[page 113] Abstract: Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) introduced one of the most influential female vampires in literary history, still reoccurring in trans muted forms today: Carmilla Karnstein. Carmilla evolved from a Victorian sensation to a timeless icon, appearing in multimedia texts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and is yet again portrayed as an antagonist in Netflix’s Castlevania (2017). Her multiple adaptations contributed to shaping the lesbian vampire trope as embodied bloodlust in vampire literature and film. Accordingly, the article compares Carmilla's queer evolution from her original character to her portrayal in the Netflix animated series, arguing that she has shifted from a vampire marked by same-sex desire to a radical, desexualized figure in her adaptation from Le Fanu's classic to the Netflix series. While Castlevania portrays Carmilla's sexual transgression and fluidity, her desexualization adds nuance to her presentation, moving beyond a sexually independent demoness to a radical female vampire figure that blurs the lines of femininity and masculinity. Ultimately, Carmilla's lust for blood, power, and refusal to submit to male authority shape and complicate the queerness of the lesbian vampire trope. Her consistent reconceptualization across eras, genres, and transmedia establishes Carmilla as a contemporary of Dracula himself in the larger vampire narrative.
Keywords: Queer Gothic, lesbian vampirism, vampire fiction, transmedia, adaptation
Introduction: Many Lives of Carmilla
“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” – Carmilla to Laura (Le Fanu)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) introduces Carmilla/Countess Mircalla Karnstein, one of the prominent predatory aristocratic vampires—along with Lord Ruthven in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Bram Stoker’s titular Count in Dracula (1897)—of nineteenth-century Gothic and vampire fiction. In this Victorian tale of forbidden desire, Le Fanu introduces the trope of the lesbian [page 114] vampire through the story of a bloodthirsty seductress who preys upon a young woman, Laura. Despite being overshadowed as “the older sister to” Stoker’s Count Dracula (Costello-Sullivan xvii), Le Fanu’s Carmilla established the female, specifically lesbian, vampire as the monstrous feminine, whose embodiment of lesbianism and sexual transgression would penetrate well beyond the nineteenth century. “You shall be mine,” vows Carmilla to Laura, the promise of eternal union (Le Fanu 30). Her passionate declaration exposes Carmilla’s possessive, predatory, and vampiric nature, epitomizing the tensions and attractions between the vampire and her prey. At the heart of their relationship lies an uneasy blend of erotic allure and bloodthirsty temptation that would leave a lasting influence on later vampire literature. The aftereffects of Le Fanu's Victorian female vampire can be seen in more recent classics, such as Stoker's Dracula, as well as in many transmedial adaptations. In other words, Carmilla has survived “forever,” having been resurrected in multiple cultural moments. Even within Le Fanu’s frame narrative, Laura remains haunted by Carmilla’s “ambiguous alterations” and still hears “the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” ten years after her apparent death (96). The everlasting specter of Carmilla in Laura’s memory and imagination is a testament to her lasting impact within the novella. Similarly, Carmilla’s legacy (or her story) has refused to die outside of Le Fanu’s work as well; her blood lust has continued to feed the allure and fear of monstrous femininity and the lesbian vampire to multinational, multigenerational, and multimedia audiences.
Le Fanu presents Carmilla's queerness as deeply intertwined with her seductive power and emotional intensity. Her interactions with Laura are rich with desire and physical intimacy, as illustrated when Laura recalls “my strange and beautiful companion [who] would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the [page 115] tumultuous respiration” (29-30). The romantic bond between Carmilla and Laura is marked by erotic confusion, intimacy, stimulation, and fear. Their bodies connect through the repetitive act of holding hands, emphasizing a longing that exceeds mere friendship and binds them together. Their physical intimacy hints at the emotional depth and yearning that characterize their relationship, leaving Laura caught between fascination and apprehension. Regardless of authorial intent, Le Fanu ultimately crafts a profoundly queer narrative, with the female narrator writing for and about another woman, a threat of lesbian contamination that has been noted by scholars; Adrienne Antrim Major argues, “[I]n creating a text ostensibly written by a woman for a woman . . . Le Fanu elides his own and the reader’s sexuality within a lesbian encoding” (162). Carmilla is marked by the abundance of bodily desire and ambivalent eroticism, and this legacy creates a space for transmedial interpretations, such as that in the animated Netflix series Castlevania, a queer vampire narrative that reestablishes and redefines the character of Carmilla. Le Fanu's lesbian vampire reappears and transforms through multiple adaptations, including film, television, and video games, making Carmilla a significant transmedial figure whose everlasting significance is evident in various cultural texts, from the horror and vampire films of the twentieth century to the live-action web series Carmilla (2014-2016).
