Romania Takes Its Stake in the Dracula Legend To Heart
Tourist Blood Overcomes Disdain for the Vampire
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page C01
BUCHAREST, Romania
Petre Moraru emerged from the darkness of his stand-up coffin, dressed in a long black cape and white chiffon scarf, and grabbed the hand of a young lady who wobbled on spiked heels. Moraru stared at her with piercing eyes and purred in his best Transylvanian-accented English, "My, you have a nice neck."
As he retreated into the tomb, the woman followed briskly, beseeching, "Can I come with you?"
"Sometimes, I feel I have the force," Moraru later told a pair of visitors. "It can be dangerous to be Dracula. He is irresistible."
Moraru, a veteran stage actor, is the star attraction at the Dracula Club Restaurant, a theme eatery in the heart of Bucharest, Romania's foggy capital. And he's not the only one finding the vampire irresistible.
Dracula is much in vogue in a country that once ferociously resisted identification with a celluloid bloodsucker whose most famous film interpreter may be Bela Lugosi -- a Hungarian no less. Although tour guides still half-heartedly explain that Romania's own real-life Dracula, a historical figure known as Vlad the Impaler, had nothing to do with bats and bites, they have also surrendered to the irrepressible desire of tourists to thrill at the sites purported to be locales for Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," which he just happened to set in Transylvania, the rugged western part of the country, and on which the film versions, however loosely, are based.
Disdain has given way to the lure of money. Despite unhappy holdouts to the vampire's allure, Romania, it seems, is learning to love the vampire. Restaurants, bars, nightclubs and campgrounds bear the vampire's name. Souvenir vendors hawk plastic fangs and rubber bats. An on-again, off-again plan to build a Dracula theme park is on again.
"We're beginning to find Dracula interesting as well as lucrative. Why fight it?" asked Moraru as he devoured a meal of "The Count's Mixed Grill," one of the restaurant's specialties. With his longish face and swept-back gray hair, Moraru looks uncannily like Christopher Lee, who starred in the British hit 1958 Hammer Films version of "Dracula," as well as a long list of sequels: "Dracula: Prince of Darkness," "Dracula Has Risen From the Grave," "Scars of Dracula," "Dracula and Son" and . . . well, you get the picture.
When Moraru pops out of his coffin, artificial mist fills the restaurant; you're suddenly on a movie set. The rooms have fake hands sticking out of the walls.
There are passionate dissenters to the Dracula craze. Some regard it as a setback in Romania's climb to respectability. As a candidate for membership in the European Union, Romania is already burdened with gruesome claims to fame: the Christmas Day 1989 execution of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, scandals over house-of-horror orphanages, runaway crime and its reputation for corruption (87th out of 145 places in the most recent Transparency International Survey).
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"Here is Romania, trying to join the EU, a club of nice countries, and it is saddled with a bloodthirsty image that Dracula only accentuates," said Duncan Light, a professor from Liverpool Hope University College in England. He is spending a year in Romania to study its folklore.
For others, the Dracula link is a sad case of identity distortion and historical falsification. The cinematic Dracula has become inexorably linked with Vlad the Impaler. Romanians by and large admire Vlad for relentlessly beating back Ottoman Empire invasions and safeguarding Christianity in Europe. He never morphed into a bat.
"How would you like it if someone said Abraham Lincoln was a vampire?" asked Constantin Balaceanu Stolnici, the last surviving blood relative of Vlad's family. He is a direct descendant of Vlad the Monk, one of the Impaler's brothers. He is a neuropsychologist whose genial hospitality is somewhat offset by the jarring display of a plastic brain on his desk. He blames the whole Dracula fad on globalization. "This is an example of a simple, local culture being dominated by a powerful one," he said. "Hollywood rules."
Now, let's get a few facts straight. Bram Stoker, an Irishman, never visited Transylvania. Stoker discovered the name Dracula in a book that included tales of Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century warrior. Vlad got the name Dracula from his father, who was honored by Germans with a chivalrous "Order of the Dragon." The Romanians had no word for dragon, so they transliterated it into "drac," which means devil. Vlad Jr. called himself Vlad Dracula, i.e. Vlad, Son of the Devil.
