W W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K
CARMILLA
The Age Of Innocence| 053Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872
Gothic novella has a long history of
adaptation and reinvention in cinema.
In 1932, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr stripped away
the lesbian erotica, in the Sixties, horror
legend Christopher Lee starred in a good-
looking but barely coherent Italian version of
the text called Terror In The Crypt, Hammer
Horror had a stab at it in 1976, with The
Va mpi re Lovers, starring Peter Cushing and
Ingrid Pitt, and the 1972 Spanish film, The
Blood Splattered Bride, has been hailed as
a cult classic for its X-rated but progressive,
feminist handling of Carmilla’s themes.
In 2020, director/writer Emily Harris’
interpretation hits UK cinema screens.
Filmed in 2017 at an Elizabethan manor
house in East Sussex, she transposes the time
to the 1780s and relocates to rural England.
The film strikes an eerie ambience from
the start, introducing its isolated, 15-year-old
protagonist Lara (Hannah Rae) as a captive
of sorts to her stern governess, Miss Fontaine
(Jessica Raine). When a horse and carriage
crash brings an auburn-haired mysterious
stranger, Carmilla (Devrim Lingnau), to
their door, Miss Fontaine’s suspicions and
superstition lead her to believe she is in fact
the devil.
“I’d never actually read the book before,
so when I did, I found that aspects of it
really intrigued me, which I felt hadn’t been
expressed in cinema before and that made
me want to make it,” explains Harris. Her
previous background in theatre gave her a
fresh approach to the adaptation: “HavingWE SPEAK TO CARMILLA DIRECTOR EMILY HARRIS AND
ACTRESS HANNAH RAE ABOUT TAKING THE 19TH CENTURY
GOTHIC NOVELLA IN A NEW DIRECTIONWO RDS KATHERINE MCLAUGHLIN