The six-year genesis of Carmilla… Six years? Seems impossible, conceding to what seems to be progressing into one of my daily mantras: man, does time fly by when you’re not looking. I had returned from the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 chalk full of wild inspiration, and I hammered out two scripts over the month following my return home. One of those scripts was Carmilla, then titled “Carmilla 2000” is some off-kilter homage to both Death Race 2000 and Camille 2000. Even then, I knew what I’d written was not just some modern updating of a vampire classic (a lesbian vampire classic), it was a script infused with what was at least trying to be the schlocky, witty, comedic over-the-top tone of my then-favorite movie Re-Animator. I think in the end we got the comedic and schlocky (and possibly some of the over-the-top) parts right, if not the wit. Later that summer, we were representing another film company at the first annual Victoria Comic, Sci-Fi & Fantasy convention (Victoria, B.C.) where we met and got somewhat aquatinted with American cult actress Brinke Stevens. We sent her the script, she agreed to come aboard our low budget 16-millimeter production, and we went to camera in April 2002. It was a three-week, two-camera shoot where we also utilized one of the weekends to shoot the short film Heads Are Gonna Roll (also with Brinke). We changed the name to Carmilla and finished post-production in the summer of 2003 (we actually had to wait until January 2003 to get all our film transfers and color correction done before we could start editing). We sent the film off to a horror film festival called Shockerfest in L.A. – and heard nothing back… Until October that year, when all of a sudden three distribution companies called to acquire the rights to Carmilla. Turns out, the director of Shockerfest had set up a screening for the film to a bunch of distributors, and we hadn’t even known until then that it had played. We decided to go with The Asylum, which was a basic three-year licensing contract. Then we waited for the movie to come out…

In January 2004, with the film still unreleased, we heard from The Asylum, and they asked us what we thought of their choices in promoting the film, basically asking us to pick the one we liked the best. Our choices were this: 1. Carmilla – based on the novel by J. Sheridan LeFanu; 2. Lesbian Vampires; or 3. Vampires vs. Zombies. After a few minutes’ discussion, Nicole and I picked Vampires vs. Zombies; and I’ll swear to this day, we seriously thought The Asylum was asking us to choose a tagline for the movie. It wasn’t until a couple of months later when they emailed and asked me for a textless master of the promotional trailer that I’d realized what had happened – “Remember, we need the trailer without the title, because the name of the movie is now Vampires vs. Zombies”. I have to admit, when Nicole and I read this Email, we actually burst out laughing. We already knew there were no vampires vs. any zombies; we knew because we’d made the damned movie! But unfortunately, there was a worldwide audience out there that was not privy to this detrimental fact. In May of 2004, the film was released as such, and on top of that it was cut down to acquire an R-rating from the MPAA. These factors turned out to be the best and the worst things that could’ve happened to our movie.

The Asylum is actually a really great company, I really can’t say anything bad, they treated us well, and they did really well for the movie. Through them, it was released in at least fifteen countries – incredibly, all under various translations of the title “Vampires vs Zombies”. The timing for the US was incredible, as at that particular point in time the buyer for the Blockbuster chains, both corporate and franchise, happened to be a fan of low-budget horror, if you can dig it. Everything just clicked into place regarding the release of the movie, and it reached a huge audience, the size of audience we’d never expected – only to be largely rejected by the misleading marketing. The horrible blessing and the wonderful curse.

We rode the wave of angry consumers for the rest of our contracted time with The Asylum, and when we got the film back in October 2006, I immediately went to work re-mastering the original cut of the movie and producing a slew of extras, which really only took a couple of weeks in total. In November 2006, I send new screeners and promotional packages off to two companies, Synapse Films and Unearthed Films with the intention of getting Carmilla re-released not just in a special edition, but in its original context. I am a huge fan of both Synapse and Unearthed, and I really wanted to be working with one of these companies to ensure a high- quality SE DVD release. I did have my hopes up, and to my absolute delight (mixed with a little relief), Unearthed called me back in December 2006 to say that they wanted to release the movie. I’d also heard back from The Synapse guys in the meantime, and I can tell you that all of these people were a pleasure to talk with. It’s been a long time getting Carmilla to this point, mostly because of copyright snafus (and this is a whole other essay), but finally, finally – Carmilla has been released in its originally-intended incarnation. And Unearthed even used our original artwork, to boot! I almost can’t believe it’s finally available. Six and a half years since we took “Carmilla 2000” to camera… I hope now it can find its proper audience, even if it’s only a handful of people. And I sincerely hope they have as much fun watching it as we hade going through the experience of Carmilla. Somehow, I get the strange feeling this isn’t over just yet.

-Vince D’Amato,

November 15, 2008

Vancouver.

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