Perhaps an unfortunate choice for a nickname, but then Vlad generally suffered from bad public relations. The Turks pinned the Impaler moniker on him because he habitually executed foes by driving them onto stakes. It was a common execution method in the 15th century, though Vlad seemed to have been an especially enthusiastic practitioner. He even impaled tax evaders. Sometimes he dined while watching the victims' bodies slide down the poles. There are, by the way, various accounts of Vlad's own death -- at the hands of Turkish enemies, vengeful local nobility or by his own soldiers -- but none includes the hammering of a stake through his heart.
As early as the 1970s, the Romanian government explored the commercial possibilities of exploiting moviedom's Dracula. It built an ersatz castle near the Borgo Pass, the place where the imaginary Castle Dracula was supposed to be. But the Ceausescu government was clearly of two minds about promoting imported superstition. It never allowed any of the Dracula movies to be shown on TV nor the Stoker book to be sold. In any case, the exploitation stopped at Borgo Pass; Ceausescu became more interested in self-aggrandizement, exemplified by construction of a huge palace in Bucharest that is purportedly the world's second largest building.
Currently, with capitalism taking hold, the Dracula tide seems inexorable. "It's a problem. On the one hand, Dracula promotes a negative image. On the other hand, he has become a kind of attractive figure in the West, a sex symbol. So he's becoming digestible even for us Romanians," said Nicolae Paduraru, director of the Company of Mysterious Journeys, which organizes Dracula tours.
Paduraru embodies a certain ambivalence about Dracula. Although he runs tours to Borgo Pass and to Vlad's reputed tomb on Lake Snagov, he is also head of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, dedicated to spreading the truth about Vlad the Impaler.
"Vlad Dracula is a genuine heroic figure. No matter how hard we try to distinguish between him and the film legend, there is going to be confusion between the two," he said.
The vampire issue erupted in controversy three years ago when investors laid out a project for a Dracula theme park near Sighisoara, reputed to be the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. Sighisoara is a well-preserved, walled medieval town. Environmentalists and historians fought and killed the project on grounds that the park would diminish the area's pristine, historic value.
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"Besides shoving history aside, the movie Dracula is a kind of spiritual pollution," said Hans Bruno Frohlich, a Lutheran pastor in Sighisoara. "The myth attracts all kinds of fishy beliefs. Satanists visit our town and hold congresses. I try to persuade tourists that Sighisoara has many authentic and beautiful things to see. We don't have or need vampires."
Frohlich said he has seen only one Dracula movie, Mel Brooks's 1995 parody "Dracula: Dead and Loving It."
"I don't much like these kind of films," he said.
Adrian Gherca, proprietor of Sighisoara's Vlad Dracula Restaurant, expressed disappointment over the theme park's death. The restaurant is reputed to be Vlad the Impaler's birthplace, although Gherca acknowledges there is no documentary evidence to that effect.
"From a touristic point of view, everyone who comes here asks about Dracula. I care about history, but I also care about business," he said. "The park would not have affected our beauty, but it would have attracted visitors and created lots of jobs. Is there a Loch Ness monster? I don't think so, but that doesn't stop people from exploiting the story."
In any event, like the vampire itself, the Dracula theme park seems to have many lives. A new group of investors is proposing to build the facility on Lake Snagov and include a golf course, a Formula One race track, a hippodrome and water park.
In the meantime, for the current run of tourists, almost any castle will do as a Dracula landmark. Take Bran Castle, a medieval fortress near the city of Brasov. There is no indication that either Vlad pere, Vlad fils or any other of the celebrated Vlads spent time there. But it has plenty of horror-show ambiance: pointed towers, creaky doors and secret staircases. The parking lot is full of kiosks selling T-shirts printed with the words "Someone in Transylvania Loves You" and teeth dripping blood.
A tour guide takes it all in good-naturedly, happily mixing Vlad facts with Dracula fiction."Hey, Bram Stoker picked Transylvania out of a hat," he told a group of amused tourists. "It might just as well have been Pennsylvania."
Romania may soon have more cinematic guilt-by-association problems. The film "Seed of Chucky," the fifth installment of the series about a two-foot-tall killer doll, was shot in Bucharest last spring, even though the setting for the "story" is supposed to be Hollywood.
Next up: Chucky the Impaler?