Cuadecuc, vampir

The origin story of Cuadecuc, vampir is nothing short of unique. In 1970, when Spanish horror and exploitation director Jess Franco set out to film his version of Dracula, starring none other than Christopher Lee, young experimental filmmaker Pere Portabella asked if he could simultaneously shoot an avant-garde 'making-of'.

Filming from a different perspective, Portabella captured the same scenes — boom mics, cables, makeup artists and all — fully visible in the frame. Shot in stark black and white and completely without dialogue, the film echoes the style of Murnau and Dreyer. Hovering between fiction and documentary, Cuadecuc, vampir is a poetic, layered work that ultimately points to the real horror of the time: the fascist regime of Franco. More than Dracula, it is the dictator himself who emerges as the true bloodsucker, with his oppressive censorship and suffocating grip on even the so-called nuevos cines.

In collaboration with Pere Portabella’s family — and in the lead-up to his 100th birthday next year — we invited musicologist and composer Natasha Pirard to create a new score for the film. In recent years, Pirard has quickly become one of the most exciting voices in Belgian experimental music. Her album Dream Cycles (DEEWEE), filled with dreamy tape loops, guitar, and synth textures, easily holds its own alongside the work of William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, and Félicia Atkinson.

To create the new score, Pirard spent a residency at IPEM, the Ghent-based institute for psychoacoustics and electronic music. There, she immersed herself in the legendary EMS Synthi 100 — an ultra-rare synthesizer, with only four working units left in the world. The soundtrack draws heavily on tape loops crafted from the distinctive sounds she coaxed out of this remarkable instrument.