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Thread: Carmilla

  1. #1
    Registered User Cailin's Avatar
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    Carmilla

    The pre-cursor to Dracula. Anybody want to share opinions?

  2. #2
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    Creation of the Vampire

    I am wondering, did J. Sheridan Le Fanu create the concept of the 'vampire' in Carmilla or did the myth of the vampire exist pre-Carmilla?

    If the idea of the vampire came about with J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, then he must have done an excellent job with the creation of Carmilla aka Mircalla aka Millarca and the impact it had on the imagination of everybody who read it, including Bram Stoker because vampires are so widespread in popular fiction these days (Twilight the most recent example of the popular fascination in this creature).

  3. #3
    Watcher by Night mtpspur's Avatar
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    I read this story probably 20 years ago and it sends creeps up the spine. The description of the finding of Camilla in her coffin is has stayed with me the most all these years. well worht the read for the slow build-up of suspense and the utter cluelessness of the heroine. I'm not sure she ever GOT it. Unforgettable. leFanu is a master at understated dread.

  4. #4
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    I am reading Carmilla and quite enjoying it. It reminds me very much of those early 70s Hammer House of Horror films in which the lady vampires wore see-through night gowns. In fact, I believe The Vampire Lovers was based on Carmilla, although I have not watched it yet. I like the polite formality of the language. A story like that had to be situated in a far off eastern or central European country like that, where the population density was low, the forests thick, the mountains high, the technology backward, and the society almost feudal.

    I was surprised to find vampire stories go back quite a long way. I thought they originated with Dracula, but before him there was Carmilla, and Dr Polidori's vampire stories. There was even a penny dreadful who is my namesake, Varney the Vampire, from the mid 19th century. I am not tempted to read it as it is about 2000 pages long.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

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