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.

Based on the imagery evoked by the title and lyrics, as well as the band’s situation in 2024, we set the theme as “resonance and collision of wavelengths.” As reference points, we drew on Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Magician Who Decays and “Holography Hymn” from Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s The Sun King and the Moon King to build the world of the piece. To bring the collage created on a flat surface into the real location, we produced the art direction as physical set pieces. With the band’s long-established formation having changed, while preserving the empty space at the center, we sought to honor the band’s intention, and we depicted the camera dolly moving side to side as literal gods of thunder and wind. We also used the set door to suggest that this place is connected to somewhere else. The cut tearing open into a transition likewise carried the intention of representing another place elsewhere.

“Feel free to do anything as long as it’s not obscene.” With that request, I made sure the world of the music and the poem, its mood, and its forms would become as strange and disjointed as possible. The references I drew on were works that feel feverish and nightmarish to watch, such as Stephen King’s The Devil Truck, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, and Ken Russell’s Gothic. Above all, I wanted to express the absurdity of a gigantic thing racing at full speed, and the image of something that crosses some kind of limit or is mixed together until it turns into an uncanny form. If you trace the history of Gothic, from the Christian view of life and death to the monsters like gargoyles placed on church Gothic architecture, there is a sense of life and death repeating like summer and winter. I am always drawn to the coexistence of ambivalent things. The zombie in the passenger seat is always embodying the ambivalent state of life and death. Though dead, he wears a T-shirt that says “flesh and blood,” or gets an IV drip, as if he refuses to accept death. The method is my usual collage, but it is difficult to create something without straying from the world I have set up. The shape of the truck, on which I put special emphasis, also has to maintain a certain level of consistency from the front, the diagonal, and the side in order to connect properly. A lack of consistency is in a sense an inherent quality of collage, but this nauseating lack of balance was the most exciting and enjoyable part of my recent work.