Hippies, vampires and the spirit of David Lynch loom largeWriter-director Peter Strickland cites a viewing of David Lynch's nightmarish Eraserhead ("this strange, beautiful piece of atmosphere"), followed by years of triple bills at the King's Cross Scala ("New York underground, sleazy European art porn, creepy Italian horror"), as his cinematic inspiration. It's easy to imagine the creator of Katalin Varga (2009, Artificial Eye, 15) gorging himself on such exotica. From the brooding, amorphous guilt of Lynch's industrial noisescapes to the emotive violence of so much "exploitation" fare, Strickland clearly appreciates the strange mysteries of cinema's most dark and troubling dreams.His eye-opening first feature is a gothic-inflected Romanian tragedy in which the vampiric spectre of Transylvania's prince of darkness is replaced ...