While many adaptations retain her seductive power and transgressive lesbian vampirism, the Netflix anime series Castlevania (2017–2021) presents a significant evolution of her characterization. In this retelling, Carmilla is portrayed not as a predatory seductress but rather as a figure who commands power through intellect and defiance more than through desire. By exploring Carmilla’s queerness untethered to eroticism, we argue that Castlevania reimagines Carmilla not as a romanticized or eroticized figure of lesbian monstrosity, but as a desexualized and politically strategic agent of queer resistance. The series explores Carmilla's queerness in relation to anti-patriarchal sovereignty, alternative kinship [page 116] structures, and feminist Gothic agency. In contrast to the eroticism central to earlier representations, including Le Fanu's original novella, the series preserves but radically transforms Carmilla into a symbol of anti-normative and queer sexuality that is rooted neither in desire nor possession but rather in control, refusal, and legacy. Transforming from the most horrifying nightmares of Victorian domesticity, Carmilla in Castlevania exemplifies how a familiar monster can be reinterpreted to reflect contemporary feminist and queer values while continuing to unsettle patriarchal norms. Exploring both Carmilla’s queerness untethered from erotic seduction and her evolution in Castlevania allows us to analyze the ways that the monster becomes a cultural body that embodies what is desired and repulsive, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued; Cohen’s Monster Theses help to articulate a connection between the novella and the anime by showing how the “monstrous” registers cultural change rather than a fixed essence.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the Anglo-Irish, and the Victorian Era
The socio-cultural and political context of Le Fanu’s novella shows that Carmilla is more than just another Gothic creature in British literary and cultural history; she functions as a symbol through which Victorian fears about gender, sexuality, and power are explored and expressed. Additionally, viewing Carmilla as a product of Le Fanu’s ideological stance as a Protestant Ascendancy figure in a rapidly changing Ireland signifies his ambivalent position regarding Irish nationalism, British colonialism, and religious politics. Although the novella is set in the state of Styria in Austria, critics including Jarlath Killeen argue that its main themes revolve around Anglo-Irish anxiety. Carmilla can be seen as a metaphorical story of loss and haunting, with the Catholic aristocracy—represented by Carmilla herself—coming back from the dead to reclaim what was taken by Protestant colonial rule (101-105). These conflicting dichotomies, narrated through Gothic tropes, reveal how Carmilla’s queerness and vampirism may [page 117] connect to Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irishness and the Victorian period more generally. As nineteenth-century British discourse associated Ireland with vampirism, while “ousted Catholics” were often linked to folklore and the supernatural prior to the 19th century, Le Fanu situates Carmilla in an ambivalent situation of Catholic and Anglo-Irish identity (101-105): she attacks an English household in Styria, one in which the inhabitants try to preserve their English identity in a foreign country (Le Fanu 4). She is an ancient creature/enemy from the past, like the Irish Catholics living under British Protestant rule, but being neither Irish Catholic nor Anglo-Irish, Le Fanu’s Vampirella1 is the ultimate outsider: she comes to destroy all the binaries of nations, religions, death and life, supernatural and rationality with mysterious and horrifying lesbian desire (Killeen 108-109).
The publication history of Carmilla signals the ideological background against which the novella was written. First serialized in The Dark Blue (1871–72), it reappeared as one of Dr. Martin Hesselius’s occult case studies in In a Glass Darkly (1872). This second appearance introduces a new form of engagement to the readers with the added Prologue. The narrative shift, from a stand-alone Gothic tale to a case study, resituates the text for reading through the century’s habits of classification and display (Cameron and O’Dea 320). As Ardel Haefele-Thomas points out, “Le Fanu’s inclusion of the previously independent vampire tale in a book of case studies situates the vampire as an oddity . . . in need of further scrutiny” (100). Carmilla’s reappearance as a (pseudo-) scientific/medical “oddity” re-conceptualizes Carmilla and Laura’s passionate romance, pathologizing queer sexualities as the “strange epidemic” that Carmilla causes (Le Fanu 41) and situating Carmilla’s queer monstrosity squarely within Victorian “scientific” debates about sexuality, nature, and domestic order. Acknowledging “[t]he Victorian impulse both to categorize and control the natural world,” Lin Young traces the acts of arrangement, labeling, and display to assert control over an “unnatural” body that resists stable categorization [page 118] (65–67). Young writes that “Both Hesselius and the Baron, bracketing Laura’s narrative, seek to catalogue and define the ‘unknowable’,” a project Laura’s own memory subtly resists (65). Since the frame narrative is told from Laura’s perspective, the multi-dimensional storytelling generates uncertainty about the “truth” of Carmilla’s nature. The destabilization of knowledge reflects the epistemic crises of Victorian obsession with truth, categorization, and classification. Within that regime of categorization, Young argues, Carmilla’s queerness appears not only as erotic difference but as a challenge to the very systems that claim to “know” her (66–67).
Carmilla’s subtle yet passionate desire attacks (literally: she drains to death the young women with whom she falls in love) the sacred realm of Victorian domesticity with what was “scientifically” unimaginable. Female friendships could hardly be classified as deviant sexual practices for Victorian discourses, since strong bonds and intimacy between women were not only “widely” accepted but also encouraged and “codified with a distinct language of love” (Cameron and O’Dea 324-325). In other words, the intimacy of Carmilla and Laura is not romantic but platonic, a non-sexual, non-romantic female friendship within the heteronormative framework. It is because romance between women cannot be imagined that women’s ability to feel sexual attraction or desire is completely ignored. As Young notes, “female love has historically been erased . . . within Western literary imagination” (69). Here is where Carmilla’s uncategorizable vampiric nature, as Young again would argue, complicates the issue. She loves, desires, and lusts as a female character. Her vampiric impulses transgress the image of the “sexless” female body as her lustful bites transgress the bodily limits of her victims/lovers. Moreover, her vampiric impulses bring about sexual awakenings in her victims, as Renée Fox explains: “Carmilla’s threat is not simply that she is a vampire or that she desires Laura, but rather that Laura mirrors her desire” (115). The vampiric erotic attraction is also a subversion that challenges [page 119] the classification itself by refusing clear boundaries between natural/unnatural, intimacy/predation, living/dead, human (or girl)/monster.
Consequently, Le Fanu’s tale frames the monstrous Carmilla as what Cohen would call “a cultural body.” If, as he proposes, “the monster is born . . . as an embodiment of a cer tain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place,” then it “always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again” (4). Carmilla then emerges not merely as a supernatural monster of Le Fanu’s fantastical Gothic imagination but as a cultural body through which Victorian fears about gender, sexuality, and power (including the dichotomy of Anglo-Irish and Catholics) are navigated. Carmilla embodies the aristocratic idleness, foreign contamination, and—most significantly—non-normative sexual desire and turns them into the specter of female sexual deviance that haunts the narrative. Carmilla’s monstrosity, thus, is inseparable from her queerness, which is itself framed as a seductive, intimate, and deeply threatening form of contagion.
