Love at First Bite
Year: 1979
Genre: horror, comedy
Country: United States
Director: Stan Dragoti
Degree of Relevance: High
The movie tells the story of Count Dracula, who gets thrown away from his own castle by the Communist government because they want to make it a training place for gymnasts like Nadia Comaneci. He has to travel to New York with his servant Renfield, and there he lives at a hotel. The tone of the movie is a hilarious one, since there are all sorts of funny situations (such as his coffin is sent by mistake to a funeral in Harlem). Dracula is surprised to see that there are discotheques and blood banks in America, and he starts to sympathize a fashion model, Cindy Sondheim. Eventually she accepts to get married with him and in the end we see them turning into bats and flying to Jamaica.
In my opinion, it is interesting to see a new approach on the same old tropes of the Romanian vampire. What makes this movie particularly special is the anachronism between the vampire’s world, an archaic one where he lives in a castle, and a modern setting in 1970’s America, where he has to move to a hotel. Moreover, he is stunned at the modern things he is seeing, such as the blood bank. However, I don’t believe this confirms the backward trope about Romania and the Balkans, but it does work based on stereotypes: vampires, Nadia Comaneci, Communism etc. All in all, it shows a funny part of Romania, not necessarily a bad one.
