Sùrbiles (2017): women vampires in Sardinia
Author(s)
Whatley, John
Date Issued
2025
Type
bookPart
Abstract
Alessandra Serra furthers the revisionism of the maternal by way of a recent Italian variation on the female vampire – the Sùrbile, adapted from long-established folklore on the island of Sardinia – as it appears in the 2017 Columbu film Sùrbiles. This film is a hybrid creation that combines the ethnographic pseudo-documentary (of supposedly “found footage,” as in The Blair Witch Project [1999]) with already-Gothicized vampire fiction, building on the hybridity of the Gothic from its very beginnings. On the one hand, Serra reveals, Sùrbiles uses its kind of woman-vampire figure to symbolize the fearsome potentials and guilts of motherhood in a present-day Sardinia that in fact confronts a crisis of high infant mortality. On the other hand, Serra equally emphasises, while this film underlines that crisis via faux-real footage that suggests authentic events, it also moves its central female “Other” away from mere horror to give audiences a woman who exerts control over her multiple environments through role reversals and acts of rebellion motivated by understandable retribution.