Her vampirism mainly operates through blood, and she threatens the purity and cleanliness of blood through intimacy and desire, which bypasses the patriarchal notion of femininity and domestic womanhood as well as heteronormative lineages of Anglo-Irish and British identities. In other words, she is not just a horror figure but a site of profound ideological struggle. Her monstrosity articulates the broader anxieties about what it means to transgress the norms of body, kinship, and power. Carmilla’s monstrosity, thus, serves as “the embodiment of radical difference” (Cohen 12). She sneaks into spaces where she does not belong, and she complicates the system that defines her as the monster. The confusing and terrifying senses and emotions that Carmilla evokes in Laura reflect Carmilla’s ambivalence and liminal space as a monster. She generates “a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust” by means of which Laura becomes “conscious of a [page 120] love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 30). The “pleasure” and “disgust” here register precisely the duality that Cohen associates with the monster’s function as a liminal figure. Laura’s consciousness of intimacy (adoration) and simultaneous feeling of sickness (abhorrence) suggests that Le Fanu thus constructs Carmilla as a monster not simply because she kills, but because she disrupts: she troubles the gendered boundaries of friendship and desire, haunts the liminal space between the erotic and the violent, and destabilizes the Victorian ideals of womanhood and domestic virtue. She is, in Cohen’s terms, a monster that “polices the borders of the possible” (12). Carmilla personifies multiple violations of Victorian norms: she is a woman who practices sexual agency, a queer figure whose desire transgresses heteronormative boundaries, and an aristocratic foreigner who infiltrates an English domestic sphere. In the patriarchal imagination, each of these attributes are marked as differences—and Carmilla combines them all in one unsettling figure.
Carmilla’s Queer Transmedial Legacy
The scholarship of Gothic fiction has long noted figures, forces, and narratives that disrupt the boundaries of identity, sexuality, and the body. From the grotesque (Frankenstein’s Creature) to the transgressive and sexually aggressive (such as Manfred, Vathek, and Ambrosio), Gothic bodies have served as a potent symbol for queer desire.2 The Gothic mode, as conceptualized by Angela Carter in “Notes on the Gothic Mode,”3 not only aestheticizes fear and excess but also stages the breakdown of normative structures—of family, gender, and desire.4 Judith Butler claims that “much of the straight world has always needed the queers it has sought to repudiate through the performative force of the term” (223). Butler clarifies how heteropatriarchy creates the sexual other. Non-heterosexual individuals forcibly have to repress themselves as a result of oppression enforced by heteronormativity. Normative structures provide the space for the existence of [page 121] heterosexual practices and identities by casting non-heterosexuals into marginal, queer identities.
The interrogation and subversion of notions of identity and sexuality render the Gothic as a queer space in which bodies are socially fashioned, constructed, and identified: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote, “The Gothic conception of the human character itself is anchored in this image of the contagious, quasi-linguistic inscription of surfaces. In the Gothic view, therefore, individual identity, including sexual identity, is social and relational rather than original or private; it is established only ex post facto, by recognition” (256). Sedgwick asserts that Gothic fiction tends to depict the self or individual as contingent upon external signs and societal recognition. The markers of the body are not deep or interior, but they are written on the body, the face, or other visible features. For Sedgwick, then, it is a process of navigation and negotiation through which a hidden identity is revealed. A suppressed truth is revealed, and one recognizes a monstrous act or desire. The navigation of the private self and public settings establishes the link between Gothic and queer. Sedgwick echoes George E. Haggerty’s analysis of how the Gothic is fertile ground for queer expression as it embodies the interplay between the self and society. Haggerty claims, “Gothic impulses are connected to the secrecies of private desire that are well outside public norms, which makes them very like queer theory itself, which is concerned, not only with so-called homosexuality but with the wide range of all non-normative sexualities” (“Gothic Fiction” 150). The Gothic mode is, thus, instrumental in dramatizing the instability and performativity of identity. Desire and monstrosity are not inner traits but socially constructed meanings. As such, the Gothic creates queerness precisely through the tension, excess, and contradiction between social stability and the instability of the self. Such disruptions, consequently, allow for figures like the vampire, figures who embody the collapse of stable boundaries and queerness itself. [page 122]
The vampire, then, embodies a duality between life and death, pleasure and danger, self and other, which enacts the instability of identity, desire, and transgression that lies at the heart of Gothic fiction. Scholarship on the figure of the vampire has explored the vampire’s liminality/ambiguity, complicating the strict gendered and sexual notions and associating the figure with the threatening non-heteronormative desire not through explicit depiction but through predatory invasion, an embodiment of repressed and taboo yet alluring pleasures, the fear of forbidden (homo)sexuality, and intimate trespasses that situate the vampire as the monstrous body that threatens normative order while blurring the boundaries between the erotic and the dangerous, the private and the social.5 The vampire assumes queer meanings with such instabilities, which are particularly pronounced in the context of same-sex intimacy and the implications of blood-sharing, a subtle metaphor for sexual interactions and reproduction. The vampire becomes the ultimate other through its ability to invade both private and public spheres, paralleling how queer bodies often disrupt normative heterosexuality. S. Brooke Cameron states that “just as queer serves as the Other against which straight sexuality is defined (often forcefully, per the often derogatory use of the former term), so too is the vampire a kind of shadow figure for tabooed desires” (117). A vampire’s bite, therefore, becomes a metaphorical penetration of socio-sexual boundaries, attempting to obscure or displace its queerness. Through physical intimacy and the erotic exchange of blood, the vampire blurs the binaries of public/private, self/other, male/female, and normativity/deviance. All in all, the vampire is a monster that encodes both sexual threat and sexual possibility and whose symbolic flexibility has ensured its endurance across media forms.
