Eduardo Casanova’s miniseries Silence dives into vampire lore and the AIDS epidemic

Silence is one of the most exciting and unique projects to be making an entry as it deals with two topics that have been hitherto never been joined together—vampires and AIDS.

As bizarre as it sounds, the miniseries is the ingenious brainchild of Spanish filmmaker Eduardo Casanova, who has also written and directed the miniseries. The cast includes actors like Leticia Dolera, Ana Polvorosa, María Leon, and others.

The show will be a part of the official selection at genre festival Fantastic Fest in Austin, which will take place from September 18 to 25. Silence will also premiere at the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. In an interview with Variety, Casanova states that, ““In so many horror films, monsters are hidden. They are living in the dark, invisible – and so are seropositive women,”

The unique miniseries has an inventive premise and viewers and critics are eagerly excited to watch the show. Eduardo Casanova is a noted screenwriter and director who has won the best film award at the festival for La Piedad at 2023. Silence, is his first series. Here’s a quick look at what the show is all about.

Silence dives into vampire lore and the AIDS epidemic and makes a social statement

The miniseries has a striking visual style and blends psychological drama with a thrilling premise. The show takes place in two timelines. One of them takes place in Europe that has been destroyed by the Black Plague and the other takes place in 1980s Spain when the HIV crisis was at its peak.

According to the official synopsis of the show, “Silence tells the story of a family of vampire sisters struggling to survive the scarcity of ‘clean human blood’ while also confronting social silence and stigma around illness, sexuality, and identity.” However, the show makes it a point to highlight that the true stigma is not the disease but the social taboos around them. During both the Black Plague and the AIDS pandemic in Spain, the vampires and their descendants have to wrestle with social condemnation. Even after all the centuries that have gone by between the two events, the social stigma remains.

Eduardo Casanova on the show and what it means to emphasize

Casanova says in a director’s statement that, “I’ve always been struck by the way people referred to the first AIDS patients back when the disease was deadly: The Pink Plague…Silence uses the myth of vampires as a metaphor to reflect on social stigma and condemnation through two pandemics, the Black Death and AIDS. Though they’re separated by centuries and shaped by very different social contexts, both are bound by a shared thread: fear and rejection.”

He continues, “Silence itself can be deadly. At the same time, I’m blending two genres that fascinate me, and that I feel have never been explicitly merged in this way: vampire horror and queer cinema. Both deal with virus transmitted through fluids like blood, a central element both in vampirism and in HIV discourse.”

In an interview with Variety, the director states that, “You don’t really die from it anymore, but you still stay silent because the stigma is very, very strong. Even more so for women, because gay men, or at least white gay men, are like straight men. They have the same privileges.”

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