armilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years and inspired the latter. My new film, Carmilla places Le Fanu’s female vampire against the backdrop of historical conflict between the East and the West and finds the origin of the popular myth in racial and cultural fears that shaped our shared culture.

Having come to the U.S. in 1980 and observed firsthand expressions of xenophobia during the “trade war with Japan,” I have focused on the East-West conflict and its impact on the sociopsychology of our time as the subject matter of my work in performance, installation and film. While researching Tokyo Rose (1993-95), I learned that the phrase “Yellow Peril” was first used by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in 1895.[1] This made me realize that there is an older, deeper fear of “the Orient,” an abstraction that stretches from Vienna to Tokyo and which represents, as Philipp Blom, the author of The Vertigo Years (2008) observed, “everything the Occident is not.”[2]

In the age of AIDS, the vampire has widely been accepted as a symbol of the Black Death, itself a result of Europe’s contact with its neighbors to the east and south. The fact that the vampires’ fictional models since the 19^th century have been based on the folklore of the Balkans ­­–– the geographical “bridge” between Asia and Europe –– led me to suspect that the “evil” had a human face after all. A meeting in 1999 with a Transylvanian Saxon woman who had spent time in a Soviet labor camp after WWII moved me to expand the definition of the “East” to include the Cold War period to the present.

Le Fanu’s protagonist Carmilla prefers same-sex victims and pursues them with erotic fervor. The lesbian overtones of Carmilla heightened the character’s “otherness” to its Victorian readers. I chose to focus on Carmilla over Dracula because her gender and sexuality made her a personification of “The Other” the 20^th-century West defined itself against. This continues my exploration of the history and evolution of negative female figures –– of which Tokyo Rose (1993/95) was one, and Yoko Ono, the subject of The Heart of No Place (2009), as “the woman who broke up the Beatles,” was at one time –– that symbolize the age-old fears of the foreign, defined by gender and race.

Black Death (bubonic plague) is now thought to have come from East Africa, devastating the 5^th-century Roman Empire that had been ravaged by the Huns.[3] The Huns were among many invaders from the East, both Germanic and Turkic: Gepids, Lombards, Avars, Bulgars and Magyars. The Roman historians’ descriptions of them as “prodigiously ugly and bent” and “put men to flight by their terrifying appearances”[4] could have inspired the term untermenschen (literally, “under-men”) coined by American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) as an antithesis to Nietzche’s “super-man”[5] and adopted by the Nazis to specifically mean the “horde from the East.” Eighth-century Muslim conquests of North Africa and Spain effectively surrounded Europe and helped form its identity.[6][7] By the 11^th century, the Crusader fanaticism was such that they practiced cannibalism on the inhabitants of Ma’arra, present-day Syria (1098).[8]

The Mongols followed, taking Russia, Hungary and Poland (1239-40).[9] Religious-military orders formed during the Crusades –– Hospitaler, Templar, and the Teutonic Knights –– continued to fight this new “scourge.” These knights’ image as armed “protectors of Christendom,” merged with those of St. George and St. (Archangel) Michael, would resurface in the Kaiser’s vision of the “Yellow Peril” and inspire the Romanian Iron Guard in the 20th century. In 1453, the fall of Constantinople marked the end of the Byzantine Empire. Although the Ottomans, as the Moorish rulers of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) did earlier,[10] built a multicultural society in the 16^th and 17^th centuries (in contrast, Jews and Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula were expelled following the Christian Reconquista),[11] it is by their bloody suppressions of Balkan revolts and by Armenian and Greek genocides in its declining years that they are remembered.

