"If a person who has already been buried is still pestering the villagers, they will dig up his body, take out his heart and burn it, and make a potion out of the burned ash, including the man's relatives, and all those who are entangled with him must drink this potion, only in this way can they escape his entanglement."
This is not witchcraft, but the folk culture of Transylvania.
Transylvania: Located in southeastern Europe, west of the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, in the Tissa River Basin, a tributary of the Danube River, it refers to the central and western regions of Romania. In the 14th century, three principalities were established successively, Wallachia, Moldova and Transylvania, and it was not until after World War II that the three principalities were truly united to form the independent Romanian People's Republic.
Historically, under the long-term control of Russia and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), the war never seems to have stopped.
The image of the vampire can be traced back to the influence of Orthodox doctrines, as well as the epitome of local history, and it is inseparable from the forging of local folk customs and ideology. And the movie "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love", behind the romantic and moving love, is a tangle between religion and folk culture...
Transylvanians firmly believe that after death, one either goes to heaven or goes to hell.
According to Romanian traditional consciousness, it is believed that the body does not decay until the soul enters heaven or hell, so Romanians will exhum the body of the deceased after up to seven years. Therefore, the people here are very afraid of death, thinking that it is an abnormal thing, the bitter fruit of what Adam and Eve planted in the Garden of Eden.
If the bones of the deceased are dug up and snow-white, it means that the soul has rested permanently, but if the body is not completely decomposed, they believe that the soul is trapped in the mortal world and has become a vampire-like evil ghost called "Strigoe", but Strigoe does not suck blood, at most stealing cow's milk, or causing male impotence, or destroying crops, and torturing everyone they encounter, they lurk between the sun and hell, a bit like the lone ghosts that we say cannot be reincarnated.
In order to drive out Strigoce, people would dig up undecavened corpses and perform various exorcism rituals, of course, in addition to potions, including beheading, burning, nailing stakes into the heart, or using garlic to ward off evil spirits...
In our Hakka burial, we will also dig up the coffin of the deceased after seven years, just to lay the bones and bury it, but we only firmly believe that the relatives have long been reincarnated, and the bones are only respect for the relatives, and it is also the Hakka family's habit in the tradition of historical migration, in order to make it more convenient to migrate.
In the movie, Mr. Lin Zhengying, an old predecessor of Hong Kong, also uses Maoshan techniques to suppress or burn oriental zombies with peach wood swords. We folk, there is also a garlic to ward off evil sayings... It seems that the global way to deal with uneasy souls is similar.
Romanians are very religious, about 90% of the region belongs to the Orthodox Parish, mostly belong to the medieval style of the city, especially Transylvania, here has a deep folk ritual style, the suburbs look very desolate, the infrastructure is not very sound, so in many rural areas, still live 150 years ago.
There are many theories about the origin of vampires: they existed in ancient Babylon, Egypt, and South America. The most widely circulated are the legend of Cain in The Dark World, or sumerian mythology with Satan's lover Lilith, and of course, a misinterpretation of disease that originated before the 16th century, such as the 17 plagues that broke out in England: people dug up some graves, and sometimes saw the corpses as if they were alive: their hair and nails grew longer, they grew beards, some eyes were open, their lips contracted, and their teeth exposed, which also became one of the origins of vampires. Bats and werewolves in the animal kingdom have also become indispensable personal spokesmen for vampires.
And medieval vampire legends, really and largely, are the result of church intimidation. The Church declares that any suicidal, unclean, pagan person will become a vampire after death.
The special folk culture of Transylvania, and guided by the guidance of Christian doctrine, makes Romania the best soil for vampires. Thus, Dracula became the most perfect vampire.
The novel "Dracula the Vampire" by irish writer Bram Stoker is based on Ferrard Dracula, an archetypal character in Transylvania's history. "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love" is adapted from this book.
As a result, the Austrian army and government in the 18th century, when the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire were in disputes, the Austrian army and government investigated and recorded the strange burial ceremonies of the dead, and the earliest cultural background of Dracula was moved from the original Austria to Stoker's Transylvania.
In Dracula (1931), the image of Count Dracula was cast as a flattened horror label, a supernatural monster of pure evil. To a certain extent, "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love" also idealizes and vulgarizes the whole story and the characters in it, portraying Count Dracula as a kind and pious lover, and carefully filtering out the evil and animal nature belonging to vampires.
I quite agree with this review.
Ferrad Dracula became count of the Duchy of Valakia at the age of five or six, was sent to Constantinople as a hostage in the Ottoman Turkish Empire at the age of twelve, and did not leave until the age of seventeen.
Five years of captivity and the death of his loved ones left Dracula in excruciating pain and later becoming violent. At the age of seventeen, with the support of the Sultan of Turkey, he led an army to retake Wallachia and regain power, and the first thing he did after coming to power was to purge dissidents, use harsh methods, and use various harsh punishments to treat criminals to clean up the country, the most famous of which was puncture punishment.
He stripped the captured more than 20,000 Turkish soldiers naked and showed them to the public, and pierced them from the anus of the living with wooden stakes, and then pierced them from their mouths, standing on the border, called the forest of wooden stakes. When the powerful Ottoman Turkish army came to invade, seeing this cruel scene, they were directly frightened, and for this reason, the Romanians regarded Dracula as a national hero. But the bloodthirsty brutality of Count Dracula spread throughout Europe, and the name "vampire" was born.
But there is also another interpretation that says that in fact, Dracula is not as brutal as he imagined, because the country is small, in order to fight against the powerful Ottoman Empire, he deliberately portrays himself as brutal and terrifying. Perhaps, the world of kings, always lonely, does not need people to understand, on the contrary, only needs inexhaustible strength, even if it is the ultimate cruelty.
In "Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love", Dracula's image is more entangled in this contradictory historical fog and the fusion of folk culture, and the vampire becomes both elegant and evil, that is, amorous, selfish, good, and arbitrary...