Wigs, vampires and drags. Sara Manubens joins forces with Norma Pérez (better known as Muerte a la Norma) to stage a queer, trans-drag reinterpretation of the Nosferatu legend, starting from the idea that horror films have long shaped the figure of the vampiress as a kind of LGTBIQ+ body. A long-nailed bloodsucker, a transmitter of disease, androgynous features, and an insatiable, norm-defying desire. The vampiresses we grew up watching in afternoon movies may have resembled us far more than we realised at the time.

But the connections don’t end there. As Sara says with a chuckle, “Our lives have a lot in common with a horror movie.” Symphony of Horror aims to chip away at the stone with mockery and humour, to challenge representational codes and flip the weight of cultural role models. If we’re all daughters of our culture, then we’re also daughters of the trashiest horror flicks and all their clichés: the sadistic vampire, the sexy vampiress, the innocent virgins tied to beds. And if we scratch beneath the surfaces of all those gothic settings with their castles, moats and thunderstorms, we find a space of erotic, empowered longing. The desire to transform the world and be transformed.

From audiovisual reference to drag horror cabaret, the piece Sara has developed during her TNT residency doesn’t shy away from theatricality or excess. Instead, it embraces them as spaces of representation and subversion, where layers upon layers of fiction build up and seep into the body. In a deconstruction of gazes, Sara plays with the stage as she and Feña assemble and disassemble themselves. If beneath the drag queen there’s a vampiress… what lies beneath the vampiress?

As in Carmilla, the lesbian vampire novella that inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the relationship between the two drag performers is a central ingredient of the piece. And it won’t be the first or last time they share makeup brushes. After all, vampire cinema is a paradise for copies and remakes.