Carmilla and the Daughters of Darkness

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the film and media adaptations of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) produced between 1989 and 2019. It presents accounts of costume dramas and contemporary updatings of the story, as well as examining productions in which the character Carmilla is portrayed as queen of the vampires. It outlines how forms of adaptation such as intertexts, metatexts, and transcoding are employed to reposition the narrative in terms of national identity and sexuality, as well as analyzing the ways in which discourses around concerns such as suicide, self-harm, and sexual violence are constructed in these films. Key examples discussed include the Nightmare Classics adaptation (1989), Carmilla Hyde (2010), The Moth Diaries (2011), Styria (2014), The Unwanted (2014), the Canadian web series (2014–2016), and Emily Harris’s version (2019). It also considers Carmilla as a character in other productions, notably the animated series Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000) and Castlevania seasons 2 and 3 (2017–2021).