Severed Roots: Brad Sykes Unleashes Transylvania Tapes
Underground icon, Brad Sykes, was the first person I ever interviewed for Severed Cinema (see Horror in Hi-8: And Interview with Brad Sykes) when the old site had a counter per page calculating how many hits everything had. After about six months, Brad’s interview had reached near the 10k mark. Proves two things — how popular Brad is (due in part to his bargain bin titles that spread the word such as Zombie Chronicles, Camp Blood, and Death Factory) and how popular Severed Cinema was, even back then.
The years have passed. Brad has still been popping up from time to time. He is now due to release his latest mini masterpiece, Transylvania Tapes.
This is going to be a hybrid of the old-school Euro horrors plus the found footage genres. As the pressure release states:
Transylvania Tapes follows Mara Enescu, a young woman in her 30s who travels from Los Angeles to her home country of Romania to discover the truth about her mother’s disappearance in Transylvania years ago. Together with a cameraman friend, Mara journeys from Bucharest to the birthplace of Dracula himself.
The film originally began twenty years ago, when producer and Nightfall Pictures co-owner Josephina Sykes (Within the Woods) wrote a vampire script set in Romania. After reworking the project several times, Josephina and her partner at Nightfall, writer/director Brad Sykes (Camp Blood, Goth), decided to make the movie themselves on a smaller budget. Preproduction and casting on Transylvania Tapes began in Fall 2024, with the filming taking place in Bucharest and the medieval town of Sighisoara over three weeks in April 2025.
I’ll keep you posted on any updates. Meanwhile, here’s a couple of links to various dark places:
