Undying Love

The original female vampire Carmilla returns to the screen… or does she?

“I WASN’T AIMING AT HORROR OR A vampire story in the traditional sense,” says Emily Harris, writer and director of Carmilla, an intriguing new take on the Gothic classic by Sheridan Le Fanu. “The horrific stuff is what goes on inside people, how our behaviour manifests. Our ignorance, our lack of openness and all the fears that get bundled in with that.”

Predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a quarter of a century, Le Fanu’s 1872 novella is one of the earliest works of undead literature. In Carmilla – alias Mircalla, Countess Karnstein – it unleashed the first vampiress protagonist, mother to every blood-thirsting femme that followed in print and on screen.

As Harris tells Red Alert, she’s prepared for the purists to wave crucifixes at her. “It’s kind of a reimagining,” she admits. “That’s a grand word to use but it’s just a way of saying this isn’t a literal adaptation. It draws on a lot of the themes, the broad strokes of narrative structure, but I was trying to understand the psychology behind it, the purpose behind Le Fanu writing it in the first place. I don’t think it was just about putting lesbians and vampires on the page. It was exploring sides of human nature.”