From Transylvania, with Love (and Not a Lot of Research)

I watched Nosferatu (2024) during a first date (no, it did not work out), and left the cinema pretty flabbergasted.

Was it because of the movie’s eerie gothic visuals? Maybe a little. But mostly, it was because I am Romanian and I’ve had to smile through one too many “Wait… so are you a vampire?” jokes.

So yes, I came into the theatre with some baggage. But I stayed for the geographical, cultural, vaguely vampirical inaccuracies. And let me tell you, they were… plentiful.

Now, if you’re not from Eastern Europe or haven’t spent much time learning about its tangled history and geography, it’s easy to miss how often Hollywood gets it wrong. But Nosferatu (2024) isn’t just about fog-drenched castles and plague rats. It’s part of a much bigger pattern: how Western cinema keeps exoticizing and mythologizing Eastern Europe as some Gothic theme park of doom.

Let’s break it down.

From Vlad to Orlok: A Brief History of the Bloodsucker

First of all, we should really start with the guy behind the myth: Vlad III - aka Vlad the Impaler - former Voievode of Wallachia (a portion of what is today Romania).

No, he was not a vampire. Though the Bran Castle is nowadays really milking this myth dry.

He was, however, a 15th-century Romanian prince best known for impaling his enemies and defending his territory from the Ottomans. Brutal? Absolutely. Obviously enough, making a forest of thousands of impaled corpses does not make for great PR. But in Romania, he’s remembered as a national hero who stood his ground when things got bloody (literally).

Now here’s the twist: the name “Dracula” didn’t start spooky. Vlad’s dad was a member of the Order of the Dragon (Dracul), a kind of elite anti-Ottoman knight squad. That made Vlad the Son of the Dragon. Or, if you squint hard enough and throw in some post-Enlightenment paranoia, Son of the Devil.

For my Romanians out there, yes ‘dracul’ does mean ‘the devil’ nowadays. Back then? Another story.

And then came Bram Stoker. And I do have a bone to pick with Bram Stoker. (Yes, I am calling him out while he is in his grave.)

This is the Irish author that wrote Dracula in 1897, the story from which Nosferatu was born. One very gloomy story about an aristocratic vampire from Transylvania. Weirdly enough, though, Bram has never stepped foot in Transylvania. All that he wrote, the background of his entire narrative, had been put together through various travel journals. And, call me a pessimist, but I can’t really believe that 19th century travel journals were the most trustworthy source. The proof lies in the fact that Stoker’s Dracula became more so a product of sociopolitical tensions in England at that time. The Count’s Transylvanian origins? We can read it as a play on the British fears of foreign infiltration. Dracula’s ability to blend into London society? The ongoing anxieties about hidden threats and the strength of the country’s borders.

And that is without talking about how vampirism as a trope has always served as a device of discrimination. The vampire, and this includes Stoker’s Dracula, became a metaphor for every late-Victorian fear rolled into one: homosexuality (sucking blood as an inherently sexual, non-reproductive act), disease, women with opinions and sexual freedom, Jewish people (Stoker’s depiction of Dracula comes straight from the criminology textbooks of the time), Eastern Europe, and all the other things that tickle the xenophobic imagination

So, what we got was a blood-sucking aristocrat from the ‘dark East’ who immigrated to England and upended the fragile human morality with his general vibe of sexual doom. Nice.

In 1922, F. W. Murnau gave us Count Orlok in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and things got even weirder.

Orlok is basically Dracula with all the sexy scrubbed off. He’s not suave. He’s not mysterious. He’s kind of a sentient sewer rat in a cloak. Gone is the Eastern European aristocrat with complicated motivations, Orlok is all pestilence and predation. The shadows are deeper, the teeth are longer, and he literally travels with plague rats. Do we have rats in Romania? Sure. But so does Paris, and we call that the City of Love.

This makeover wasn't random. Post-WWI Europe was riddled with fear: fear of disease, foreignness, decay. Orlok embodied it all. And with him, Transylvania became less a real place and more a gothic hellscape: foggy, forsaken, and forever cursed.

And here’s the kicker: that’s the image we’re still working with today.

