podcasts – Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

Le Fanu’s Carmilla: how loneliness makes us vulnerable to vampires

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a fascinating story. If nothing else it was published in 1872, long before Dracula, and was clearly a huge influence on Bram Stoker.

When the team at the Vampire Videos podcast invited me to join them as their guest on an episode my first challenge was to think of a vampire movie they hadn’t already covered.

Fortunately, I’ve developed a taste for the kinds of films you can only find in the depths of YouTube, which is where I found a 1989 episode of the US anthology series Nightmare Classics based on Carmilla.

It stars Jennifer Tilly as Carmilla and relocates the action from Styria in Eastern Europe to the American Deep South.

You can find out what I think of this adaptation by listening to the podcast.

The cover image for the podcast wit Jennifer Tilly as Carmilla.

Here, though, I wanted to say a few words about Le Fanu’s original story which I suspect many readers of vampire fiction have overlooked for various reasons.

I first read Carmilla as a teenager during the vampire craze of the early 1990s, when kids at my comprehensive school in Somerset – even those who wouldn’t normally be seen dead with a book – were carrying around film tie-in editions of Dracula and Interview With a Vampire.

I read both, and saw both films, and wanted more, so when I was given the chance to choose a book for a school prize, I selected The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories edited by Alan Ryan.

What a treasure trove that book was, and is. I still have the same copy, its pages yellowing, wrapped in ‘protective film’ that is slowly eating it, with a slip on the flyleaf which tells me I won the Phillips Award for Academic Achievement in 1994.

As well as John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and Stoker’s own ‘Dracula’s Guest’ it contains the complete text of Carmilla, a novella at 70 or so pages.

I sometimes describe myself as Britain’s Most Uptight Man and I was even worse as a teenager. Carmilla, at that time more than 120 years’ old, still had the power to thrill and shock (me, at least). I was astonished by how modern it seemed with an intense sexuality and, specifically, what seemed to me in 1994 to be a clear and unambiguous portrayal of a lesbian relationship:

In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful landscape opened before us.

“And so you were thinking of the night I came here?” she almost whispered.

“Are you glad I came?”

“Delighted, dear Carmilla,” I answered.

“And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room,” she murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. “How romantic you are, Carmilla,” I said. “Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one great romance.”

She kissed me silently.

“I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.”

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

I’d like to pretend I had a sensitive, sophisticated response to this at the age of 16 but what I probably thought was “I’m confused, help!” and/or “Cor, girls kissing!”

Carmilla, I later learned, was the source for all of Hammer’s “Cor! Girls with their tops off!” vampire movies of the 1970s, their use of the name ‘Karnstein’ being the most obvious giveaway.

The Vampire Lovers from 1972, with Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla, is a fairly close adaptation of Le Fanu’s novella with all the flaws and compromises you might expect for a film of the time.

I don’t want to spoil the podcast but it’s fair to say the 1989 adaptation, though less exploitative, also has its flaws.

It would be great to see an adaptation of this story as lavish and careful as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Robert Eggers’s recent version of Nosferatu.

There are themes in Carmilla that still resonate in 2025, not least the negative power of loneliness.

Laura is utterly isolation in a castle in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by stuffy old men and servants.

It is her desperation for a friend, for any kind of companionship, that makes her so vulnerable to Carmilla’s serial predation. Or, to put it another way, that makes her so ready to be liberated. Which is it?

I see in this uncomfortable tension some interesting echoes of online exploitation and catfishing.

That such contemporary parallels can be drawn is perhaps a sign that Carmilla has depth and value beyond it’s part in the genesis of Dracula, and beyond its undoubted erotic charge.

You can listen to the podcast at vampirevideos.co.uk or wherever you usually get podcasts. The full text of Carmilla is available online at Project Gutenberg and in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories which you can buy used for buttons.

Broken Veil: indescribable horrors gently whispered in your ear

The six-part podcast series Broken Veil, created and presented by Joel Morris and Will Maclean, exploits the inherent ‘truthiness’ of the podcast format to chill its audience.

