David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell built their reputation in tight spaces. The Boy Behind the Door and The Djinn trapped their young leads inside a house and an apartment and let the walls do the work. Vampire Carnival throws the doors open: a traveling carnival, an ensemble cast, and vampires who feed not on blood but on human despair.
The Nerd Wire spoke with Charbonier, Powell and star Kieron Moore, which Aura Entertainment opened in select theaters Oct. 7 and brings to VOD on Oct. 30. Written by Jason Filardi and Peter Filardi, it follows Gemma (Nell Verlaque, Thanksgiving), a grieving young woman drawn to a mysterious carnival that appears without warning in her small town, which turns out to be a gateway to a hidden world of vampires who feed on human despair. The cast also includes Jason Isaacs (The White Lotus), Paulina Chávez (Landman), Moore (Boots), Eoin Macken (Resident Evil: The Final Chapter), Alicia Sanz (El Cid), Cedrick Cooper (Boots) and Alvise Rigo.
From one locked room to a whole carnival
After two films about kids who can’t get out, did the first day on a carnival set feel like seeing the sky? Charbonier said it was a new playground entirely.
“Everything that we’ve done before this has been very contained,” he said. “We had multiple characters. We’d never done something of this scale before, with so many different storylines to juggle. And these sets were pretty massive. This was literally a real carnival that Guillermo built, which was really cool. So yeah, we were overwhelmed.”
Guillermo is the film’s production designer, and building that carnival in Spain came with its own problems. Charbonier said the two rides he wanted most were the hardest to find: a Gravitron-style spinner, “where it turns and the momentum pushes you against the wall,” and a Ferris wheel. “We were shooting in Spain, and they just have different carnival rides,” he said. “So we really pushed him to find that.” The Ferris wheel, “such an iconic piece of carnival visual,” was surprisingly hard to source too.
How do you direct someone losing their sadness?
Vampires that drain despair instead of blood is a great hook and a strange thing to put on camera. Is there a note for that? “More hollow, please”? Charbonier said most of that work happens before the camera rolls.
“We work with really talented, committed actors, and usually a lot of that prep work is done before we start to roll,” he said. “We talk a lot about the character, their motivation. With Gemma specifically, her backstory and the loss that she’s dealing with really shapes where she’s at when we meet her in the story.”
The interesting part, he said, was the meeting point between where Gemma is emotionally and the moment she first encounters the carnival. On the other side of that equation, he said of Sebastian (Alvise Rigo) that “he really understood the intention of the vampires and the code they live by.”
Kieron Moore finally gets his fangs
Moore played Dimitri Belikov in Peacock’s Vampire Academy, and he was quick to correct the record on that one. “I actually didn’t get to play a vampire in Vampire Academy,” he said. “I got to play a half-vampire that doesn’t have fangs.”
So Vampire Carnival settled a score. “I had an itch in me to finally get my fangs that were taken from me in Vampire Academy, so this definitely filled that hole,” he said. It came with a full-circle bonus: Moore said the film shot where Vampire Academy was made.
Did Dimitri lend Eric any vampire instincts? Not really. “Every character that I’ve been lucky enough to play sort of develops me for the next one, but I don’t know if they’re inherently linked,” Moore said. “I think Dimitri would probably kick Eric’s ass. But Eric is nuts, and was so fun.”
Threat or warning? Moore didn’t pick
Eric is a character the audience can’t quite read. Is he the danger, or the one trying to warn Gemma? Moore said unpredictability was the point.
“I think his desires are fleeting,” he said. Eric’s idea of what he’s doing “changes pretty rapidly,” Moore said, with one constant: revenge. “I think that is his one driving force, and how he goes about that, and what that leads to, I think is quite adaptable for him.”
“It’s very easy to have a character like Eric just be plain and simply the bad guy and play the villain, and I wanted him to be much more than that,” Moore said. “I wanted to have him be a conflict for people by the end.” The goal, he said, is simple: “I am lucky if the audience are unsettled by him but are also curious about him.”
No time for the rides
A real carnival on set raises the obvious question: did anyone ride anything between takes? No. “We literally had no time on set,” Charbonier said. “We lost five days of our shooting schedule while we were shooting, so the days were extremely tight. We had to keep making cuts and revisions to the script as we’re going.”
If they’d had the time, he said, he and Powell would have dragged Moore onto the Gravitron. Moore had the last word: “Every day of shooting was a ride.”
Vampire Carnival opened in select theaters Oct. 7 from Aura Entertainment and arrives on VOD Oct. 30. For more scary-season coverage, head to The Nerd Wire’s horror section.
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