52 • SFRA Review 52.1 • Winter 2022 Undead Culture in the East: Te Hungarian Vampire Negotiating the National Past in Comrade Drakulich Ildikó Limpár Western culture’s undead renaissance has a spectacular efect on European culture, and it has brought about nation-specifc variations in Hungary. But while in the past two decades the West has been more invested in the vampire lover than in the political vampire (who may be as much of a seducer as the revenant in the supernatural romances), Hungary has rediscovered the political potentials of the bloodsucking undead. Tis phenomenon is almost self-explanatory: frstly, the fgure of the vampire—the hybrid creature that is both living and dead—is a genuinely apt signifer of the haunting past that needs to be confronted and settled; and secondly, Hungary has its own historical connections to the literary vampire, as Transylvania, homeland of Dracula, used to be part of Hungary but was lost with the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. Terefore, spinning narratives with the vampire appears as a most natural Hungarian method to re-create fctive, alternative pasts to travel back and forth and thereby “harass” the present (Miklósvölgyi and Nemes). Nemes explains that practicing “a type of spectral retrofuturism, a returning which is not quite a repetition” (qtd. in Harrison, “Eastern Europe’s” n.p.) is what Hungarofuturism aims to do in order to oppose the Hungarian government’s essentializing view of what it means to be Hungarian (Harrison, “How a Futurist” n.p.) and to ofer a new perspective on Hungarianness. Such literary endeavors include Noémi Szécsi’s parodistic novel Finnugor vámpír (2002) [Te Finno-Ugrian Vampire, 2012] and Szabolcs Benedek’s Vérgróf [Blood Count] trilogy (2012–2013), 1 both working with historical settings and the character of the vampire to radically re-imagine history, as well as Ágnes Gaura’s ongoing Borbála Borbíró series (2012–), 2 set in a contemporary, alternative Hungary and regularly using vampire characters to reminisce and comment about the past and thus remythologize both the national identity and the present. Among these works, Benedek’s lacks an ironical stance, while both Szécsi and Gaura use heavy irony as a tool to dismantle enforced, essentializing concepts about Hungarianness; 3 yet, independently of the authors’ artistic techniques (and the date of their publication), they qualify as Hungarofuturist works inasmuch as they contribute to “an identity-poetic experiment in radical imagination, through which an emergent minority identity can feed into a strategy of post-ironic overidentifcation” (Nemes, qtd. in Harrison, “Eastern Europe’s” n.p.). Te same applies for the subject matter of the present study, the satirical vampire movie Comrade Drakulich, released in 2019 but set in 1972, which works to recreate a fctional past by connecting the protagonist vampire to the communist-socialist so-called Kádár era. While this flm clearly aims at providing a critical view on a much debated, dark era of Hungarian history, I argue that its efort to utilize the motif of the undead comments equally on the Hungarian “ofcial,” that is, the government- SYMPOSIUM: THE HUNGARIAN FANTASTIC SYMPOSIUM: THE HUNGARIAN FANTASTIC