INTERVIEW: It’s scary to think ‘Lake Vampire’ film is based on true story
The Lake Vampire, the new film written and directed by Carl Zitelmann, is based on the true story of a Venezuelan serial killer who drank the blood of his victims. The crime thriller, adapted from Norberto José Olivar’s book A Vampire in Maracaibo, recently opened in Los Angeles and is available on VOD later this fall.
“Maracaibo is a city in the westernmost part of Venezuela, and it’s right next to a lake,” Zitelmann said in a recent phone interview. “The original book is about this real-life case that happened back in the ’70s about a serial killer who used to drink the blood of his victims. His name was Zacarías Ortega, and he was this really, really slippery guy. He was put in jail a couple of times. He then disappeared. They thought he was dead at some point, and he reappeared years later.”
The original book, Zitelmann said, is about this so-called vampire case, but also it’s focus is on the city of Maracaibo, which is an important city to Venezuela’s oil industry.
“He wanted to talk a bit about evil as a part of human nature as well, so it’s a very dense book,” the director said. “I fell in love with it about 10 years ago. Five years ago I decided to get an option for the rights and adapted it into a movie. It turned out to be quite the challenge. It ended up becoming The Lake Vampire. I’m really proud of what we managed to do with the movie. I wanted to do a police thriller, like a genre American movie, but with a Venezuelan tone and a Venezuelan character.”
When Zitelmann started working on the script, he thought his job would be fairly easy. After all, he wasn’t starting the story from scratch; this would be the process of adaptation. However, he soon realized that translating scenes from the page to the screen was a tough business.
“When I started working on the actual script, I realized an adaptation is a very difficult job,” Zitelmann said. “When I got the rights for the book, I thought, well, this is going to be easier than writing my own material. The idea is there. The story is there. It’s just a matter of fitting it to the screen, but then you realize it’s not that simple. I actually found it even more difficult than writing an original script because you have to cut out a lot of stuff that you really love, and you feel that you have to stand up to the challenge of making a movie that is at least as good as the book.”
The actual story depicted in the movie is based on a real-life case, but many of the details are fictionalized for dramatic effect. Zitelmann is the first one to admit that creative license was taken to make the film as dramatic as possible. The resulting tale follows author Ernesto Navarro as he follows a mysterious killer who decapitates his victims. The investigation leads him to Jeremías Morales, a retired police detective who thinks this present-day case is tied to a similar one he remembers in the 1970s.
“It’s not all true,” he said. “It’s based on a real-life case. The book is fictionized history. The writer is actually a history professor … and all his books are based on real-live stories and real-live cases that he somehow fictionalizes and romanticizes. And he did that with the book. I took it a little bit further because it was a big challenge to do the adaptation, so I had to find my own story within the book. I added my own twist, my own take on the story. There are some characters that are real-life characters in the both the book and the movie as well. I actually had to change the name of some of the characters because they’re still alive, and there are some scenes from real-life cases. But, yeah, it’s fictionalized. Not everything is true.”
Writing the script was the first challenge for Zitelmann, but the real obstacle was the production. Filming for The Lake Vampire commenced two years ago, at the height of Venezuela’s difficult economic times. This made filming almost impossible, so the director had to get creative.
“Venezuela is going through a major social and political crisis,” he said. “We shot the movie two years ago, and the budget we got diminished by the day because of the inflation. Right now I think the estimate for this year is that Venezuela is going to have a 10,000 percent yearly inflation, and back when I did it, we had like a 20 percent inflation per month. So the catering they wouldn’t budget for a six-week shoot: ‘I can budget you two weeks, and in two weeks I have to give you a new budget,’ and so on. We started eating chicken and meat, and we ended up eating rice and vegetables.”
He added: “The locations were a challenge as well because some of the locations I really, really loved were unsecured. There was no way we could go there with a crew and shoot there because we would get kidnapped, robbed or even murdered. We had to shoot with a security team, like a private security team with us all the time. There’s a scene in a graveyard we had to shoot at night, and we shot it at this graveyard outside Caracas where not even the police or national guard would dare to go in there. So we had to talk with the criminals from the area, the drug dealers, and they agreed for us to shoot at the cemetery. They would be our own security.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Lake Vampire, written and directed by Carl Zitelmann, is now playing in movie theaters and will soon be available on VOD. Click here for more information.
