Writer-director Faye Jackson has said that Strigoi started with the idea of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu (Communist dictators of Romania, deposed and executed for various crimes in 1989) returning from the dead. That's a pretty rarified genesis for a low-budget horror-detective hybrid with "midnight movie" written all over it. But the further you get into the story, the more you grasp how deeply yet subtly informed it is by Eastern European politics of the mid-to-late twentieth century.
The film opens on a group of Romanian villagers executing and burying the local tyrannical landlord and his wife and then cavorting through his mansion, drinking his wine and bedecking themselves with his wife's clothing, to the driving, celebratory strains of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky." Clearly the landlord was a bad guy who deserved his fate, but he and his wife refuse to stay buried and rise by night to terrorize the villagers who thought their troubles were at an end.
Into this scene wanders Vlad, returning from a stint at medical school in Italy to live with his elderly grandfather. He is immediately drawn into the general atmosphere of weirdness that pervades the village. A local dies under mysterious circumstances, a dog disappears, Vlad's neighbor can't stomach food of any sort, everyone develops a peculiar, inexplicable skin rash, and Vlad's grandfather is convinced that gypsies are stealing his cigarettes. The villagers seem curiously helpless, angry at the wrongs done them, yet so wracked with guilt over the murders they themselves committed that it paralyzes them. It is left to Vlad to untangle the machinations of both the spirit world and very corporeal communist land-grabbers in order to solve the crime and finally put the wandering dead to rest.
Gorgeously photographed in rich hues, the Romanian location is everything a vampire story setting should be: eerie and beautiful, alive with a sense of something horrible waiting around every corner, beneath every tendril of creeping mist. The undead are deliciously old-school--evil, ugly, and ravenous. No sexy teenage vampires or werewolves in this neck of the Carpathians, thank you. The creepiness is judiciously leavened with black comedy, and the actors inhabit their roles as if born to them. The unhurried pace requires patience, not the most prevalent characteristic of general horror audiences. But the return on investment, when it finally comes, is high and quite worth the wait and close attention Jackson demands.