In Carmilla, Le Fanu explores the vampire's sexual and gendered traits, primarily through the simultaneous existence of vampiric penetration and same-sex desire. The vampire is not only female but preys exclusively on women, and her encounters are charged with emotional intensity and erotic [page 123] ambiguity. Carmilla invades Laura’s domestic space—first the household, then the bedroom, and finally, the interiority of her mind. The intimate progression culminates in a psychic and physical connection that leaves Laura permanently haunted. Carmilla penetrates Laura’s personal/private boundaries with intense physicality and bloodlust such that Laura can never truly forget her encounter with Carmilla. As she recalls in her manuscript for Dr. Hesselius: “To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church” (96). Carmilla’s influence lingers because she awakens in Laura an unfamiliar, inexpressible same-sex desire—one that is both alluring, terrifying and confusing. Carmilla’s desire is both relational and transgressive. Her legacy, then, endures mainly because she queers the binaries of victim and predator, love and monstrosity, femininity and aggression.
However, the queer influence of Carmilla and other vampires extends far beyond her original nineteenth-century incarnation. Her transgressive nature—defined by boundary-crossing and relational ambiguity—has been continually reimagined across various adaptations. She embodies what Simon Bacon calls “a story, retold, engaging, and pulling its audience into a narrative world beyond our own” (“Transmedia” 541). Her adaptive capacity has made Carmilla a quintessential transmedial figure of queerness—one that “thrives on popularity and the mores of popular culture whilst being inherently a multiplatform and multimedia entity” (541). As a transmedial figure, Carmilla’s cultural endurance rests not only on her early depiction of lesbian desire but on her persistent narrative afterlife. Her queerness evolves with each new adaptation, reemerging as “an oppositional figure to the dominant, male, and ideology” (546). Just as Le Fanu's Carmilla infiltrated the Victorian domestic sphere to prey on innocent girls for their blood, her transmedial revenants continue to haunt dominant patriarchal structures. Whether she appears in erotic horror, Gothic cinema, a digital series, or [page 124] video games, each reimagining reactivates and expands her queer potential. These evolving depictions invite us to critically examine how queer desires are articulated, celebrated, or contained within popular culture—reaffirming Carmilla’s role as a shape-shifting monster of resistant femininity and queer disruption.
When it comes to the evolution of Carmilla in vampire fiction and media, she demonstrates a diverse presentation of lesbian vampirism. S. Brooke Cameron and Peadar O’Dea emphasize her influence on the construction of the aristocratic vampire type, particularly in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (331). In addition, Paulina Palmer traces Carmilla and emergence of the figure of the lesbian vampire in 1970s erotic horror classics such as The Vampire Lovers (Roy Ward Baker, 1970), The Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kimmel, 1971), and Twins of Evil (John Hough, 1971). Exploring the “transgressive sexuality” of lesbian vampirism, Palmer notes that horror film directors often exploited lesbian vampire portrayals “for sensationalistic, pornographic ends,” serving as erotic objects for the heterosexual male gaze (204). Although Palmer acknowledges the continuity between horror and sexploitation films in this regard, she nonetheless affirms the subversive potential of lesbian vampires, particularly in opposition to domesticity and patriarchal norms (205).
In more contemporary adaptations, scholars observe a shift toward affirming and relational portrayals of queer desire beyond the object of pleasure. Natalie Krikowa states that historically, lesbian vampires, including Carmilla, have been depicted as dangerous and predatory monsters associated with the awakening of female sexuality as well as deviant same-sex desire, needing to be eradicated to restore heterosexual norms (50, 56-57). Building on her historicizing approach, Krikowa presents Carmilla the web series as a transmedial adaptation that allows the LGBTQ community to engage directly with the characters. In this series, Carmilla and Laura develop an authentic romantic connection that evolves genuinely, free from tropes of predation, shame, or [page 125] queer tragedy. Krikowa argues that the adaptation repositions queer desire as humorous, relational, and fully normalized within its narrative world (49, 55–57). Brigid Cherry extends Krikowa's framework by situating Carmilla's transmedial evolution. For Cherry, Carmilla functions as a “shape-shifter” who reflects “changing attitudes towards the female/lesbian vampire in popular culture” while also embodying larger sociocultural concerns regarding identity, sexuality, female autonomy, and violence against women (1158). Analyzing works from 1989 to 2019, Cherry contends that adaptations have remediated Carmilla through film, television, web series, and animation, transforming her into a cultural icon that mirrors and reflects anxieties about gender, sexuality, power, and intimacy. Additionally, Cherry categorizes Carmilla as she is depicted in Castlevania as a figure of “vampire royalty”—a militarized, aristocratic leader who asserts autonomy and commands an all-female vampire council (1155). Yet, Cherry’s analysis does not unearth the queer implications of the new Carmilla and her sisters, which, as we suggest, displaces eroticism with strategy, intimacy with sovereignty. Here is where Castlevania marks a radical departure. In what follows, we analyze how Netflix’s Castlevania presents Carmilla and lesbian vampirism through anti-patriarchal governance, feminist alliance, agency, and queer kinship.