From Vlad to Dracula to Orlok, a real historical figure (controversial, sure, but deeply rooted in Romanian identity) got hijacked by Western fiction and turned into shorthand for barbarism, monstrosity, and the spooky unknowable East. Like, imagine if Hollywood made Joan of Arc into a zombie and then told French people to chill. That’s kind of what happened here. A centuries-long game of telephone.

Why is Eastern Europe Always SO Foggy?

If you believed horror movies, you would think Eastern Europe is all fog, suspicious peasants mumbling vague threats in Slavic accents, and God knows what kind of rituals that involve a naked woman. This is a very much crafted image, rooted in postcolonial Gothic fiction, where the foreign and the unfamiliar are framed as the evil.

So, when the West needed to externalize the fears about disease, decay, sexuality, and immorality, it needed a place to pin them on. And this comes from humanity’s general need to establish borders because we cannot perceive the existence of order otherwise. Transylvania, the Balkans, ‘the East’, all became cinematic code for wild, untamed, irrational space. A place stuck in time. A place full of superstition, ancient evils, and villagers who’ve clearly never heard of Wi-Fi.

Robert Eggers, director of Nosferatu (2024), knows his way around a mood. And, in fairness, he nails the atmosphere: cobblestone streets, candlelight, unsettling silences…It is aesthetically gorgeous. But gorgeous isn’t always harmless. Because underneath the vibe is a persistent trope: Eastern Europe as the exoticized ‘Other.’

Take the way Transylvania is framed in the film: decaying architecture, eerie forests, and people that feel more like stock characters than real individuals. Orlok himself is less a person than a symbol: the East as danger, corruption, disease. His journey westward is a metaphor for cultural infection. And while it looks artsy in 4K, it’s also a little... tired.

This aesthetic isn’t unique to Nosferatu. Films like Van Helsing (2004), Dracula (1931), and even Hostel (2005) lean hard into the ‘Eastern Europe = cursed’ narrative. It’s always the same vibe: mystery, misery, and meat hanging ominously in doorways. We’re not saying the region’s never had problems. But let’s be honest, what region hasn’t?

The problem is that Western films rarely let Eastern Europe be anything but haunted. And when that’s the only version people see? You get it.

Eggers and… Geography?

Robert Eggers has built his whole brand on being historically obsessed, the guy who’ll shoot on Double-X stock black and white or resurrect dead folktales just to make sure the vibe is right. So when Nosferatu (2024) gets the geography wrong, you can imagine how fast my Romanian eyebrow twitched.

There’s a moment where Herr Knock points to a spot on the map and says Orlok’s castle is somewhere east of Bohemia. Now, Bohemia is in the Czech Republic. East of Bohemia puts you… not in Transylvania, but somewhere around Slovakia or Poland. Meanwhile, actual Transylvania is in Romania (or Hungary, back then), surrounded by the Eastern and Southern Carpathians, hundreds of kilometers away from wherever Knock is pointing. Unless Orlok commutes by bat, the math ain’t mathing.

And yes, horror cinema has never been obsessed with pinpoint accuracy. Transylvania, in particular, has long existed more as a mood than a location. But here’s the catch: when you’re making a film that prides itself on historical realism, and you still treat Eastern Europe like a vague spooky blur, that says something.

Because it’s about how geography is used as shorthand. ‘Over there’ becomes backwards, ancient, dangerous. In Eggers’s Nosferatu, Transylvania is a land out of time: crumbling, isolated, and utterly Other. And when that image is repeated across decades of cinema, it stops being fiction. It is now more of an expectation.

So yes, I’ll give Eggers credit for the candlelit mood and dusty ambiance. But next time, maybe double-check the map before claiming historical accuracy. The Carpathians deserve better.

Rats, Gypsies, and Other Gothic Tropes

It doesn’t stop at fog and bad map reading. Someone did a great job at plunging their hand deep into the bag of dusty old tropes and pulling out the full set: rats, gypsies, ancient curses, and a dash of Eastern European doom for flavor.

