YMMV / Vampirismus

• Adaptation Displacement: Not really a straightforward adaptation, but Carmilla was strongly influenced by this tale, and has since far eclipsed it in terms of both fame and popularity.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • The ending would seem to imply that the vampires were Real After All, but given that the only witness was driven mad by the experience, how much do we actually know happened?
  • Alternately, the Fridge Logic is a sign that Cyprian is an Unreliable Narrator whose story is Based on a Great Big Lie.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Ultimately, Aurelia's confrontation with her husband boils down to him pushing her to the floor after she bites him, which quickly kills her.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: It's not exactly hard for the reader to guess what is wrong with Aurelia and her mother. Though in the story's original context, this is pretty explicitly the point, with Hippolytus's ignorance being played as Dramatic Irony.
• Cult Classic: Not one of Hoffmann's more famous stories, but it did make enough of an impact to get a TV adaptation a whopping 161 years after release, and it inspired other works such as Carmilla.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The story itself is only eleven pages long, which can make it feel rather rushed and underdeveloped sometimes.
• Jerkass Woobie: By the end of the story, Aurelia has become a monstrous vampire who attacks her own husband, but this is after fighting a drawn-out battle against said vampirism, desperately trying to cling onto her own humanity. And even this is merely the climax of an extended Trauma Conga Line she has suffered through for years by this point.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The vampires are a One-Scene Wonder, and the descrption of them feasting on a corpse counts as a Wham Line.
  • There is also the very human horror of the Stranger, a Handsome Lech who seduces the Baroness with the promise of financial security, enters into an Unholy Matrimony with her and sexually assaults her daughter Aurelia (both of whom he claims to be distantly related to). He is only arrested after he strips and beats up the aging woman, and is subsequently revealed to have committed murder in the past, making the fact that Aurelia lived with him for an extended peroid of time even more frightening.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: Due to the genre's evolution, the vampires are fairly weak from what we see, lacking many of their iconic powers. Many of said powers did not appear until the release of Dracula in 1897, and even in that book most of the Count's powers are said to be derived from his studies of Black Magic, not innate to vampires in general.
• Values Dissonance: While the story makes it clear that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil and that the way the Stranger treated Aurelia was not okay, him being a distant relative wasn't seen as a complete dealbreaker at the time. Nowadays, the Stranger's affair with the Baroness reads like a case of Villainous Incest (Hoffmann portrayed a similar — consensual — relationship mostly positively in The Sandman (1816)) though Aurelia is still rather disturbed by it. (However, it is possible that the Stranger was only pretending to be a relative as a cover.)
• Values Resonance: The story isn't shy to call out abusers, whether physical, sexual or psychological. No attempts are made to justify the acts of the Stranger or the Baroness, who are treated as the monsters they are.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As creepy as they are, the vampiric coven only appear briefly and don't really get to do anything except devour an already dead man.

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