Dracula vs Carmilla

The writing in Dracula:

"Day 1 of the Castle, the Count is a strange but friendly man, I think my employment here shall be fine and nothing will go wrong. Gosh I really love my fiance, Mina."

"Day 4 of the Castle, he's climbing down the fucking wall again. Gosh I really love my fiance, Mina."

"Day 6 of the Castle, he just fed a baby to his sexy roommates and I am thinking of jumping out the window."

The writing in Carmilla:

"Carmilla did something strange and inexplicable, and I was suspicious, but then she said she loved me, rubbed herself all over me, and sobbed into my hair. I was confused and not at all horny and forgot entirely about the other thing. Also, the General stopped by and told us this long, waffly story about a masquerade ball. Let me reprint it word for word here..."

Thank you so much to the @re-dracula team for providing an unforgettable chronological audio experience of the classic novel; my personal favorite thing about it were the little details, like Dracula's voice being overlayed with Mina's (so delightfully creepy), so I'll definitely be tuning in for Carmilla when the time comes!

Old men in gothic novels love to say "something terrible is happening! But I'm too scared to tell you... I'll tell you later - I can't think of a single reason it would be relevant to you, the protagonist of this classic horror novel." and then they disappear into the night

It’s Carmilla weekly time y’all!!

One of the things that gets me about Interview with the Vampire is Anne Rice’s take on the downside of immortality. I’m especially thinking about this after reading Dracula Daily, currently reading Carmilla Weekly, and considering other vampire media. The vampire should both horrify and fascinate you, and so there should be enough of a tradeoff between a normal, human life and vampirism to make you question if you’d really want that immortality if it was offered to you.

I say if you could choose to be any type of vampire, you’d want to be a Twilight vampire. It’s literally impossible for a human to kill one. Sure, you maybe can’t go out in daylight all the time because your skin sparkles, but that doesn’t mean you can never see the sun again. You’re also fast enough to catch and kill any human unlucky enough to see you out in the middle of the woods or wherever you risked going out during the day. And as long as word doesn’t get out, the Volturi won’t come after you. Twilight also goes very easy on the obvious drawback of watching everyone you love get old and die. I don’t remember the backstory of every single Cullen, but Edward was dying, Alice literally has no memory of her previous life, and Rosalie was brutalized and left for dead by her fiance. They had no life to go back to. Bella might lose her parents eventually, but children ideally should be the ones to outlive their parents. She didn’t have any other close relatives or friends. In giving up her human life, she gets to marry someone she loves and a new family. They can also live just fine on animal blood, so you don’t have to deal with the moral implications of killing humans. And you get your own superpower! Twilight vampires don’t even have to sleep.

Compare this to earlier vampire stories. The vampires in Dracula and Carmilla lose their connection to God--which was a much bigger deal to the Irishmen writing these stories in the late 1800s than it is to a modern audience. Dracula vampires also lose their humanity and have the significant weakness of needing to return to their coffin to sleep during the day and being vulnerable while doing so. They also can be warded off by garlic and have their sanctuaries destroyed by Eucharist wafers. Dracula couldn’t even move his own coffins--he had to pay other people to do it for him, and that meant he had to leave very quickly when the poly band started destroying them. Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca is restricted by only being able to use different spellings of her name. Her eating habits raise suspicion in any area she stays in for too long, with so many people dying of a strange “fever”, and she also has trouble going out in the daylight. 

Buffy vampires lose their souls, burn up dramatically in sunlight, and have a vampire slayer (or, by the end of the series, many vampire slayers) gunning for them. Most of the vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn are stuck in an eternal position of slavery or servitude and also burn up in the sunlight, essentially forced into a new society where they have very little power and any disobedience would be punished by death. Vampires in Supernatural can survive sunlight, even if it hurts, but they have hunters to contend with, many of which won’t hesitate to cut their heads off even if they stick to animal blood and mind their own business. Increased speed and strength and eternal life might be nice, but you either become an evil, blood-hunting animal or you get to spend that eternity living in fear.

