Authentic vampire tales exist in Transylvanian folklore--yet the Transylvanian vampire is nothing like the bloodthirsty count of Bram Stoker's imagination or the romantic hero of popular fiction. The Romanian tradition reflects the norms of peasant life and wisdom embedded in age-old communities. This book consists of 21 narratives developed from brief accounts recorded by local anthropologists and historians from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal is to capture the major themes found in the existing sources. The book also includes translations of 17 brief folk stories about Vlad Ţepeş, known as Dracula. Contrary to the prevailing fictive image, these stories portray Vlad as a wise although strict ruler and a proud defender of his country's autonomy. An introduction discusses the Transylvanian village and its rich folk traditions, making explicit the comparison to the historic and to the fictional Dracula.

Provides an overview of the people, beliefs, traditions, and history of Transylvania and examines the area's folklore.

Includes sixteen tales from Transylvanian folklore, arranged in three sections: Ghosts, Vampires, and Werewolves; Haunted Treasures; and Eerie Fairy Tales.

String garlic by the window and hang a cross around your neck! The most powerful vampire of all time returns in our Stepping Stone Classic adaption of the original tale by Bran Stoker. Follow Johnathan Harker, Mina Harker, and Dr. Abraham van Helsing as they discover the true nature of evil. Their battle to destroy Count Dracula takes them from the crags of his castle to the streets of London... and back again.

The Ultimate Collection of Vampire Facts and Fiction From Vlad the Impaler to Barnabas Collins to Edward Cullen to Dracula and Bill Compton, renowned religion expert and fearless vampire authority J. Gordon Melton, PhD takes the reader on a vast, alphabetic tour of the psychosexual, macabre world of the blood-sucking undead. Digging deep into the lore, myths, pop culture, and reported realities of vampires and vampire legends from across the globe, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead exposes everything about the blood thirsty predator. Death and immortality, sexual prowess and surrender, intimacy and alienation, rebellion and temptation. The allure of the vampire is eternal, and The Vampire Book explores it all. The historical, literary, mythological, biographical, and popular aspects of one of the world's most mesmerizing paranormal subject. This vast reference is an alphabetical tour of the psychosexual, macabre world of the soul-sucking undead. In the first fully revised and updated edition in a decade, Dr. J. Gordon Melton (president of the American chapter of the Transylvania Society of Dracula) bites even deeper into vampire lore, myths, reported realities, and legends that come from all around the world. From Transylvania to plague-infested Europe to Nostradamus and from modern literature to movies and TV series, this exhaustive guide furnishes more than 500 essays to quench your thirst for facts, biographies, definitions, and more.

Even before Bram Stoker immortalized Transylvania as the homeland of his fictional Count Dracula, the figure of the vampire was inextricably tied to Eastern Europe in the popular imagination. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected sources, this book offers a fascinating account of how vampires—whose various incarnations originally emerged from folk traditions from all over the world—became so strongly identified with Eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the modern conception of the vampire was born in the crucible of the Enlightenment, embodying a mysterious, Eastern otherness that stood opposed to Western rationality. From the Prologue: From Original Sin to Eternal Life For a broad contemporary public, the vampire has become a star, a media sensation from Hollywood. Bestselling authors such as Bram Stoker, Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer continue to fire the imaginations of young and old alike, and bloodsuckers have achieved immortality through films like Dracula, Interview with a Vampireand Twilight. It is no wonder that, in the teenage bedrooms of our globalized world, vampires even steal the show from Harry Potter. They have long since been assigned individual personalities and treated with sympathy. They may possess superhuman powers, but they are also burdened by their immortality and have to learn to come to terms with their craving for blood. Whereas the Southeast European vampire, discovered in the 1730s, underwent an Americanization and domestication in the media landscape of the twentieth century, the creole zombies that first became known through the cheap novels and horror films of the 1920s still continue to serve as brainless horror figures. Do bloodsuckers really exist and should we really be afraid of the dead? These are the questions that I seek to tackle, following the wishes of my daughter, who was ten when I started this project.

The first book to explore the origins of the vampire slayer “A fascinating comparison of the original vampire myths to their later literary transformations.” —Adam Morton, author of On Evil “From the Balkan Mountains to Beverly Hills, Bruce has mapped the vampire’s migration. There’s no better guide for the trek.” —Jan L. Perkowski, Professor, Slavic Department, University of Virginia, and author of Vampires of the Slavs and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism “The vampire slayer is our protector, our hero, our Buffy. But how much do we really know about him—or her? Very little, it turns out, and Bruce McClelland shows us why: because the vampire slayer is an unsettling figure, almost as disturbing as the evil she is set to destroy. Prepare to be frightened . . . and enlightened.” —Corey Robin, author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea “What is unique about this book is that it is the first of its kind to focus on the vampire hunter, rather than the vampire. As such, it makes a significant contribution to the field. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers of folklore, as well as anyone interested in the literature and popular culture of the vampire.” —Elizabeth Miller, author of Dracula and A Dracula Handbook “Shades of Van Helsing! Vampirologist extraordinaire Bruce McClelland has managed that rarest of feats: developing a radically new and thoroughly enlightening perspective on a topic of eternal fascination. Ranging from the icons of popular culture to previously overlooked details of Balkan and Slavic history and folk practice, he has rethought the borders of life and death, good and evil, saint and sinner, vampires and their slayers. Excellent scholarship, and a story that never flags.” —Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago, and author of Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship,Authority: Construction and Corrosion, and Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice

For many in the West, Romania is synonymous with Count Dracula. Since the publication of Bram Stoker's famous novel in 1897 Transylvania (and by extension, Romania) has become inseparable in the Western imagination with Dracula, vampires and the supernatural. Moreover, since the late 1960s Western tourists have travelled to Transylvania on their own searches for the literary and supernatural roots of the Dracula myth. Such 'Dracula tourism' presents Romania with a dilemma. On one hand, Dracula is Romania's unique selling point and has considerable potential to be exploited for economic gain. On the other hand, the whole notion of vampires and the supernatural is starkly at odds with Romania's self-image as a modern, developed, European state. This book examines the way that Romania has negotiated Dracula tourism over the past four decades. During the communist period (up to 1989) the Romanian state did almost nothing to encourage such tourism but reluctantly tolerated it. However, some discrete local initiatives were developed to cater for Dracula enthusiasts that operated at the margins of legality in a communist state. In the post-communist period (after 1989) any attempt to censor Dracula has disappeared and the private sector in Romania has been swift to exploit the commercial possibilities of the Count. However, the Romanian state remains ambivalent about Dracula and continues to be reluctant to encourage or promote Dracula tourism. As such Romania's dilemma with Dracula remains unresolved.

The figure of the vampire serves as both object and mode of analysis for more than a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Never dying, shifting shape and moving at unnatural speed, as the vampire renews itself by drinking victims' blood, so too does Hollywood renew itself by consuming foreign styles and talent, moving to overseas locations, and proliferating in new guises. In Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Dracula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation.