This can be viewed as a companion piece of sorts to Carmilla should be allowed to be a Bad Girl. But here I shall talk about things that bug me in Carmilla adaptations that some may view as a bit more arbitrary but do regardless annoy me. Some are not the complete deal breakers others are, the lower on the list the more tolerable it is, but it also depends just how well done everything else is.
Depictions of Carmilla can fit into two categories, ones that are in some way an adaptation of the original story however loosely. And new stories featuring the same character, presented as perhaps in continuity with the original story, or a version of it. The Pet Peeves I shall vent about here are all things that can be equally relevant to either.
Pet Peeve No. 0: Carmilla In Name Only.
I’m not properly numbering this one because all of them are often symptoms of it. But it does annoy me when a story just uses the name Carmilla because she's the only female Public Domain Vampire with even close to the same name recognition as Dracula. There are other more niche ones you can choose, a lot of them come from 19th Century French Literature. Clairmonde of La Morte Amoureuse by Theophile Gautier would be the most traditional for a Het Femme Fatale Vampire, the others I’m thinking of don’t have English translations that are PD so we have to turn to BlackCoatPress. But if a female counterpart to Dracula is all you're going for just use the one in Dracula's Guest, or Dracula's Daughter, or make a Vampire out of a female historical figure comparable to Vlad Tepes like one who'll come up later in this post.
You could say Dracula is also subject to this, but he has so many more depictions in total that the In Name Only ones feel less offensive in their very existence. But also all the major Dracula depictions, however many liberties they have, still feel like a take on Stoker’s character. The same can’t be said for Carmilla.
And no being a Lesbian isn't enough to make one more then in name only. Being Lesbian itself isn't a character trait, it's how her attraction to women effects that story that makes it part of Carmilla's character.
Pet Peeve No. 1: Straight Washing Carmilla.
Given how much of Carmilla’s defining characteristics are tied to being a lover of Girls, any “Carmilla” who is completely Hetersoexual is obviously also an example of No. 0. Perhaps you don’t even believe me that this has happened, but trust me it has, I no longer remember any titles to single them out, but they exist. [Update: 2005's The Batman Vs Dracula made Carmilla the name of Dracula's wife, so that's one example.]
The gray area is, can Carmilla swing both ways? It can seem like Bi Erasure to say definitely No when the original Novella does imply she had a male lover during her human life, and suggesting her orientation changed as a symptom of being a Vampire would be very problematic. However we don’t know that story from her POV, only how it’s told by a generations later kinsman of a person said to have been her lover. Carmilla The Return is a Prose Novel I liked but some things are blurry in my memory of it right now, I think that Carmilla might have been a little Bi but only in Threesomes where another girl was present, but again I could be remembering it wrong, Lauren in the novel is definitely Bi.
Lust for A Vampire is the second film of Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy, and probably the one I like the most. As a Carmilla film it does most of my Pet Peeves. But like how many say the 98 Godzilla would be a fine Kaiju movie if it weren’t presented as specifically Godzilla, this is one of the better Hammer Vampire movies. The 98 Godzilla however perhaps wouldn't have been watched at all if it didn’t have the Godzilla name, this movie puts neither Carmilla or Karnstein in the title. The informal name of the Trilogy is Karnstein not Carmilla, so why couldn’t it just star another vampire of the same house? Yutte Stensdaard is one of my favorite On Screen Vampires of all time, she has exactly the vibes and look I would want a Bisexual Femme Fatale Vampiress to have. She just shouldn’t have been called Carmilla.
Pet Peeve No. 2: Making Carmilla’s origin story that she committed Suicide.
I don’t know why this is so common. The original Novella does supply an origin story and it’s not that. There is some evidence that one of the old superstitions about Vampires is that they are sometimes products of Suicide (The Virgin Vampire is a 1825 pre-Carmilla example of a Vampiress with a Suicide origin story). So it makes sense that there is some Vampire fiction exploring that, but I don’t get why it’s so common to make that specifically Carmilla's origin story?
Sometimes it’s not Carmilla herself who committed Suicide but Suicide is still made a theme of the story. .Even then I’d rather not have that heavy subject crammed into Carmilla.
Pet Peeve No. 3: Making her some epic Rival to Dracula.
