Jenő Farkas

By request of Professor Jenő Farkas of Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, The Vampire's Vault herewith publishes his new article about the lost cover image of the film-book of Death of Dracula, the long-forgotten Hungarian film version of the Dracula story by Károly Lajthay (1921). We are happy to be a part of Professor Farkas' exciting quest.

Jenő Farkas, a Hungarian scholar, is the author of two works on Dracula: The History of Voivode Dracula (1989, Academy Editions) and Dracula and the Vampires (2010, Palamart Editions). He was the first to unearth and present the screenplay of the film Drakula halála in 1997 in the magazine Filmújság in Budapest (Lokke Heiss: Graven Images: The Search for Drakula Part 2). He is also a specialist in Romanian literature and a translator. For decades, he has conducted extensive research on the lost silent film in various Hungarian libraries. His collection of documents on The Death of Dracula contains numerous new findings. He has authored twelve books.

The illustrations no. 3 and 4 (photo copies of the original cover) are published in this article for the first time.

You can download the complete illustrated article for free below.

The copyright to the article remains with  Jenő Farkas.

After the publication of this article, I had a most pleasant email exchange with Professor Farkas about the cover pictures reproduced in his paper. At a certain point, it seemed improbable to me that the original cover would have been lost, and replaced with a new copy based on Pocsai's materials. In the article that you can download below, I explain my doubts and my suspicions - and how they proved to be right in the end!

With two extra illustrations added on February 6, 2026.

The foreword by Maria SZEPES to the re-issue of "Drakula és a vámpírok" is published here again, for free. Illustrations and some explanatory remarks have been added. Introductory words and translation: Professor Jenő Farkas, Budapest. Lay-out and image editing: Hans Corneel de Roos, Bantayan Island.

The article gives a unique first-hand insight into Hungarian film making during the Interbellum and provides rare background information about the makers of the movie Drakula Halála - the first Dracula movie ever.

During the last week of February 2026, I edited a third essay sent to me by Professor Farkas: "An Unknown Episode in the History of The Death of Dracula," highlighting a giant psychiatric institution in Vienna as the location where the interior scenes of Drakula Halála were filmed. The Otto-Wagner-Hospital or "Klinik Penzing" am Steinhof had been opened in 1907 and with 2,800 beds spread over sixty pavilions, it was the largest asylum in Europe. Farkas analyzes the dynamics of "heimlich" and "unheimlich" in Lajthay's silent movie - the first Dracula movie ever - and provides us with background information about this crucial location.

Although this article does not directly deal with Dracula, it gives valuable insights into the practice of translating and adapting popular novels for a foreign public. Publishers, newspapers, magazines and translators were competing to make this exciting material available to their readers as quickly as possible and trim it to their specific needs. The process of serialization and modification is very similar to the one used for the later Hungarian, Swedish and Icelandic translations of Dracula. Therefore, I am very happy to present this essay by the hand of Professor Farkas here, in English; a French version was published in 2023. You can download the richly illustrated PDF for free below.