1 IACOB, Mihai (2013). “The (Re)Construction of Transylvania in Vampire Films”, in José Igor Prieto-Arranz et alii, De-Centring Cultural Studies. Past, Present and Future of Popular Culture, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Chapter Fourteen, pp. 293-303. CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSYLVANIA IN VAMPIRE FILMS MIHAI IACOB The topic of this paper is part of a larger research project that aims to question the validity of the concept of Transylvanism and its potential use in the marketplace of ideas, together with similar, firmly established notions, like, for example, Orientalism, defined by Edward Said, and Balkanism, discussed by Maria Todorova. It presents an analysis of only one segment of the Transylvanian discourse (vampire films) 1 , in order to emphasize the two main paradigms that cinematic representations about the Transylvanian space share, namely the (more traditional) symbolic paradigm and the (updated) pseudo- realistic. Two of the key-features of these paradigmatic visions will also commented upon: heterogeneity and mobility. Most vampire fiction─even Bram Stoker’s famous novel (1897)─identifies the name Transylvania with Count Dracula’s homeland, a wild and backward country, at the end of the civilized world. 2 This image, a highly effective vehicle for the dissemination of geographical, historical, ethnic, ethnographical, and political information, is closely related to the survival of not only the clichés from gothic literature but also the hegemonic Western views over Eastern, especially Balkan, otherness. Nevertheless, apart from the ideological issues─which on the hole are still valid today, as has been proved by Edward Said and Maria Todorova, amongst others–we have to take into account the fact that the image of Transylvania as a cultural construct has been created mostly in the realm of literature and film. 3 It is precisely the distinctively unreal and fictional nature of this image that may set Transylvanism apart from the ideological constructs referred to above as Orientalism and Balkanism, created by literature and art, in general, as well as by a large corpus of non-fictional texts (historiography, travel memoires, newspaper articles, reports and political discourses, etc.). It is mainly because of the importance of non- 293 fictional texts that Orientalism and Balkanism have gradually become two institutionalised, organised, didactic and politically instrumentalised discourses, while Transylvanism is still relegated to the field of fiction and popular culture.