The transmedial triangulation of Dracula: how cinema turned the Gothic bloodsucker into a Gothicized serial killer

Abstract

G. M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu’s Vampirul (The Vampire), the first vampire novel in Romania, was published in 1938, a decade after the release of the first translation of Dracula into Romanian. Instead of emulating Stoker’s bloodthirsty undead aristocrat, the two authors envision a priest who exploits the community’s magical thinking, masquerading as a vampire-serial killer and haunting the increasingly industrialized community in the hopes of discouraging capitalistic ventures. Although evoking East-Central European representations of heretic vampire priests, there is textual and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the villain in Vampirul was (in)directly inspired by movies which revolutionized the Gothic trope of the vampire via exposure to real-life crime cases such as that of the Vampire of Düsseldorf. Through a close reading analysis, the article revisits Franco Moretti’s theory of the (semi)peripheries importing “foreign plots” through “local characters” and expands Andrei Terian’s concept of “cultural triangulation” to include cinema, which offers fresh insights into the evolution of literary tropes. As for the influence of this medium on the vampire myth, the article shows that the first vampire narrative in Romanian literature is the product of transmedial triangulation, a process whereby the narratives of 1930s horror cinema influenced the literary reception of the “foreign plot” in Dracula, which was, in turn, reinterpreted through a serial killer vampire priest, a “local character” who embodies the period’s concerns about a lingering feudal order that threatens to hinder the development of the then fledgling Romanian society.