The drawbacks of vampirism per Interview with the Vampire differ a little between the book and the 1994 movie, and a lot between both of those and the 2022 television series. In the book, and save one scene in the movie where Claudia gets out of her coffin during the day to join Louis in his, Anne Rice’s vampires literally cannot be awake during the day. As they age, sunlight does lose its power over them as Armand says in the series, but they cannot be awake to experience it. New vampires are burnt to ash by the sun, older vampires are only burned by it, and the oldest and most powerful can sleep in the sun all day and come out with a nice tan. The movie does a good job of showing this with Louis, holding his lantern close to the waters of the Mediterranean at night because he wants to see it as blue as he’s always heard about. But his light isn’t enough, and the water stays black. It’s a significant drawback of vampirism that the show loses: the sun may eventually lose its ability to hurt you, but you will never experience sunlight or what the world looks like in the daytime again.

One thing the Interview with the Vampire series does keep and did do well with in the first season is showing how vampires are incapable of change. Not only that their bodies are the same forever and that Claudia will never grow up, but that they have essentially lost the human ability to grow and change as people. In the book/movie, Louis was in his early twenties and had already lost his brother (book) or wife and buried his newborn child (movie). Alone in the world save for the slaves he owned at his plantation--who rightfully hated him. He wanted to die, and Lestat jumped him and gave him what he wanted, but he also preserved Louis like that forever. He is and always will be suicidally depressed--he is both dead and wanting to die, existing in limbo. In the series, Louis will always be exactly who he was when Louis turned him. Alienated from his family, but feeling an obligation to support them. Hating the life he leads and the way he earns his money while also viciously defending it. Paying someone to sit in a room and listen to him talk, whether that person is a prostitute or reporter. Louis is stuck as who he was in his weakest moment, when he gave into Lestat, which is why he will always give into Lestat, which is why, after more than a century, he is still whining!

It’s also why aging up the reporter is a great move, because over the course of fifty years, Daniel went from a young addict to a world-renowned reporter, from an idealistic idiot to a cynical asshole. This means he’s done the one thing Louis can’t (besides go out in sunlight): he’s grown and changed as a person. That’s why Louis is fascinated by him, and why he called him decades later to complete their interview. It also calls into question if you, the viewer, would want the “dark gift” Louis offers him. Twenty-year-old Daniel, like most people that age, had no idea how much life can change you, and had no idea what he might be losing to ask for Louis to turn him at that age. Seventy-year-old Daniel knows very well what he would have lost and what he still very well might lose by letting Louis turn him, even as Parkinson’s slowly starts to take its toll on his body. Would you want to live as who you are right now, forever? Do you like who you are enough that you would give up your ability to change, to know who you might become? Would you always want to be that person who, when the vampire bared his teeth and made his offer, gave into a moment of weakness and said yes?

Carmilla Weekly Chapter Four

“You are afraid to die?”

“Yes, every one is.”

“But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together.

Did this Lady really just leave her daughter with a bunch of strangers? And says she won't be back for three months??? Was this normal in that time period because that sounds insane to me.

She held me close in her pretty arms for a moment and whispered in my ear, “Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night; tomorrow, but not early, I shall see you again.”

Things I have learned from Dracula and Carmilla:

Vampires are super melodramatic. I thought Dracula with his "blood of Attila" speech was a ham, but then along comes little miss "rapture of my enormous humiliation"...mademoiselle "I live in you and you would die for me I love you so" fraulein "girls are like caterpillars" Mircalla what the flaming fuck are you on about just boink her already you useless lesbian.

Really looking forward to the update on Sunday. Here, have a meme.

The thing with Carmilla (1871) is that it's not only lesbian rep, vampire lesbian rep, evil lesbian rep etc etc,

but above all it's "useless lesbian" rep.

Laura is so incredibly repressed; she wants so deeply but is disgusted by this wanting, so scared when it's reciprocated.

Carmilla, for all her usual confidence, often becomes so shy and coquettish, before being overwhelmed by a sudden intensity of emotion, unable to hold back even though she knows it frightens Laura away.

They kiss and hold each other and care for each other so deeply, and yet, by the restraints of the narrative, are unable to make an actual connection with each other beyond this.

THE Lady Vampire herself - Carmilla

Dracula daily: ROAD TRIP!

Carmilla weekly: do you know how cheap a sweet castle is if you live way out in the middle of nowhere? Pretty cool huh

When your sleep paralysis demon turns out to be real and apparently able to walk through walls.