Tina Romero is led to strange places by Susana Kamini, her new roommate at the convent, in ALUCARDA.
of Justine’s room. These women also appear to be mirror images of one another, as both are named after supernatural winged creatures of op- posing natures. Alucarda immediately fawns over her new friend, showing Justine her “secrets”— various natural objects she has acquired in the forest.
The next day, when playing in the woods, Alucarda shows Justine two blood-red bugs she has discovered in a clump of earth. When Justine comments on their odd appearance, Alucarda re- plies “It’s one more secret. One is identical to the other, just like an image in a mirror.” Although the importance of this scene (which also features a variation on CARMILLA’s funeral scene) is easily missed, it is here that Moctezuma reveals his true intent. Mirror images are, of course, simply differ- ent representations of the same underlying reality. Human beings, with our imperfect knowledge, look “in a glass darkly” and see two separate and op- posing forces—good and evil, God and Satan. But what if both forces are, in reality, one and the same, summoned and wielded by groups that perceive its nature in very different ways? And if that is the case, what is the true source of this force? To develop this concept further, Moctezuma quotes directly from CARMILLA in the scenes im- mediately following. During their next outing in the forest, Justine and Alucarda encounter the hunch- back of Le Fanu’s novella (Claudio Brook, here
resembling Pan) plying his wares in a gypsy camp. The hunchback frightens Alucarda by suggesting knowledge of her origins, causing her and Justine to flee further into the woods. The girls soon stumble upon an abandoned castle shrouded in red cloth, and enter the crypt featured in the first scene. Justine is frightened, but Alucarda is over- come by a powerful flood of memories, as if she has rediscovered “a world [she] had lost.” Preying upon Justine’s fears of death, Alucarda declares her love for Justine in words lifted from CARMILLA, and demands that they become one through a shared blood oath. When Justine blanches at be- ing cut, Alucarda decides instead to swear on the coffin of Lucy Westerna—unbeknownst to them, Alucarda’s mother—who died the year of their birth. Alucarda opens the coffin, releasing the demonic force heard during the opening of the film, and both girls become possessed.
In this scene, Moctezuma cleverly employs dialogue from CARMILLA in the service of his un- derlying theme. In the novella, the hunchback is the only one to comment upon Carmilla’s fangs and thus her true nature. In the film, he notes that she “[comes] from the dew and the forest, and there they will be waiting,” suggesting an entirely different origin. When professing her love, Alucarda—like Carmilla in the novella—demands that she and her beloved pledge to “die loving each other, dying together so that [they] might
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