Spectacle and silence: vampire tourism and the erosion of folkloric cadence in Romania and Serbia

Abstract

This article stands at the boundary between spectacle and silence, tracing how vampire myth erodes differently in Romania and Serbia. In Romania, ancestral beliefs once woven into ritual life have been transformed into global spectacle—Dracula branding, tourism circuits, and algorithm-driven fragments. The myth remains visible but emotionally thinned, present yet disconnected from its cultural memory. In a rural Serbian village, by contrast, the vampir and veštica persist quietly in elders’ fading recollections. Their stories are not erased by censorship but by generational drift, a slow cultural erosion. Drawing on trauma theory, cultural memory studies, and ethnography, the article asks what is preserved when myth becomes a commodity, and what is lost when it fades without fanfare. It argues that both spectacle and silence diminish folkloric cadence, though Serbia’s quiet may signal care rather than absence. The folklorist becomes a witness to fragile memory, tending stories before they disappear.