When the first episode landed a few weeks ago I wasn’t sure if it was an attempt to jump on the Uncanny bandwagon by telling a supposedly true ghost story, or a clever fiction.

I suspected the latter thanks to the involvement of Maclean, best known for his 2020 novel The Apparition Phase. It didn’t take long to spot tells which confirmed that, yes, this was a drama – albeit one that felt, at times, uncomfortably real.

Those tells? Acting as if you’re not acting is difficult, for one thing. Broken Veil is cleverly directed to minimise this problem with actors apparently briefed on the story they need to tell and encouraged to improvise around a loose script.

Conversations recorded on noisy microphones, in noisy cafes, in open spaces, or in moving vehicles, also dragged it a touch closer to verisimilitude.

I’ve listened to a lot of audio drama that feels like stage school kids in sound-proofed studios, over-egging their performances, and slurping their tea too aggressively, too near the microphone. Broken Veil felt light years ahead of that. But still not completely, seamlessly, perfectly convincing, even if it got very near.

Despite deciding that it was fiction, there continued to be moments when I doubted myself. Perhaps it was more complex than I’d realised. Perhaps some of the incidents described were real, and only some were fictional, or fictionalised.

The spooky, moody, Scandi-noir score was another tick in the ‘feels real’ column. This is how true crime and supernatural podcasts tend to sound.

Another was the way episodes were edited to finish on revelations and cliffhangers. Co-creator Morris is an expert in understanding and documenting the patterns and structures behind stories, and comedy, and he applies that expertise here to apply the unwritten rules of of non-fiction podcasting.

Just as real non-fiction podcasts tend to do, it also went off on tangents, and gave over whole episodes to what felt like ‘side quests’. Each made the story feel more complex and more confusing, in pleasing ways. When the real actress Gabrielle Glaister (Bob from Blackadder) turned up playing herself it worked both as a standalone story and as a ‘convincer’.

Horror, or weird fiction, often thrives in that space between truth and fantasy. To paraphrase Fox Mulder from The X-Files (a reference point for Broken Veil) “We want to believe.”

Like Morris and Maclean, I’m of the generation that saw Ghostwatch air live on the BBC in 1992. It was clearly labelled as a drama, with an on-screen writing credit for Stephen Volk. But it employed non-actors like Sarah Greene and Michael Parkinson, and the look and feel of live TV, to play with the audience’s perceptions of reality.

Other touchpoints in a similar vein are Alternative 3, a 1977 mockumentary which was originally scheduled for 1 April but actually aired much later in the year, and so fooled many viewers; and The Blair Witch Project, which triggered the found footage movie boom of the early 21^st century.

Throughout Broken Veil’s short arc the hosts frequently invoke cultural references like these, along with myths and legends of the paranormal that a certain type of British child has latched onto and absorbed for decades.

The Philadelphia Experiment gets a mention, for example, as does Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, and the ‘backrooms’ internet meme.

All of these are shortcuts to the mood the creators want to create: paranoid, hauntological, psychogeographical – layers of muddled meaning on worn-out, overdubbed tape.

As with many weird stories, the opening is the strongest section. It’s when the sense of reality is strongest and the story being told feels most plausible. A challenge for creators of weird fiction is that setting up a mystery is fun, and it’s what people enjoy. They think they want a solution but no explanation you can provide will be as pleasurable as drifting, bewildered, in the unknown.

If there’s a problem with Broken Veil, it’s the pacing. Though it’s been a success, at least in terms of podcast charts and critical commentary, it was a side project for two busy creatives, and that shows in its brief run, and hurried denouement.

The final episode in particular felt like several weeks’ worth of content crammed together into too small a space. And of course the opaque solution half provided wasn’t wholly satisfactory – how could it be?

I would have been quite happy to listen to a longer, slower version of this podcast that revealed small nuggets of information over months. And I wouldn’t have minded had it never resolved.

Just being in this world, with two softly-spoken, slightly geeky hosts murmuring strange stories to each other, was pleasure enough.

Broken Veil is available through all the usual podcast services.