The Burning

The idea of the film came up very natural for me as since I was a child, I was obsessed with vampires. I dreamt of being one and always collected stories and movies about them. I had an experience around that time, playing a prank on our house maids with my siblings, when we pretended that we were vampires, and the prank went wrong, one of the maids, in her innocence, actually believed it. We got scolded but then I thought, what if it actually was true? I played with the idea until the siblings disappeared from a draft, the maids became nurses, and then the characters just came into being forging what became the script for “The Burning”.
The look and feel of the film has been inspired by the films Persona and Fanny and Alexander from director Ingmar Bergman, and by Pan's Labyrynth by director Guillermo del Toro.Persona is about a nurse taking care of a patient and as they develop a relationship, feelings between them arise. Fanny and Alexander is a family drama seen through the eyes of two kids, who at some point experience magic. As Bergman said in his book The Magic Lantern: The prerogative of childhood is to move unhindered between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and explosive joy. There were no boundaries except prohibitions and regulations, which were shadowy, mostly incomprehensible . . ."
In Fanny and Alexander magic and ghosts and life and death coexist side by side and the creative imagination of childhood fantasy becomes a temporary escape from the bleakness of reality, such as it happens in Pan's Labyrynth, where a girl, trying to escape from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, creates a fantasy where she is a fairy and has to complete tasks to go back to her Kingdom.
In The Burning, Carmilla tries to make sense of her disease that doesn't allow her to see the daylight, by believing that she is a vampire. Telling our story from the perspective of a child sets us free in the realm of fantasy and imagination.