“You don’t deserve my blood”: Castlevania’s Carmilla and Radical Gender-Bending Practices
In the Netflix animated series Castlevania, created by Warren Ellis in 2017 and based on the video game franchise of the same name, Carmilla's characterization as a lesbian vampire depicts an evolutionary shift in her portrayal. Set in a dark, medieval fantasy world inspired by Eastern Europe, the show maintains some ties to Le Fanu's setting—Carmilla resides in Styria. Carmilla emerges as a primary antagonist in the show's second season, continuing as an antagonist throughout several subplots until her eventual demise in season four. The storyline in the first two seasons centers on Dracula's quest to [page 126] exterminate the entire human race following the death of his wife, Lisa Tepes. In this adaptation, Carmilla responds to Count Dracula's call as one of his commanders, evolving into a formidable and ruthless war leader whose blood is more precious than anything else.
Castlevania centers themes of internal struggle within vampire society itself, embedding Carmilla’s power in a world where she fights patriarchal oppression within her own kind. Medieval Eastern Europe provides an alternative perspective, setting Carmilla’s Castlevania narrative apart from the colonial underpinnings present in Le Fanu’s novella. Castlevania presents Carmilla as a mature war strategist and an agent of radical power, defiance, and resistance. The animation in the series incorporates graphic and violent imagery, contributing to a more visceral representation that further solidifies her identity. Consequently, while Carmilla is often associated with the lesbian vampire archetype, Castlevania presents her as almost asexual, not depicting any explicit eroticism while maintaining her anti-normativity. The desexualization here contributes to the evolution of Carmilla’s characterization, reframing her identity beyond the lesbian vampire trope as a Gothic and queer character.
From her very first appearance in Castlevania, in the second episode of the second season (Ellis, “Old”) when she arrives to join Count Dracula's war council, Carmilla asserts her defiance of traditional gender roles, positioning herself as a figure of queer resistance and power. Carmilla’s arrival bears glimpses of her challenge to male authority due to her initial confrontation with the Count, which will be discussed further. However, a revealing and formative moment from her past uncovers the roots of her resistance. In the next episode, Carmilla's challenge to male authority crystallizes in her confrontation with Godbrand, another commander in Dracula's council. Reminiscing about her past, she reveals that she killed her creator to reclaim her autonomy and to punish his abusive nature: “I was bound to him. Until I decided to take back my world. I wasn't going to be dictated to by mad old men [page 127] anymore. And then I come here, to meet with the leader of our nation, and what do I find? A mad, cruel old man. Never again, Godbrand. Never again” (Ellis, “Shadow”). The repetition of “never again” intensifies her intention to refuse male authority in any form. The slight pause before she says, “take back my world” suggests her ambitions and grandiose plans to become a leader following Dracula's death. Her facial expression after recounting her creator's death suggests not just satisfaction but a relentless commitment to reshaping power structures. Thus, her quest for autonomy extends beyond personal liberation.
Carmilla defies male authority throughout her first episode: visually, she initially appears as a hyper-feminine figure—dressed in red, with long white hair and striking red lips—yet her demeanor immediately implies non-conformity. Among Dracula's war council, she is the only one bold enough to question his authority: “Why was this new wife of yours never turned? . . . You married, you had a child, and yet you did not make her a vampire. Why was that? Were you simply keeping a human pet? And if so, why is vampire society going to war with the world over it?” (“Old”). In this scene, Dracula stands at a higher angle, representing his authority, yet Carmilla boldly critiques both his military strategies and the failures of his generals. She directly challenges Dracula's authority, identifying his grief-driven war as irrational and self indulgent. The shock on the faces of the generals and Dracula's visible dismay reinforce that Carmilla has dared to say what others could not. Additionally, her remark about Lisa being a “human pet” adds a gendered critique, suggesting that Dracula actively chose to play with and subjugate Lisa because he did not turn her into a vampire; she could have been an equal and eternal lover, but she was destined to die a mortal's death. Carmilla openly casts doubt on Dracula's leadership by hinting that Dracula's love is a weakness, his war is reckless, and he leads the vampire race into a war over what she deems an unworthy cause. [page 128]
In addition to defying male authority, Carmilla displays sexual autonomy and independence. In “Old Homes,” Dracula suggests a sexual encounter with Godbrand, which Carmilla declines with sarcasm and defiance: “I may [sleep with Godbrand]. If all the other vampire males in the world dropped dead. And half of the females. Some of the animals.” Her demure giggle implies a sense of sexual freedom and defiance; she indicates that her sexual practices challenge societal conventions by encompassing her interests in men, women, and even animals. Rather than submitting to Dracula's request, Carmilla actively resists and denies him, simultaneously looking down on Godbrand, asserting her autonomy over her own desires. The moment sets the stage for her broader resistance to patriarchal control, as Carmilla refuses the expectations placed upon her as a woman and breaches the gendered, heteronormative hierarchies. Carmilla's plans are revealed in the eighth episode of season two, “End Times.” She knows that Dracula is unstable after the loss of his wife and the many wars and battles in which he has fought. She intends to overthrow him to secure a much safer position for herself and her Council of Sisters within the vampire community. Essentially, by “taking advantage of” the turmoil after Dracula's death, she aspires to her own majesty and rule, planning to use one of Dracula's forgemasters, Hector, to create an army of night creatures to accomplish her goal, to sustain themselves by taking control of a large area and a vast number of “livestock,” that is, humans (Ellis, “End”).
Carmilla embodies a distinctly queer challenge to both patriarchal and heteronormative hierarchies. While she adopts traditionally “masculine” qualities—such as strategic thinking, ambition, and a ruthless pursuit of power—she never fully assumes a masculine role. Instead, she embodies a persona that transcends both conventional femininity and masculinity, embracing a model of leadership that prioritizes intellect, independence, and calculated action. With her autonomy and refusal of Dracula's toxic, grief-driven, and unstable rule, as well as his “pointless” war, Carmilla does [page 129] more than challenge Dracula's authority. Her power is rooted not in sexual seduction or manipulation but in her unwavering resistance to male dominance. Thus, Castlevania offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the proto-feminist Carmilla in Le Fanu’s novella, aligning her with modern feminist and queer critiques.
