The annual Dracula conference this year focused on fear. Attendance however was down, reports Ann McElhinney from Sighisoara, due to ... fear.
The World Dracula Congress in Transylvania attracts an eclectic bunch.
There are vampire-believing Scottish bank clerks who subscribe to Bite Me magazine, the odd German forensic pathologist specialising in ageing maggots that emerge from rotting corpses and the chairman of the English Ghost Club (membership 250).
The theme of this year's congress is fear. It was warming up to be a thorough examination of how we have all been affected by September 11th, SARS, the war in Iraq, chemical weapons and lots of other scary things.
Unfortunately, the debate was at times slow as numbers attending were low. The organisers attributed this to, er . . . fear. It seemed people were refusing to travel to discuss fear due to fear of September 11th, SARS and the war in Iraq etc.
Those who didn't travel missed international academics exploring how the fictional creation of Bram Stoker, the Irish writer and creator of Dracula, still fills us with horror.
The book's drawing power is undisputed. Over a century after publication, Dracula has never been out of print. It has inspired almost 1,000 films, hundreds of books have analysed its meaning and countless theories have been formulated as to Stoker's inspiration.
Freudians see it as blatantly dipal. Feminists think it an attack on female sexuality while the gay lobby is delighted with the homoerotic references.
Of course no academic conference would be complete without the academic who tells us that everything we think we know about the subject is completely wrong.
Step forward Prof Elizabeth Miller, a world expert on Stoker's novel and author of Dracula: Sense and nonsense. She says she fears the fictional Dracula would get lost in all the other fictions that have been ascribed to author Bram Stoker. The phrase "rubbish and yet more rubbish" is much used by her.
She tells how Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania despite oceans of print that says he did. But that is the least of the mistakes, says Prof Miller, who has analysed encyclopedias, quality newspapers, documentaries and coffin-loads of learned tomes. She found 70 statements of fact about Dracula and Bram Stoker which she says are "absolute nonsense".
To her horror, Dracula experts have claimed Bram Stoker was sexually abused as a child. Or they say that as an adult he was in love with Henry Irving, the English actor. This is the same Irving other experts say Stoker hated so much Dracula is based on him. Oh and there's the one about the novel being inspired by the author eating a dodgy seafood supper. Indeed. All very interesting but according to Prof Miller there is no evidence to back up any of the claims.
Then she tackles the biggest myth of them all: "The most prevalent and deeply entrenched misconception about Stoker's novel is that it was inspired by the exploits of Vlad the Impaler.
"Let me say categorically . . . Vlad was not Bram Stoker's inspiration for Dracula."
It seems Stoker knew very little about Vlad, the 15th century Transylvanian ruler with a penchant for impaling his enemies. The little he did know, Prof Miller says, was gleaned from a few paragraphs he read in a book at the Whitby public library in the summer of 1890.
Among the more outlandish claims the professor is trying to quash is that Dracula was inspired by the trial of Oscar Wilde. Stoker and Wilde were friends and according to some the novel reflects the cruelty of the trial. The only problem with this theory, says Prof Miller, is that the novel was published five years before the trial began.
The setting for this year's congress is Sighisoara, a walled town and UNESCO world heritage site with the most perfectly preserved medieval settlement in Europe. The brilliantly coloured houses of the citadel are glorious in the May sunshine, their handmade terracotta tiled roofs brilliant against the bluest skies.
Delegates at the congress sit out in the town square under an ancient clock tower and sip "Vampire wine". United by a sense of the supernatural and the extraordinary, they exchange ghost stories and Dracula theories in the square where Vlad the Impaler played as a toddler.
The house where he was born sits opposite. It is now a restaurant with possibly the worst service in Romania, no easy feat in this post-communist country where the customer always comes last. As the sun sets over the beautiful walled city we all agree the Dracula restaurant is the only thing in this perfect place to be truly feared.