years before Dracula, and Bram Stoker read it closely: his early notes placed Dracula's castle in Styria, and the deleted opening later published as 'Dracula's Guest' features a vampire countess from Gratz. Le Fanu's vampire is a woman who preys on women, and that has kept the story in print, on screen and in argument ever since.
🎭 Myth vs Movie
True or false? Make your guess, then click a card (or press r) for the verdict.
Carmilla came after Dracula and copied it.
✘ FALSE
Carmilla was published in 1872, 25 years before Dracula (1897). Stoker was the borrower.
Carmilla can take the form of a cat.
✔ TRUE
Laura sees a huge, sooty-black cat creeping about her bedroom before the attacks, and the General's niece was visited by the same beast.
Le Fanu's vampire is destroyed by sunlight.
✘ FALSE
Carmilla is up and about in the afternoons, just late and listless. She is finished the old-fashioned way: a stake, beheading and burning, with the ashes thrown into the river.
Carmilla's names are anagrams of each other.
✔ TRUE
Mircalla, Millarca and Carmilla rearrange the same letters, which is the clue that unmasks her.
Carmilla lies in a coffin full of blood.
✔ TRUE
When her tomb is opened, the body is found immersed in seven inches of blood, with a faint heartbeat and open eyes.
🕯️ Quotes
“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”
“I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine.”
Lines come only from public-domain texts.
🃏 Stat Card
⚡ Powers
- Passing through locked doors
- Taking the shape of a great black cat
- A deathless beauty that disarms suspicion
- Turning her victims' affection into surrender
🧄 Weaknesses
- Hymns and funerals, which make her ill
- A lie-in that stretches past noon
- A stake, an axe and a fire
- Anagrams
Stats power the Monster Mash: terminal-of-terror mash carmilla
🎞️ Legacy
- Vampyr (1932), Carl Theodor Dreyer's dreamlike film loosely drawn from In a Glass Darkly
- Blood and Roses (1960), Roger Vadim's modern-dress version
- Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970), with Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla
- Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971), the rest of Hammer's Karnstein trilogy
- Carmilla (2014), the web series that gave the story a new fandom
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