The Carmilla Movie + Series: How to lose (at least) a week of your life and alienate yourself from most of your real-life friends. GayBae Follow Nov 2, 2017 · 4 min read

Maybe you’re still in school and will have a bit more time to loaf about during the holidays (I miss that!), or maybe you, like me, are a fully-formed adult that stills travels back home to visit your family for the holidays as penance for moving across the country, during which time, even after all these years, it becomes painfully clear what it’s like to be in a small, heteronormative town again.

If either of those things make you do the sympathetically understanding head nod, then this article is for you! I didn’t set off on this journey intentionally, but here we are, and I figured the most productive thing I could do was share my last week’s worth of experiences with everyone else in the hopes that I can find others obsessed with Carmilla or help create a whole new wave of Creampuffs in my age demographic that will talk with me about this show. At the very least, I want to give you a new show to binge watch if you have some extra time coming up!

The angst. The cuteness. I can’t even.

If you’re already a fan, I know, I know, I’m SO late to the game. But, as any LGBTQ+ person will tell you, it’s never too late to follow your heart, and things can be much better because of it.

The series is adapted from the Gothic novella, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which predates Dracula being published by almost 30 years and also follows a lesbian vampire on her adventures of mayhem and carnage.

With three seasons and a full-length feature film under its belt, there are many people out there who have loved Carmilla for far longer than me. But! I think if you talk to any of my friends or my girlfriend, they will tell you just how earnestly, and annoyingly, I have taken up the mantle of being a Creampuff in just shy of a week.

I think it’s pretty easy to see how the obsession snowballed so quickly…

This show really does have everything: a storyline where being a lesbian is just part of who the characters are, not the narrative that the conflict centers upon, non-binary characters, a mostly female cast, and enough pop culture references to have you noticing new ones the second and third time you watch the series and movie. Shoutout to Veronica Mars references!

Narrative aside: I want to be the Carmilla, but I’m totally the Laura. I’ve accepted that, because as I’m writing this, hollering about gay visibility and my gay agenda for the day, my partner in crime, who is actually far more like Carmilla than I will ever be, stares at me across the room in confusion while she reads a good ol’ fashioned book, and I scour the internet for the perfect screenshot.

From all three seasons on KindaTV’s YouTube Channel (gotta support that original content!), to all three seasons as supercuts together without the ads and intros in between the original episodes, to just the supercuts of all the Hollstein (the couple name for Carmilla Karnstein and Laura Hollis) kisses by season, I’ve watched them all. And. It. Was. Glorious. I’ve already moved on to cast interviews (which I never, ever do) as well as KindaTV videos released by Natasha Negovanlis.

Scene from season 3 of the web series aka living with your ex-girlfriend that you’re still in love with

I didn’t expect this to be a full-blown franchise, but there is so much content to absorb on the internet surrounding the sensation. Both main characters make music, one has another web series, and with 9+ hours of free webisodes spanning three seasons and a feature length film available to purchase, there is no shortage of content to get lost in.

If I were a vampire, time would be irrelevant, and I could get lost in the simple pleasure of the rabbit hole that is online content and blather on about this for another 10,000 words, but sadly, the sun is coming up, the puppies need to go out, and a world not rife with LGBTQ+ characters and happy endings is unfortunately beckoning.