In Castlevania, the multilayered queerness of Carmilla is expanded by the presence of other female vampires, Striga, Morana, and Lenore, who are presented as the companions with whom Carmilla has formed the Council of Sisters. Thanks to the strong, intimate bond among them, Carmilla and her sisters subvert gender binaries to represent a “queer kinship.” The non-sexual romantic bond among the four female vampires can be defined as a “queer friendship,” which provides the basis for a non-heteronormative structure of intimacy that extends beyond traditional family or romantic bonds. Their sisterhood within the council does not include physical sexual interactions, except between Morana and Striga as a couple. Instead, the emotional affection displayed among the vampires transcends the boundaries of heteronormative friendship. Haggerty states that “friends are physical, emotional, and psychological partners, who love and are loved in ways that culture at large has always preserved for cross-gender relations” (Queer Friendship 2). Haggerty expands the understanding of friendships and emphasizes their capacity for intense intimacy, which can resemble romance or eroticism among same-sex or gendered individuals without necessarily aiming for sexual interaction. Instead, the focus is on support, community, and affirmation.
Within Castlevania, the female vampires’ sisterhood exemplifies a queer alternative to traditional nuclear family structures, as their interactions and relationships offer “alternative structures of belonging that may offer intimacy, care, eroticism, and dependency in other forms” (Bradway and Freeman 13). Carmilla and her sisters establish an alternative familial structure, one built on solidarity, emotional dependence, and a shared vampire identity. Not biological blood [page 130] sisters, their unity is nonetheless forged through blood—both in their vampiric nature and in the ritualistic exchange of it. In the first episode of the third season, Carmilla reunites with her sisters in Styria and is warmly welcomed. When Carmilla is finally alone with all her sisters inside the castle, Morana says, “You'll be wanting a drink, then,” offering Carmilla a cup of blood. As Carmilla drinks, she hums in satisfaction and responds, “Mm—Virgin's blood. Oh, bless your dead little hearts. You do still love me.” Morana replies, “Mm. Welcome home, Carmilla. We're all so glad to have you back with us.” This exchange signals both the shared intimacy and the pleasure derived from drinking blood, functioning as a ritual of affirmation that reestablishes their bond after a prolonged absence. Their dialogue continues with Lenore prioritizing Carmilla's safety while also ensuring their unity and sense of belonging. Finally, Striga asserts their union: “It's us against the world, Carmilla. Same as it always was” (Ellis, “Bless”). Striga's final declaration, coupled with the camera's framing of the sisters from above, disconnects them from the rest of the world and captures the deep unity and shared history among the sisters, as do their varied facial expressions: Morana and Lenore show warmth and compassion, while Striga's narrowed eyes are indicative of unwavering determination and protec tion. The isolated portrayal of the four sisters reveals both the unity and the complexity of their queer friendship. Castlevania presents Carmilla and her sisters as a queer kinship unit, bound by loyalty, unconditional solidarity, affection, and the history and thirst that are essential to an existence that goes beyond the heteronormative familial structures.
Evolving interpretations of Carmilla not only reshape her queerness but also embed her within contemporary feminist discourse. Unlike her predecessors, Castlevania’s Carmilla does not necessarily use seduction—she strategically builds power, commanding an all-female vampire collective that challenges the dominance of male rulers. The reinterpretation aligns with what Catherine Spooner identifies as the female Gothic monster “who becomes invested with the politics of [page 131] resistance and disruption of heteronormative patriarchy” (137), reframing monstrosity as a mode of feminist agency. The shift in Carmilla’s characterization from a bloodthirsty seductress also reflects transmedial storytelling’s capacity to develop new gendered power structures. In Castlevania, Carmilla's power is not merely personal but systemic—her Council of Sisters establishes a model of queer kinship rooted in governance rather than eroticism. The serialized format allows the dynamics among them to unfold gradually. With their diverse skills and personalities—Carmilla is the leader; Morana, the administrator; Striga, the war general; and Lenore, the diplomat—the Council of Sisters presents a multidimensional portrayal of womanhood and femininity that previous Carmilla adaptations did not necessarily explore.
Carmilla’s rejection of patriarchy aligns with what Sara Ahmed describes as the “feminist killjoy”—a figure who disrupts patriarchal expectations by refusing to participate in the structures that sustain them. Rather than seeking validation through seduction, Castlevania’s Carmilla creates her own system of power. Her alternative power structure does not make it a necessity for women to strategically navigate patriarchal spaces and stay humble by restructuring power itself.6 In this sense, Castlevania does not just reframe Carmilla’s queerness; it situates her within a broader feminist discourse that challenges systemic gendered oppression.
Castlevania imagines queerness as a strategic, calculated form of dominance. The evolution of the lesbian vampire trope demonstrates how Gothic queerness is not only reimagined across transmedial platforms but also responds to shifting cultural narratives about gender and power. Cunning, clever, bold, and independent, Carmilla and her sisters offer alternative possibilities of diverse and empowered portrayals of femininity/womanhood and resistance to oppressive systems. Their transformation illustrates how transmedial adaptation is not merely about reinterpretation—it is about the ongoing evolution of queerness within the Gothic, adapting to contemporary feminist and queer politics. [page 132]
The Desexualization of Carmilla
While Carmilla and her sisters subvert conventional gender categories, the narrative consistently presents her as a desexualized subject. Despite her sexual freedom and feminine appearance, she does not engage in romantic or sexual relationships with other characters, but this does not negate her queerness; rather, the show reframes Carmilla through a lens of desexualized queerness as a symbol of her power, ambition, and defiance. Her autonomy, strategic mind, and rejection of male dominance emphasize Carmilla as a complex subject grappling with struggles that extend beyond the archetypal femme fatale associated with either seduction or doom.
