Across the Danube lie the Balkans; Western European perception of these lands aids in the portrayals of Europeans as heroes and everyone else as villains through a process that treated "the Balkans as the site of the primitive, archaic, and irrational," in which "the strategy of exoticization renders the vampire story more plausible."

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader framework of how the West constructs the East as exotic 'other' to justify its own heroism.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 534