In the shadows of the (seemingly) deserted Castle Karnstein, a 19th century finishing school for young women is about to experience more than its fair share of titillating drama. Forty years after the events of 1970’s The Vampire Lovers, the vampiric Count and Countess Karnstein resurrect their beautiful daughter Carmilla (Mircalla, played by Yutte Stensgaard), who immediately becomes entangled in the aforementioned finishing school—a place for young women to learn and internalize the etiquette of upper class society.
Lust for a Vampire is the second film in Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy, which I am now—quite by accident—two thirds of the way through, in reverse order. The trilogy uses J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s influential 1872 novella “Carmilla” as its inspiration and source material, but this second film downplays the lesbian themes of the novella and the first film, partially due to the censorship of the notoriously prudish British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).
Of course, Hammer’s passing infatuation with lesbian vampires had much less to do with empowerment and more to do with the prurient (and nearly omnipresent) male gaze of both producers and audiences. An 1830s finishing school (a term I had to look up due to my working class ignorance) is a fitting location for a film—and a broader culture—that finds much comfort and sense of hierarchical order in strict gender essentialism. Indeed, a finishing school proves by its very definition the classist and sexist dimensions of the society in which it exists.
The BBFC initially cut down a love scene between Mircalla and the doomed Amanda, but the greater victory for “traditional” values is won through the script’s pointed emphasis on Mircalla’s romance with Richard LeStrange (Michael Johnson). He becomes instantly infatuated with her, and she seems to partially reciprocate, or at least give in to his tenacious courtship.
Although this falls into the storied lesbian vampire subgenre, Lust for a Vampire presents Mircalla as bisexual: a beautiful and emotionally opaque predator whose sexuality exists both cinematically (for her apparent pleasure and, theoretically, as a way of luring human prey), and extra-cinematically (to appease the salacious demands of the audience). Mircalla finds a gruesome and thankless end in the film’s climactic moments, and LeStrange falls conveniently into the arms of the self-assured Jenny Playfair (Suzanna Leigh)—her unrequited love now (seemingly) satisfied by a man who frankly doesn’t deserve her.
This is a fairly uninspired and disappointingly tame entry in Hammer’s canon, but I can imagine a modern remake that might find justice for a misutilized gothic queen: a horny, bisexual vampire drama wielding male and female gaze both, with subtext and plot that finds sympathy for counterculture weirdos, and bloody justice for patriarchal heter0normativity.