A bloody fang-tastic idea: why everyone should embrace their vampire

“The blood is the life…and it shall be mine!” Bram Stoker, Dracula

Organizers of the Untold Music Festival in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania have teamed up with the Romanian National Institute of Blood Transfusion offering ticket discounts and free one-day passes for people who donate blood. The number of active blood donors in Romania is among the lowest in Europe with only 1.7% of the population donating blood, most only because someone close to them needs a transfusion.

When you live in Transylvania, like it or not, Dracula is in your blood. Only recently has the Romanian government begun promoting Romania as a destination for vampire tourists, noting in a press release that...

“The Dracula brand existed for a long time, we only need to exploit it and wrap it properly and then sell it in a modern manner.”

Romania has been hesitant to sell Dracula because of the competing legend of Vlad "the Impaler" Tepes. Bram Stoker is said to have used Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (1431-1476)--also known as Vlad Dracul--as a model for Dracula, but for Romanians he is a national hero who fought for independence from the Ottoman Empire, not a bloodsucking vampire. Dracula was thus a smear campaign against a brave patriot.

But Dracula was not English literature's first vampire. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron was holed up in a villa on Lake Geneva where he fled to escape marital difficulties. He was joined by some friends including the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his mistress, Mary Godwin (later to be Mary Shelley) along with his personal physician John Polidori. With no LinkedIn, Facebook or Netflix to entertain them in the evenings, they read one another ghost stories. Byron suggested everyone write a ghost story of their own.

This writing assignment spawned both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre, the story of an aristocrat with a taste for virginal necks that became hugely popular in England. Lord Byron's escape to Geneva proved beyond a doubt that off-site brainstorming sessions really do work.

Almost seventy years later Bram Stoker, a civil servant with a taste for horror, did his take on the vampire myth. Though he never visited Transylvania, Stoker immersed himself in its lore and legends, what he called a "whirlpool of the imagination".

Drawing from a plump vein flowing through the human psyche, it's no wonder that Dracula has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897...

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went down below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat...

Nobody writes erotica like a prudish Victorian. 

Is Dracula about man's fear of female sexual expression or man's fear of his own sexuality? Is it about the invasion of a 'foreign other' or the threat that science and technology pose to religion? Who knows, but Dracula is a sexiest travel brochure a country could wish for. It is not, however, the blueprint for a theme park.

DraculaPark, to be built in the heart of Transylvania, was the brainchild of Matei Dan, Romania's minister of tourism, a man with an overheated jacuzzi of an imagination.

“OK, I knew my project was unconventional. Original! Shocking! But I want to use it to attract a million tourists a year. It's time Dracula went to work for Romania.”

The site Dan chose for DraculaPark was the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the town of Sighisoara (featured in the scary tourism video below) also known as "pearl of Transylvania" a Saxon village preserved since the 13th century. Sighisoara was to become the site of a theme park castle complete with torture chamber and an Institute for Vampirology featuring a workshop for teeth sharpening. The DraculaPark restaurant on DraculaLake would serve blood pudding, stake dinners and disgusting things entombed in gelatin.

Intellectuals and artists were mortified and rose up in protest. Even Prince Charles got involved declaring DraculaPark to be "wholly out of sympathy with the area".

Some 14,000 Romanians bought shares worth EUR 1 million in the project and large private companies contributed EUR 2 million. They never recovered the money. The project was moved to a site north of Bucharest airport then abandoned. In January of this year it rose from the dead, rebranded as The Impaler Park. One can only hope that trailers are part of the plan so that there can be a trailer park in The Impaler Park.

The Romanian Ministry of Tourism, acknowledging the allure of its most famous impaler, has struggled mightily with how to package Dracula, erring on the side of too much audacity and too little...

Had to cut eight minutes down to one and a half to spare you the full horror--apparently it is possible to make Dracula look boring.

The organizers of the Untold Music Festival have found the right blend of Dracula and bloodletting that is neither banal nor overkill. As the festival's director general Bogdan Buta says...

“Given that Romania faces an acute blood shortage in medical facilities, a campaign that takes inspiration from these myths to draw attention to a real problem is more than welcome.”

The festival's PR manager's phone has been ringing non-stop since the Pay with Blood campaign was announced. Considering that many young people in Romania don’t donate blood and the festival is aimed at youth, organizers have seized a golden opportunity. Forty-five people, many first-time donors, had signed up and given blood by noon on the campaign’s first day.

We all have such opportunities lurking within our myths--the unwelcome Dracula stories that become part of who we are. Companies often struggle with such stories--an earthbound IBM that would rather be in the cloud, a nostalgia-ridden McDonald's that would rather be a modern progressive hamburger company. But if we are patient we can take inspiration from our myths and transfuse that narrative energy. 

As Bram Stoker would say...

I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.

Does branding get any better than this?

About the Author: Lynne Everatt is a former Globe and Mail Careers columnist, author of two books, Drink Wine and Giggle and Emails from the Edge (nominated for the Stephen Leacock award for humour). She was surprised to discover that Dracula is available as a LinkedIn tag and that Vampire Weekend is not on the bill at the Untold Music Festival. Lynne wishes everyone in LinkedIn languorous ecstasy.