Honourable Mention: Carmilla – Season Zero

Director: Mars Horodyski

First aired: 2015

Contains spoilers

So, hot on the heels of Season 2 came Season Zero, a bonus short run of Carmilla episodes that sees Carmilla (Natasha Negovanlis) and Laura (Elise Bauman) trapped in the library. A camera senses motion and starts to record.

They are in an interrogation room area and Laura stumbles, literally, over some VHS tapes. On watching we see a short adventure based before Season 1.

stumbling into the room

Lola Perry (Annie Briggs) and Melanippe Callis (Nicole Stamp) find themselves deposited in the interrogation room. There is recording equipment (on), torture implements and a strangely large collection of sanitary product – the series were sponsored by U by Kotex – unsure as to why they were brought there. They are both freshers and they started Silas University three months before. Eventually Perry, a wiccan, starts trying to cleanse the room with sage – something that Mel disapproves of as she is a sceptic.

casting spells

However, soon their interrogator comes in and it is none other than Carmilla – this is before season 1 and so Carmilla works for her mother, the Dean, and is still pretty much evil and, of course, her identity as a vampire is not known. The two prisoners totally believe she will break their fingers as promised. She is looking for a fall-guy after a frat boy fell from a roof, thinking he was a chicken. But as things progress they realise it wasn’t an isolated incident, that frat boys are being morphed into animals and that more and more of the female students (and faculty) have started to fail to get their periods (a phenomena that has gone on since fresher week). They also discover that the room has locked them in until they solve the mystery.

Carmilla sets the camera

A really minimalist season with only the characters mentioned and occasional video from another cell where frat boy Kirsch (Matt O'Connor) has been taken. The story is simple, though effective, and it was a nice little bonus for fans of the series and a different take on the characters as we see them in the series proper. The imdb page is here and the season can be watched here.