Vlad III Dracul “the Impaler” (1431-1476) –– the model for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula –– was the prince of Wallachia and a national hero who fought Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople. The transformation of a hero to a bloodthirsty monster owes to Transylvanian Saxons who published luridly illustrated pamphlets in German about Vlad’s favorite method of execution.[12] The name Dracul derives from the Order of the Dragon sworn to fight the Turks –– to which Vlad III and his father belonged –– and is synonymous with the Devil in the Romanian language.[13] The association points to common demonizing of pre-Christian deities or mythical creatures of the East. A Roman coin from Valentinian III’s reign depicts the emperor (r.: c. 450-455) stepping on a serpent believed to symbolize Attila and the Hun.[14]

In Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula travels in a coffin filled with Transylvanian soil. Blood and soil (blut und boden, “descent and homeland”) ran in the Nazi and the other early 20^th-century fascist ideologies. The fetishism was taken to an extreme by the Legion of Archangel Michael, later the Iron Guard, a fascist party of Romania who are said to have drunk each other’s blood and carried sacks of Romanian soil around their necks.[15][16] Founded in 1927 by a charismatic mystic named Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899-1938), the Iron Guard combined Eastern Orthodox mysticism and folklore to advance their brand of nationalism, racial hatred and violence. Winning support among the peasants and the young, they helped bring about King Carol II’s abdication (1940) before briefly forming a majority in the pro-Nazi Antonescu government. They carried out the assassinations of premiers Ion G. Duca (1933) and Armand Calinescu (1939) and former premier and historian Nicolae Iorga (1940), as well as the horrific Bucharest Municipal Slaughterhouse pogrom in January 1941, in which they hung the mutilated bodies of Jews from meat hooks.[17] After Codreanu’s death in 1938, the Guardists marched with signs that read “Codreanu Present,”[18] and in 1940 exhumed his badly decomposed body for a grand funeral. Their allegiance to an undead leader, as well as his gruesome reburial, calls to mind the vampire myth as well as the Christian belief in resurrection and life after death.[19] Their claiming of Archangel Michael as their patron saint aligns them with the medieval idea of a divinely enabled hero who would battle the evil dragon: Communists and Jews, regarded as enemies of the Romanian people.[20]

In 1999, I visited Berlin artist Susken Rosenthal at her parents’ home near Stuttgart. Without this encounter, I would have set my story in Styria (Southern Austria) as is Le Fanu’s Carmilla. I learned that Rosenthal’s parents are Transylvanian Saxons, and that her mother had been deported to a Soviet labor camp at the end of WWII. According to Robert D. Kaplan, the author of Balkan Ghosts (1989), it was part of a mass extermination plan that killed 50% of deportees.[21] (The number of the deportees is estimated as 27,000 by hungarianhistory.com; “approximately 30,000” by sibiweb.de and 26,000 according to geneologienetz.de.) Transylvanian Saxons had come to Transylvania in the 1200s, and by the 20^th century comprised the middle class in Transylvania, much like the Jews in the rest of Romania. The family had just visited her hometown of Sibiu. One of the photos taken on the trip was of a fortified church in which the whole village took refuge during Mongol then Turkish and Tatar raids well into the 18^th century.[22]

I am admittedly a casual observer, brought up outside of either Christian or Muslim traditions. But to me, there seems a lot of the East in Eastern Europe: the arabesquelike patterns that adorn the interior of Matthias Church in Budapest (named after Dracula’s contemporary, King Matthias of Hungary) or the mournful tonalities of Bulgarian folk songs. These do not seem to be souvenirs of hated conquerors but like distant memories that seep out of the ground. On what might be a gradual merging between the “East” and the “West,” an artificial line seems to have been imposed, by differences in religion or ideology. It might be these elements of the Orient in the European “self” that cause the dread, and they might have, under persistent threats of invasion and conquest, manifested themselves as monsters. And how are we to know that we are no longer under the spell of these same fears that gave birth to the mythical monster? All one has to do is to observe the reactions of our fellow citizens to the economic ascendancy of China, or to the plan for a new mosque in New York City, or to the alleged “socialist” bent of the Obama Administration.

My Carmilla unfolds in dual time. One layer of the narrative follows the original LeFanu story in 19^th-century Styria. The other takes place in Romania, on the eve of World War II, through the Cold War period and ending in present-day Berlin. The titular character becomes the link between the two time periods.