With Carmilla, published for the first time in In a Glass Darkly in 1872, Le Fanu, one of the great universal masters of terror, enshrines the vampire in the novel, paving the way for Bram Stoker with Dracula.

Carmilla portrays the vampire woman in whom a strange power of fascination, grace and beauty is mixed with the most inconceivable monstrosity, referring to the fact that the vampire seduces and guides us to dark places, awakening sexuality. The vampire comes along and says, "I'm going to kill you and you'll love it and not only that, you'll want more." Likewise, the mysterious vampires seem to have sex only with their mouths, as if they were dead from the waist down, saying in the midst of erotic kisses: «I will rape you with my mouth and you will like it, instead of providing a vital liquid to your body, I will take it."

Some aspects of this novel signify an achievement that will not be surpassed even by Dracula himself, because Le Fanu employs a sustained analysis of the character of the protagonist, who, despite being a multiform infernal monster, moves on the plane of human passions and emotions. , presided over by the theme of lesbianism, introducing homosexuality repeatedly treated in vampire stories, taking up one of the obsessions of the vampire theme: erothanism.