During an exchange with Lenore in season four’s “Having the World,” Carmilla reveals her ambitions and her disdain for patriarchal authority. Lenore poses the question, “Will you be happy when you have all this?” Before she answers, the low angle momentarily shows Carmillla's firm facial expression, and then she responds:
The first part of my life was men taking things from me. And then I took their lives. And their things. And their homes. And then we took Styria. After which we formed our little enclave. We tried not to do more harm. We tried to make a home… when we asked for help. What did the rest of the vampire world say? “Bloody women,’ they said. ‘Let them die,’ they said. (Ellis, “Having”)
The gradual intensity in her voice mirrors her anger as she discards the maps of their plan. Sidelining any direct sexual relationships, Castlevania characterizes Carmilla through defiance against patriarchal oppression and her quest for retribution and dominance, thereby embodying in the character a form of queerness defined by ambitions, grievances, and resistance, and establishing her agency and empowerment as a female and queer vampire, free to embrace the anti-normativity of her sexual identity.
Even in death, Carmilla refuses to surrender to male power. In season four’s “You Don't Deserve My Blood,” she [page 133] displays her final defiance when she fights Isaac, Dracula's other forgemaster, and his horde of night creatures with relentless ferocity. Though her injuries weaken her as she is fighting off each creature, she does not yield or submit. Her eyes covered in blood, kneeling before Isaac, Carmilla remains unbroken, although audible moans anticipate her eventual defeat. Exhausted and wounded, she embodies the relentless spirit of a female warrior, consistent with her characterization throughout the series. During the fight, Isaac finally manages to stab her with his night creature-forging blade, sealing her fate, but she refuses to let him claim victory in battle. Instead, she declares: “You're not big enough to kill me . . . you're nothing! You don't deserve my blood . . . I am Carmilla of Styria and fuck you! I win.” By labeling them “nothing,” Carmilla makes clear her contempt for Isaac and his horde, even when her defeat is inevitable, and her final act—taking her own life—ensures that no man can claim the honor of defeating her (Ellis, “You”). She reclaims her agency in death, reflecting how she lived: on her own terms. Her final “fuck you” symbolizes her ultimate victory and her autonomy. Rather than utilize sexuality or femininity in the stereotypical sense, Carmilla redefines what it means to be a powerful, queer woman within the Gothic and horror tradition—one who fights, rules, and ultimately dies undefeated, enabling her to emerge as a queer subject challenging societal norms.
In the context of Castlevania, Carmilla’s queerness is no longer structured by monstrosity as desire but by domination, rebellion, and empire. The Carmilla web series “made history for being the first global queer transmedia phenomenon . . . because it reinvented” Carmilla, and Castlevania radicalized her with self-control and autonomy of female sexuality and agency beyond eroticism (Fuentes Muñoz 92). Her transformation from a sexually loaded evil predator to a manipulative and cunning sovereign speaks to a broader evolution in queer representation. Most adaptations of Carmilla have positioned her queerness as either subtle or [page 134] dangerous deviancy: she has been a seductive threat to patriarchy that had to be punished or contained. In contrast, Castlevania no longer reimagines her as a monster to be slain for her sexual transgressions. Carmilla does not demonstrate her queerness in suppressed intimacies or interactions. The queerness of lesbian vampirism is neither to be cured nor romanticized; Carmilla operationalizes it as a mode of governance with her fellow vampire sisters by her side.
Finally, the ultimate imagination of Carmilla in Castlevania reflects transmedial imaginings of the vampires and their queerness. Because transmedia allows for the constant nuances and generation of characters and narrative, Carmilla represents an iconic figure of interest for centuries. If the vampire has become a character that can engage with audiences/readers as well as carry this influence out into the real world (Bacon, “Transmedia” 542-548), then the figure is trans medial and each adaptation “adds its own characteristic to the figure” (Bacon, “Prequel” 238). The active participation of the reader means that vampire narratives do not exist as replicas of previous genre pioneers. Instead, they shape and are shaped by the cultural dynamics in which they are reproduced.
Analyzing the several ‘Carmillas’ across multiple media and environments is a significant endeavor. Through her constant adaptations, the Carmillas reimagine “an existing story and retelling [of] it in a new medium and context . . . expanding on that text to present new stories and characters” (Krikowa 53-54). Therefore, Carmilla extends her influence by representing additional meanings for new audiences in different media as she rises from her grave. She does not “just reappear,” but instead, she takes on diverse queer undertones, reflecting Gothic's subversiveness through her lust and hunger. That Carmilla transforms and transmutates in each new iteration is undeniable. Notably, in her critical edition of Carmilla, Carmen Maria Machado says, “Each new edition, adaptation, and reimagination . . . has treated the correspondence between Doctor Hesellius and Laura as a fictional artifact, an epistolary fabrication nested in layers of meta-[page 135]commentary like a set of Russian nesting dolls” (i). Machado's analysis aligns the mutual flow of establishing meaning to show how Carmilla is imbued with contemporary relevance and how her legacy resonates within the cultural milieu of each epoch.