Let’s start with the rats. Yes, the original Nosferatu (1922) had rats, lots of them. Count Orlok is feared because he brings plague. But in Eggers’s version, the rats feel... curated. Beautifully shot. Symbolic. And yet still very much there to say: ‘Look! Disease! Foreign threat! Be afraid!’

The vampire-as-contagion trope has always doubled as a metaphor for unwanted foreign influence, for bodily corruption, for social decay. Orlok is a walking, creeping metaphor for everything the West fears the East might bring.

Then there’s the ‘gypsies’. (Deep breaths. Bear with me.)

In the film, the locals in Orlok’s village are referred to as ‘gypsies’, a term that’s already a problem (most Romani people can tell you that it is an offensive term for them), and they’re portrayed ambiguously. Some wear traditional Romanian clothes. Some speak Romanian. Which is also very funny, because the German characters got to speak English, but the Eastern Europeans spoke in their mother-tongue. Double standards and all.

But here’s the thing: Romani ≠ Romanian.

This conflation is more than just a slip-up. It’s a continuation of a long cinematic tradition of exoticizing and homogenizing everything east of Vienna. Romani people are an ethnic minority with a distinct language, history, and set of cultural practices. Romanians are, well, the people who live in Romania. The confusion between the two is lazy at best and damaging at worst, erasing both groups and flattening them into one superstitious, shadowy collective.

This is where gothic horror tends to thrive, in that vague, unplaceable haze of the Other. And sure, that’s part of the genre’s appeal. But when you’re still leaning on 19th-century stereotypes in 2024, it’s time to ask whether your aesthetic choices are just reinforcing old prejudices with better lighting.

Even characters like Herr Knock and Friedrich, with their grotesque behaviors (rat-eating, necrophilia - yes, that happens), seem to function as symptoms of Orlok’s influence. The East arrives, and the West goes feral. It’s the same story: rational Europe gets corrupted by Eastern madness. Cue the plague, cue the sex panic, cue the howling wolves.

Meanwhile, Ellen, our pale, passive protagonist, becomes the site of this contamination. Her body, her desires, and eventually her fate are all shaped by Orlok’s presence. The vampire isn’t just after blood. He’s after purity, order, and Western identity. And horror cinema (bless its dramatic heart) eats that metaphor right up.

So yes, the film is gorgeous. Yes, it respects its gothic roots. But that does not exclude the fact that there are so many things that could have been done better.

Why Bother Ranting About It?

Look, I get it. It’s just a vampire movie. It’s stylish, spooky, gorgeously shot. Bill Skarsgård does a great job being unsettling with minimal dialogue. The fog is dramatic. The castles are crumbly. The rats are doing their best.

But here’s the thing: people absorb this stuff.

And I mean that literally. Every American I’ve ever met, and I mean every single one, has either asked me ‘Wait… are you a vampire?’ or, worse, ‘Is Eastern Europe really like that?’ Like what, exactly? Grey and diseased? Full of wolves and superstitious villagers? Frozen in time? The level of genuine confusion is almost impressive. (Disclaimer: I do love my American friends anyway.)

This isn’t just about one film. It’s about what happens when pop culture becomes the main reference point for entire regions, especially when those portrayals are lazy, stereotyped, or outright wrong. When Eastern Europe is constantly framed as diseased, primitive, or permanently haunted, even in prestige cinema like Nosferatu (2024), that image starts to stick. Not just as fiction, but as cultural fact.

Romania becomes shorthand for creepy, poor, or probably cursed. Romani people become mystical extras in someone else’s horror fantasy. Transylvania becomes an eternal vampire cosplay zone. And the actual, modern, complicated region I come from? It disappears under a pile of fog and fake blood.

That’s why it matters. That’s why I’m ranting.

Because if you're going to make a film that claims to be historically detailed, culturally aware, and artistically serious… then you should actually care about the people and places you're portraying. Otherwise, you’re not honoring tradition. You're just recycling stereotypes in velvet capes and candlelight.

And I say this as a Romanian who genuinely loves a good vampire story. But loving something doesn’t mean letting it off the hook. Especially when it keeps romanticizing your home country as a graveyard with excellent ambiance.

One more vampire trope dies tonight. May it rest in a coffin. Or whatever.