So with my writing this in 2021 many may take this one as a stab at specifically Castlevania, and it partly is. But it also kind of begins with Hammer. And Castlevania’s Carmilla I firstly consider an In Name Only example.
The Vampire Lovers is by some metrics the most faithful adaptation of the book, the same kinds of metrics that give that title to Coppola’s film for Dracula, indeed it takes more from it's book then any of Hammer's Dracula or Frankenstein films. However one thing that ruins it’s ability to feel like the Novella is that the Novella is a very intimate story, The Vampire Lovers wants to feel like an epic battle between good and evil.
However one thing the Hammer Karnstein saga couldn’t make up its mind on is if Carmilla is actually the most important Karnstein or just the one we happen to be following the most. You see I’m fine with the idea of the Karnsteins as an Aristocratic Vampire House doing some Game of Thrones type stuff in a secret Vampire Underworld. But Carmilla herself should be neither the progenitor or head of the family but rather someone more concerned with her own personal Sapphic conquests than any Vampire Politics. Ideally she should be the Tyrion of the family.
I think this is one of the causes of Carmilla being conflated with Countess Elizabeth Bathory. I decided not to give that one it’s own number since I only know of it happening once, in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, but that once is enough to annoy me and cause me to fear discovering that it's been a trend I hadn't noticed.
Pet Peeve No. 4. Making Carmilla Blonde
Actually any hair color other than pitch black will bug me, but Blonde is what usually happens. Also the person who should be Blonde is Laura. You can call this my most superficially pedantic complaint, but the way these characters are described in the original story is vividly etched into my brain, it’s difficult to accept any deviation on that point. That movies keep changing it, often swapping them completely, baffles me.
As far as movies go I think only Meg Tilly in the 80s Nightmare Classics TV movie looks right. Though if we count films that are not Carmilla in name but clearly modeled after her, then Ernessa in The Moth Diaries has a great Carmilla look.
Pet Peeve No. 5: Carmilla being harmed by The Sun.
The concept of the Sun being Fatal to Vampires was born out of a misunderstanding of what happened at the end of the 1922 film Nosferatu. Bram Stoker’s Novel provides some prior precedent for the Sun having some kind of effect, but Stoker’s Dracula definitely has no trouble walking around freely in it. No pre-Stoker vampire has even that, when they’re Nocturnal it’s because of a positive relationship to the Moon not a negative one with the Sun.
This is one of the few things Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy got right. Even once they drifted far from being even remotely connected to the original Novella, Karnstein Vampires remained unaffected by Sunlight.
In this case modern adaptations retconning in the Sunlight weakness like they do for all Pre-Dracula Vampires doesn’t bug me as much as people analyzing the original story wanting to retrofit it in. Their argument seems to be based on LeFanu’s oft memed overuse of the word “Languid”, they seem to think the Sun is what’s making her Languid.
There are perhaps two reasons to describe a Vampire as “Languid”. Number one, in normal humans it’s a pretty natural side effect of staying up all night getting what little sleep you do get during the day. And then there is how The New Testament refers to physical death as being asleep, so there is a natural logic then to depicting the Undead as seeming like they should be sleeping right now but can’t. Remember the name of the original anthology Carmilla was apart of was a paraphrase of Paul.
One of the most memorable quotes of the Novel to me is Laura saying “the sunlight did not diminish her beauty”.
That’s not the only traditional Vampire weakness people try to retcon into the story. Her reaction to the Funeral procession is taken as evidence of standard vampiric aversion to religious relics and symbols. However elsewhere she herself bought Laura a trinket said to repel Vampires, it obviously didn’t repel her. There are potentially two things going on with the funeral scene. One, the dead girl is one of her victims, and maybe this is a hint at Carmilla’s conscience. Second the scene also reflects Carmilla's classism, she’s expressing her Argath level disdain for peasants.
P.S.
There used to be on YouTube this independently made dramatization of the opening scene of Carmilla that I really liked, it’s tone was perfect. But now I can’t find it. It could be just too buried under all the newer post viral Webseries Carmilla content, but I even tried using Google to look for specifically older stuff.
December 2021 Update: I found that dramatization on YouTube of the opening scene I was having trouble finding, turns out it was buried in my favorites. It's called Carmilla (first 3 minutes).
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