The ongoing reproduction of Carmilla as a character across diverse cultural and media platforms highlights her overall significance to the genre as a monster. “When contained by geographic, generic, or epistemic marginalization,” Cohen states, “the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self” (17). What Cohen asserts here is that monsters reflect the tensions and anxieties of cultures in which they are produced. Their “allure” stems from the fact that they embody the return of the repressed. Therefore, while monsters generate fear and horror, they simultaneously attract and even seduce. And transmedial Carmilla is no exception. The Carmilla who once scandalized Victorian readers with lesbian eroticism has, in our era, transformed into a figure who scandalizes (or intrigues) us with her feminist ferocity. Castlevania took Carmilla’s core characteristic—a queer vampire who challenges the status quo—and reimagined its expression for the twenty-first century. The result is a character who made history in her own right: Carmilla’s latest incarnation brought explicitly queer themes of female sovereignty and sisterhood into a popular animated series. The reinvention of Carmilla speaks to a broader evolution in queer representation across media. Further, Cohen argues that monsters embody the dual feelings of fear and desire, evoking a sensation of fascination, pleasure, and joy, compared to the body’s “mortality and corporality” (17). In that sense, the fictional monsters create “a safe realm” to explore or engage with marginalized bodies (sexual, gendered, racialized). Cohen also notes “the monster retains a haunting complexity” (19), conceptualizing the fluidity of monstrosity in that it offers more than simplistic moral messages and cannot be contained within limited forms. As a vampire, Castlevania’s Carmilla embodies the complexity of [page 136] monsters that Cohen describes. With her ambitions, emotions, and strength, combined with an animalistic and bloodthirsty nature that can be hidden in her human form, Carmilla “lurks somewhere in that ambiguous primal space between fear and attraction” (19). Consequently, she navigates the dual function of monstrous attraction and repulsion. No longer is the lesbian vampire simply a subtle menace to be destroyed or a tragic lover doomed for a catastrophic end. In Castlevania, she is a conqueror—one whose queerness is not a sexual crime but a refusal to bow to anyone, man or monster.
In this way, the desexualized and political Carmilla signifies a move toward what could be called a post-romantic queer Gothic. Throughout most of Carmilla’s transmedia history, her queerness designates her as both tempting and a threat to patriarchy, one that is usually punished or erased by the end. The solution for Carmilla suggested by those stories is her destruction, often at the hands of male heroes who restore the “natural” order. Castlevania disrupts that pattern by not framing Carmilla’s queerness as a problem to be solved or an evil to be exorcised because of sexual transgression. By transmediating Carmilla, Castlevania also redefines the lesbian vampire figure herself. The series demonstrates that lesbian vampirism is neither something to be cured nor something to be fetishized as purely erotic. With her Council of Sisters by her side, she fashions queerness into a political strategy: a way to live, rule, and perhaps even thrive outside the shadow of heteronormative and patriarchal authority. It imagines a future where the queer vampire is not to be contained within their bloodlust for the forbidden object of desire. Instead, it allows us to predict a queer vampire whose thirst for blood is also a thirst for freedom from dominant, heteronormative constraints. As Gothic narratives continue to evolve across platforms, Carmilla remains at the center of this cultural transformation: not as a simple object of desire or a passive figure of hidden desires but as an enduring aspect of queer existence. [page 137]
Notes
1. Vampirella is the popular icon from the eponymous horror comic magazine introduced by Warre Warren Publishing in 1969.
2. See Ardel Haefele-Thomas; George E. Haggerty’s Queer Gothic (U of Illinois P, 2006); Max Fincher’s Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and TransGothic in Literature and Culture (edited by Jolene Zigarovich, Routledge, 2018).
3. We draw on Angela Carter’s definition of “Gothic mode” as a stylistic and affective approach to storytelling that emphasizes excess, symbolism, and emotional intensity. Unlike a genre, which follows recognizable narrative conventions, a mode shapes the tone, imagery, and atmosphere of a work. Gothic, therefore, is not bound to narrative form, but could appear across genres as a mode of disturbance and ideological subversion (132-134).
4. See Queering the Gothic (edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith, Manchester UP, 2009); Paulina Palmer; Laura Westengard’s Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (U of Nebraska P, 2019); and Zigarovich.
5. See Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (U of Chicago P, 1995); Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994); The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (edited by Sam George and Bill Hughes, Manchester UP, 2024); Haggerty’s “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture” (in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5-18); Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995); Palmer’s Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (Cassell, 1999); Michelle J. Smith’s “The Post-modern Vampire in ‘Post-Race’ America: HBO’s True Blood” (in Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and William Hughes, 2013, pp. 192-209); and Catherine Spooner’s Post-[page 138] Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (Bloomsbury, 2017).
6. See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We All Should Be Feminists (Anchor Books, 2015).
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Christopher Rivera completed his PhD at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in Interdisciplinary Studies. He is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Applied Social and Political Sciences in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland. As an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar, he is interested in the ways literature, film, media, and culture reflect how we live and refashion what is possible through diverse representations. Student success and advocacy are paramount to his andragogy and he takes seriously his role as a mentor-advisor to adult learners, traditional, and non-traditional students.
Suleyman Bolukbas is a fourth-year dual-title PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, with a graduate minor in English at Penn State, State College. His research focuses on comparative analysis of Turkish literature, queer studies in literature and culture, and gothic studies. Since 2022, he has served as the Assistant Editor of Women, Gender, and Families of Color (WGFC). He is interested in queer readings of the Gothic as an international phenomenon, in the global circulation of Gothic narratives in relation to local identities, cultures, and nations, and in how Gothic's queerness is reshaped by them.
MLA citation (print):
Rivera, Christopher, and Suleyman Bolukbas. "No Cure for Carmilla: Lesbian Vampirism, Queer Contagion, and Transmedial Legacy." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2026, pp. 113-140.