It's a vampire story with a difference. Ever since Bram Stoker popularised the vampire with Dracula, eastern European myths have been a source of bloody inspiration for horror writers and filmmakers. But with Strigoi, director Faye Jackson went back to the source - to the homeland of her producer husband, Rey Muraru - to make a film that gives the subject a Romanian perspective.
In Romania, Faye explains, most people think of their country's association with vampires as a great joke. It brings in tourists and helps boost the economy, but it's not something modern city-dwellers believe. Out in the countryside, though, things are a little different. "You think it's a thing of the past," she says, "and then every now and again there'll be something in the newspapers about a body being dug up and you realise that the old myths are still very much alive."
Strigoi tells the story of a young man called Vlad (Catalin Paraschiv) who has been travelling and living in cities before returning to the village where he grew up. He's Romanian but not ready to accept all of his cultural heritage. When strange things start to happen, Vlad is sceptical, disquieted at first by what he perceives as peasant ignorance. But perhaps there really is something at the root of it all.
The film takes in modern as well as old Romanian history, focusing in part on the country's long history of exploitation.
"I've spent a lot of time in Romania over the past ten years, and I became fascinated by these old ideas," says Faye. "I did a bit of digging to see what I could find out. My initial idea was to explore the concept of what would happen if the Ceausescus came back as vampires, but then as I developed the characters the film took on a life of its own. I ended up being a bit creative with the lore, but then Romanians believe so many different versions of the myth, so I took different ideas from different places. There's a lot of my sense of humour in there but I also tried to approach it in the way the people in the village would tell the story. The local people were very helpful - they thought it was wonderful. It was actually my husband's grandfather's village that it was set in."
The film also incorporates several different types of vampire. In Romanian lore, strigoi are not just bloodsuckers - the central thing they have in common is greed.
"Each vampire has its own version of that greed," says Faye, "like the one who just eats everything." But some forms are so subtle that viewers may not spot them straight away.
The hardest thing about the film, Faye reveals, was the casting. This was partly because she was looking for Romanian actors who could speak English "but of course, they still had to be right for the roles. It was most difficult finding older actors simple because they were less likely to speak English. The man who ended up in the role of the grandfather [Rudi Rosenfeld] was actually cast in another role and we moved him when the original actor dropped out at the last minute. It meant casting him against type, but he really went all out to make it work, and he made the role his own."
It's certainly a terrific comic performance. As for the man who plays the corpse, Faye admits she cast him just because he looked good dead, but she's full of praise for the way he handled his role. "There's the scene where he has to lie there with his eyes open and not flinch as the scalpel goes in. How many people could do that? He was also great in the church scenes, which were really creepy to film. He actually asked the make-up girl to take a photo of him so that he could send it to his family to freak them out."
Strigoi is a totally independent production, so raising finance was hard. "It did limit what we could do with the effects a bit," she says, "but in general there's always another way to do things. The main issue was the filming itself. We had to think very carefully about the time we had and how to spend it. There are a lot of magic hour shots in the film so that made things tricky."
Nevertheless, the effort seems to have paid off, as this first feature is certainly getting Faye noticed, and she's now hard at work on her second. "It's a science fiction film set in London," she reveals, though she can't say more at this stage. If Strigoi is anything to go by, it could be well worth looking out for.
