Remembering That Time ‘The Vampire Lovers’ Weaponized Church Hymns Against a Vampire

We’re in the home stretch for the vampire movie centennial, and today, I’ve got the Hammer Horror film, The Vampire Lovers, on my radar. According to Turner Classic Movies, it first opened in Chicago on this day in 1970.

There’s a scene in The Vampire Lovers, where the original lesbian vampire, Carmilla, played by Ingrid Pitt, gets very upset about the singing of church hymns and clanging of church bells in a funeral procession. The funeral is for the woodman’s daughter, who Carmilla herself killed the night before. But that’s not the only reason she’s upset.

Everyone knows vampires have certain weaknesses: sunlight, crosses, stakes through the heart. Carmilla suffers from all of those, but hymns are another Achilles’ heel for her. She regards them as “dreadful noise,” and when she hears them, a change comes over her. She tries to cover her ears, but it really does a number on her head. Her voice goes guttural, and she has morbid thoughts about how all humans (especially, girls she’s seduced) are going to die.

I had a similar reaction once when I was in the church van with my youth group, and our youth pastor started blasting ‘80s Christian rock anthems out the windows. But let it never be said that I demonized the musical stylings of Petra. I’m not a vampire.

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The Vampire Lovers costars Madeline Smith, who played a Bond woman (don’t call them Bond girls) opposite Roger Moore in Live and Let Die. Peter Cushing, who ordered Darth Vader around as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: A New Hope, also appears as the father of Carmilla’s first young victim.

The Vampire Hunters is based on a Gothic novella that was on the scene a full 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Like Stoker, author Sheridan Le Fanu was Irish. He first serialized his story, Carmilla, in a literary magazine, completing it in 1872, whereas Dracula would not be published until 1897 (to be followed by Nosferatu in 1922).

There are signs that Carmilla influenced Dracula, with Stoker making use of similar elements such as the first-person narration and the figures of an occult detective (Professor Abraham Van Helsing), a sleepwalking woman (Lucy Westenra), and a vampire who holds the same name as their noble ancestor, because it’s them and they’re immortal (Count Dracula). Stoker fleshed it out into a multi-perspective, epistolary narrative that was grounded more in men’s fears.

Since Carmilla is in the public domain, I am able to freely share an excerpt of it here. This is the part of Le Fanu’s novella that provided the source material for the hymns-hurt-vamp-ears scene in The Vampire Lovers, directed by Roy Ward Baker.

The Hymn Scene in “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu

As we sat thus one afternoon under the trees a funeral passed us by. It was that of a pretty young girl, whom I had often seen, the daughter of one of the rangers of the forest. The poor man was walking behind the coffin of his darling; she was his only child, and he looked quite heartbroken.

Peasants walking two-and-two came behind, they were singing a funeral hymn.

I rose to mark my respect as they passed, and joined in the hymn they were very sweetly singing.

My companion shook me a little roughly, and I turned surprised.

She said brusquely, “Don’t you perceive how discordant that is?”

“I think it very sweet, on the contrary,” I answered, vexed at the interruption, and very uncomfortable, lest the people who composed the little procession should observe and resent what was passing.

I resumed, therefore, instantly, and was again interrupted. “You pierce my ears,” said Carmilla, almost angrily, and stopping her ears with her tiny fingers. “Besides, how can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you must die—everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home.”

“My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought you knew she was to be buried today.”

“She? I don’t trouble my head about peasants. I don’t know who she is,” answered Carmilla, with a flash from her fine eyes.

“She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and has been dying ever since, till yesterday, when she expired.”

“Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan’t sleep tonight if you do.”

“I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like it,” I continued. “The swineherd’s young wife died only a week ago, and she thought something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed, and nearly strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany some forms of fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank afterwards, and died before a week.”

“Well, her funeral is over, I hope, and her hymn sung; and our ears shan’t be tortured with that discord and jargon. It has made me nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it hard-hard-harder.”

We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat.

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. “There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!” she said at last. “Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away.”

And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the somber impression which the spectacle had left upon me, she became unusually animated and chatty; and so we got home.