In this work, built around a new song by Phantom Siita, I sought to foreground the group’s aesthetic beauty and darkness while using Le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla as a motif, creating a world that unfolds like a Gothic short film. I had long thought that I wanted to make a vampire film at least once in my lifetime, and when I saw “Carmilla” written in a note from producer Ado, I was extremely excited. Among films based on Carmilla, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is one of my all-time favorites, and throughout this production I also kept thinking about the ashen, anemic pallor of Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, another vampire film. The setting is an old mansion that appears on a night of the full moon. Through the process of the girl Heine wandering into the mansion and getting swept up in the Phantom Siita’s—vampires’—festival, the film hints at an unnameable emotional wavering that cannot be clearly defined as romance, dependence, or illness. Visually, while drawing on European Gothic sensibilities and the decadent atmosphere of filmmakers such as Daniel Schmid, I aimed for a textured expression that combines live action and analog collage to depict “illness ≠ love.” That emotion is strictly not equal; here, I do not present it in an easy-to-understand way as “love is an illness.” By portraying, on the same plane, emotions that cannot be labeled—“I love you, I’m drawn to you, I want to hold on to you but I don’t want to, I want to run away, I want to live, I want to die, and I don’t want to die either”—alongside a body that grows weaker and more exhausted, I tried to express that this ungraspable feeling is real. As for the collage, rather than shooting against a green screen, we filmed in a studio filled with vintage props and similar items. Because the relationship between space and the people within it was necessary, and because collage needed to draw out that magnetic field in order to create a distortion of reality, I have lately tried to avoid using green screen as much as possible. By dismantling those elements, I wanted to portray a blurred consciousness and memory shaped by the dislocation of time and space. As for the collage method itself, we would print out live-action frames that had been shot and create animation while rearranging them, and even before shooting there were times when fragments of blurred consciousness, the mansion, or parts of scenes were assembled into analog collages.

A music video created on 8mm film that captures the poetry and worldview depicted by TORIENA. It portrays the contrast between the chaotic atmosphere of an old downtown area in Tokyo and the tropical scenery of Okinawa through a noisy visual world rendered on 8mm film.

To visualize the straightforward, unpretentious lyrics and the nostalgic feel of the song, I used a scrolling text approach like end credits. By adding playful touches through the text design and motion in sync with the lyrics, I created a simple yet enjoyable lyric video.