Reading Carmilla and writing Dracula

Written April 02 2026

I am bewildered; let me explain. I love Dracula. It’s one of my favorite novels and recently I got to reread it as part of an upcoming seminar on demons in 19th century literature that I signed up for. It’s great. Stoker’s Dracula is, I think, a fantastic exercise in tension building and horror storytelling. The word ‘vampire’, meaning the folkloric monster, is first mentioned after the halfway point of the novel (ignoring an only slightly earlier mention of vampire bats; clever foreshadowing); before that, you’re just as ignorant about what’s happening as the characters themselves (ignoring for a second Dracula’s ubiquity; just imagine you’re reading this when it came out). The first person accounts from different points of view keep the narrative dynamic and always close to the action. It’s fantastic and I’d encourage everyone to read.

However, I also did some more reading and now Dracula actually strikes me as a bit odd. I immediately followed it up with Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla came out 25 years before Dracula and was, apparently, a huge influence on Bram Stoker’s novel. They even share a lot of similarities, such as noble vampires who suck blood, causing their victims to slowly waste away until they are defeated by a group of heroic vampire hunters who are united by their shared grief. What really surprised me, though, was how sexless Dracula is in comparison.

Carmilla is such a sensual and erotic novel. To me, it definitely reads like a tragedy. The titular Carmilla (or Mircalla or Millarca or whatever; Carmilla definitely sounds best) is a supernatural killer, yes, an unholy creature that should not exist according to its Christian environment. The novella makes that clear, even though it’s very easy to forget that and sympathize with her. To me, Carmilla reads more like a tragic character. She is torn between, on the one hand, her need for blood and thus a need to kill, to always find new victims to feast on, and, on the other hand, her actual feelings for her victims, particularly the novella’s main narrator Laura. Carmilla seems to actually feel for her and love her, though her inner conflict is clearly shown in the way he interacts with Laura:

Maybe I also got fooled by her vampiric charisma, but to me this reads as a woman with a pretty torn conscience. She loves Laura, yet she must hurt her. There are a couple more scenes like this in the novel, of the two of them tenderly embracing, Carmilla kissing her and whispering things to her. It’s great. What makes this weird, however, and what I don’t quite understand is: How did Bram Stoker read Carmilla and then write Dracula?

Eroticism and sexuality are a central part of vampire narratives at this point. Look at Twilight, look at Interview with the Vampire; hell, look at adaptations of Dracula! The count is described in the novel as quite an ugly, if imposing looking old man, yet its adaptations have cast the likes of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee or Gary Oldman in the role, quite conventionally attractive men. For so many vampire narratives, attraction and eroticism are central themes and the vampire itself is often sexy and alluring in its mysteriousness. Even one of Bram Stoker’s biggest inspirations seems to have thought so.

Dracula, on the other hand, seems almost completely sexless. There are, I’d say, two exceptions, which should be noted. The first are the ‘brides of Dracula’, as they’re now called, though they’re never referred to as such (or anything, really) in the novel. They are three vampire women that Dracula keeps locked up in his basement for unknown but certainly nefarious purposes. They try to seduce Jonathan Harker in the beginning of the novel (and he almost falls for them but for the intervention of the count himself) and later near the end Van Helsing is also tempted by their beauty to not go through with killing them (though he does manage to do so with the psychic assistance of Mina Harker). Outside of these scenes, they do not appear and are rarely brought up. The second instance is that of Lucy, who gets killed by Dracula and turns undead herself. She also tries to seduce her fiancé Arthur at the moment of her death and later as they try to kill her undead form: “Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”2 Then she gets staked and is no more.

There are other moments that might be interpreted as such. Dracula ‘baptising’ Mina by feeding her his own blood from a cut in his chest could be read as analogous to rape, though the stain it puts on Mina is described by the characters of the novel as more so spiritual in nature; for all the psychological effects it has had on her, it is more so her soul that has been tainted by it. But other than these moment, Dracula is surprisingly chaste.3 The count is a direct physical threat with his superhuman strength and his shape shifting abilities and he is a spiritual threat, an affront against the natural divine order of the world in his defiance of death and a danger for the souls of those he feasts on. He is not, however, any kind of sexual creature, neither seductively sexy nor threateningly assault-y. I don’t know if there even is any more to say about it, he just isn’t.

And that’s what’s so weird about it, at least to me. How come that Dracula, the most famous and influential vampire narrative of all time (and by a wide margin, I’d say) is also the most sexless and passionless? Imagine if The Lord of the Rings didn’t feature magic; that’d be equally weird. So many vampire stories prominently feature either depictions of or allusions to or allegories for sexuality, for romance, for the erotic, but Dracula stands out as featuring none or at the very least vanishingly little of it.

I do not really have a point here. I’m certainly not gonna trot out the Victorian repression hypothesis or whatever. I just find it really interesting. Personally, I’m a huge fan of vampires and especially sexy vampires. The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 adaptation of Carmilla done by Hammer Films, is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love reading about vampires and I’m even planning on incorporating themes of vampirism (if not the thing itself) into my future writing projects. And I also love sexy vampires. I think sucking someone’s blood seems like such an intimate and transgressive act, it seems pretty hard actually to make it as sterile as Stoker did. I still adore Dracula; that hasn’t changed a bit. But I find it interesting that this most famous of vampire stories is lacking this element of vampire narratives that, at least to me, is one of the central pillars of the genre.

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