VAMPIRE TOURISTS

No other practice better exemplifies mobility in popular culture than tourist travel. And no form of tourist travel provides a more surprising blend of reality and fiction, folk and popular culture, than vampire tourism. According to geographer Duncan Light, vampire tourism is a form of “media tourism,” a practice whereby fans of a fictional story or character—whether portrayed in a novel, film, or television program—travel to key places and landscapes in the plot. The New Zealand locations of the Lord of the Rings film series, for example, have become a key destination for the country’s foreign tourists (Figure 2.31).

Vampires are popping up everywhere in popular culture. They appear in novels and cinema (the Twilight series), animated feature films (Hotel Transylvania), graphic novels (Interview with the Vampire: Claudia’s Story), and cable television (Vampire Diaries). So saturated is popular culture with vampire stories that one would be hard pressed to find a mass entertainment medium in which they do not materialize. Interestingly, the undead lives of these ubiquitous blood suckers are anchored in real geography, resulting in the rapid growth in vampire tourism nationally and globally. The Lonely Planet, a well-known publisher of travel guides, features a list of the “world’s best vampire-spotting locations” on its web site.

Fictional vampire characters appear in the most unexpected places, including Forks, Washington; New Orleans, Louisiana; Volterra, Italy; and Mystic Falls, Virginia. Actually, Mystic Falls, the setting for the Vampire Diaries, is fictional, too, but the television show is shot in real-life Covington, Georgia. Entrepreneurs in Covington have wasted no time creating “Mystic Falls” tour packages. As one web site advertises, “The Mystic Falls Tour is the perfect destination for travelers looking for a memorable Vampire Diaries adventure.” Forks, Washington, where the Twilight series is based, has been overrun by hundreds of tourists daily—many of them young women around the age of Bella’s character—a phenomenon that has significantly improved the fortunes of this economically depressed logging town.

The Curse of Dracula, Revisited Forks and Covington, however, are mere way stations on the pilgrimage route to the mecca of vampire tourism, the Transylvania region of Romania (Figure 2.32). Transylvania is home to the world’s most famous vampire, Count Dracula, subject of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and of the numerous subsequent film versions. Dracula already had an international reputation—the novel has been translated into numerous languages—when Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula made the count a global personality. Stoker loosely based Dracula on vampire folktales that circulated throughout southeastern Europe in the eighteenth century. In his novel, Stoker located the count’s home in Transylvania’s Dran Castle, which makes it a global destination for vampire tourists (Figure 2.33). Ironically, no folk tradition of vampirism exists in the region’s culture. This inconvenient fact did not prevent Stoker from vaguely modeling Count Dracula on Vald III (or Vlad Ţepeş), a real-life Transylvanian ruler from the 1450s whom the Romanians revere as a nationalist hero for his role in repelling an Ottoman Turkish invasion.

Light shows in his study The Dracula Dilemma how vampire tourism raises difficult questions for the Romanian government and its citizens on issues of national and cultural identity. The Dracula story, Light points out, positions Romania as a backward, superstitious region on the eastern margins of modern, civilized western Europe. Moreover, Stoker links the evil beast Dracula, who is threatening the English homeland, to Vlad III, a heroic figure in the creation of Romanian cultural and national identity. Imagine the world outside the United States believing George Washington was a vampire. In short, Stoker’s character casts Romania in a negative light and challenges its citizens’ national identity at its deepest level. Dracula is an awkward figure around which to build a Romanian tourist industry.

Cashing In on the Count Until 1989 Romania was a communist country where government censorship of popular media, including the Dracula stories, was widespread. When the country abandoned communism, it lifted censorship and unleashed private entrepreneurship. Stoker’s novel and Coppola’s film began to circulate widely in Romania. The borders were opened up to the global tourist industry. Businesses started trading on the Dracula name, which is used to market guesthouses, restaurants, and even beer and cigarettes (Figure 2.34). The main marketing target is foreign tourists arriving to visit the “home” of Dracula.

The Romanian government and many citizens were not as quick as entrepreneurs to embrace Stoker’s portrayal of Transylvania. As Light points out, the Romanian nation-state wishes “to project a sense of its own political and cultural identity to the wider world on its own terms.” Those terms are defined by a desire to be politically and economically integrated into the European Union while maintaining a distinct and proud cultural heritage. The ironies and frustrations of being the nation and culture most identified with Dracula are manifold, not least being the fact that no tradition of vampires exists in Romanian folklore. According to Light, Romanians do not and never did believe in vampires, but the whole world thinks of Transylvania as the home of the most infamous vampire of all.

Vampire tourism illustrates a number of features of mobility in popular culture. There is the mobility of the vampire myth; the ways it is transported and transplanted from folk to popular culture; the ways it circulates globally, linking unlikely places as distant and dissimilar as Forks and Transylvania; and the ways it has set people in motion in search of direct experiences with these places. Fictional characters move through factual landscapes and consequently affect real-life political, economic, and cultural relations through media tourism. The mobility of vampire tourists following fictional plot lines, as Light emphasizes for Romania, “illustrates global inequalities and asymmetries in cultural power.” The Romanian government and citizenry have fought a losing battle for control over representation of their cultural heritage. In popular culture, Transylvania appears doomed to an undying association with a superstition transported from folk traditions rooted in far-off places.