Zahir Blue Guest Blogs about STYRIA and His Chat with Writer/Director Mark Devendorf

Zahir Blue, creator of Night-Tinted Glasses and the vampire web series End of the Line, stopped by to discuss an upcoming film inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's classic vampire novel Carmilla.

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STYRIA - Updating a Classic
by Zahir Blue

The last serious attempt in the English-speaking world to do a faithful version of Carmilla on film was Nightmare Classics, with Ione Skye and Meg Tilly. That was back in 1989. Roy Dotrice and Roddy McDowell also made up the cast, in a film that relocated the story to the American South. But 2011 should seen a brand-new adaptation, a retelling that finished filming in Hungary last November and is now well into post-production.

The official website put it like this:

In 1989, Lara, 16, is expelled from an English boarding school for injuring a classmate. Her estranged father, Dr. Hill, an art historian, must now take her along on a research expedition across the Iron Curtain. Their destination is the Castle von Karnstein. Once an opulent 19th-century mountain spa, the castle is now nearly a ruin, set for demolition by the town’s despotic General Spiegel.

Lara struggles to co-exist with her distant father, when a car accident thrusts the beautiful and enigmatic Carmilla, 17, into their lives. Finding Carmilla’s charms irresistible, Lara eagerly follows her out at night, where they explore the castle and surrounding forest.

When Carmilla suddenly disappears, the castle's dormant supernatural forces awaken.

As Dr. Hill obsesses with a hidden mural, whose shadowy images mirror his own dark secrets, Lara succumbs to a mysterious illness. In feverish dreams, Carmilla appears and forces Lara to witness unspeakable horrors. Other young women in the town of Styria experience similar visitations, leading to madness and a rash of suicides.

With darkness descending and the town in chaos, General Spiegel seeks to exact revenge upon the Castle’s inhabitants. Trying to hide from the General and the feral village girls, Carmilla offers Lara an escape into an enchanting, hidden world.

But before she can enter, Lara must commit a final ghastly act that will unite her and Carmilla forever.

Stephen Rea (Interview with the Vampire)

I recently sat down with one of the writer/directors, Mark Devendorf. Everything he said about the project seemed exciting, not least the cast, which includes genre veteran Stephen Rea (Interview with the Vampire) and Eleanor Tomlinson (Alice in Wonderland).

"We were interested" said Devendorf, "in going back to the source, to the origins, to the folktales, and finding what’s underneath all this that is not being addressed. For us a big part of that was suicide and poison. And the feminine. The feminine repressed. You repress something, it's going to come back in a different form, and maybe not a form you want to see. Distorted. Inverted."  He and his writing/directing partner, Mauricio Chernovetzky, spent five years creating their script. In the process they consciously chose to bring the story forward--not to the present, but just before the fall of the Iron Curtain and before many of the things we take for granted became so ubiquitous: cell phones, personal computers. The time of Reagan's America, Thatcher's England, and Gorbochev's Soviet Union. In an amazing location, a now-abandoned castle, they filmed their story about desperate loneliness and repressed longings, of a girl with no real connection to her past, susceptible to a force no one really understands.

Julia Pietrucha (Styria's Carmilla)

Most of the cast ended up being Eastern Europeans. Julia (pronouned HOO-lee-ah) Pietrucha, who portrays Carmilla herself, and Jacek Lenartowicz, the oppressive General Spiegel, who plans to demolish the old castle,as well as the murals that reveal disturbing secrets, are both Polish. In my conversation with Devendorf, he praised all the cast and noted how many tried to talk him out of casting actual British and European actors. He also noted how for three years he and his partner were told no one is doing vampire movies anymore. Then for the past two years they kept hearing how vampires were old and tired and nobody wanted to see another one.

They didn't believe the naysayers. In the end they filmed their script and are now putting it together. Hopefully, before too long (autumn 2011 maybe?) it will be available in some venue where the general public can see it.

Website: www.styriamovie.com