Vamping on an Old Folk Myth

With the cinematic landscape currently drenched to the marrow in the toothy, crimson sangfroid of the undead – at least 40 theatrical, Web-based, or DirecTV vampire films are slated for a 2009 release as of this writing – unearthing British director Faye Jackson's jaunty, nihilistic, and bitingly comic Strigoi is akin to discovering a beautiful black rose blooming in the maw of an (un)dying, overkilled film genre. Every bit as unexpected and revivifying as 2008's celebrated Let the Right One In, Jackson's tale of bloodsuckers both literal and metaphorical in rural, post-Communist Romania is a bloody great stunner from its violent opening sequence to its unnervingly lovely final shot.

"My husband's Romanian, and so I've spent a lot of time there in the past 10 years," Jackson says. "The country is changing so fast, and there was this one village in particular that I had fallen in love with. So part of my motivation for making [Strigoi] was to get this village on film before it caught up to the 21st century.

"Of course, everyone knows about the Bram Stoker version of Dracula in Romania, and they just regard it as a joke; they think it's cheesy. What I found far more interesting were all the folk beliefs and the traditions people have around death in Romania, all of which go back to this myth of the [undead or restless spirit] strigoi. It's completely different from the vampireness that's so popular in the West."

As different as night and day or Communism and Capitalism. Strigoi's heady and humorous evocation of a better-dead-than-Red townsfolk who literally exist in a ramshackle-but-not-quite-deceased village is wholly original – you'd have to go back to Boris Karloff's turn in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath to find a more authentically Eastern European nosferatu.

"The initial concept of the film was inspired by the Romanian revolution of 1989 and the [overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu]. The idea in Strigoi was that this village would kill their leader because he was corrupt, but by doing so, they become complicit in his corruption. The first five minutes of Strigoi is my very short, disrespectful version of the Romanian revolution. There's always that horror-film staple that you kill the monster and then everything's all right. In Strigoi, as in real life, killing the monster often only makes more monsters. I didn't want to have a traditional horror movie where everything's all shadows and creepy music. I wanted the horror to kind of creep in around the edges of everyday life and infect this village which has, by the actions of its people, become monstrous in a totally unexpected way."

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Strigoi

Dark Matters, Regional Premiere
Sunday, Oct. 25, 2pm, Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek; Wednesday, Oct. 28, 9:15pm, Texas Spirit Theater