Transylvania music fest embraces Dracula lore to bring in blood donations

A dance music festival in Romania has found the key to drawing more attendees to a unique event.

Untold Festival, which has been held in Romania’s Transylvania region annually since 2015, has harnessed the power of regional vampire folklore for music — and a good cause.

The story and fear of the vampire Dracula has lived beyond Transylvanian history since Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.”

In that vein, Untold established its own Blood Network program that encourages eager attendees to donate blood in exchange for a complimentary day pass.

The festival has collected the thousands of gallons of blood it has received over the last eight years to medical centers throughout Romania, according to Billboard.

“We thought, ‘What if we make a campaign based on the idea that vampires from Transylvania usually suck blood — but in this case, they don’t suck blood, but [rather] donate it?’ ” co-founder Edy Chereji said of the festival, which takes place in Cluj-Napoca at the Cluj Arena.

Untold Festival took the premise and flew with it, debuting the blood drive campaign — initially called Pay with Blood — with a whopping1,500 Romanians donating blood around the country that first year.

Now attendees come from other countries, and even Asia and North America, for the spectacle.

‘In this case they don’t suck blood, but [rather] donate it.’

The latest installment — from Aug. 3 to 6 — brought in 420,000 attendees to watch more than 200 genre-diverse dance artists. The lineup included David Guetta, Bebe Rexha, French Montana and Steve Aoki, with Imagine Dragons as one of the headliners.

Another O-positive aspect of the blood campaign was spreading the word about the event, allowing the festival to become Romania’s largest electronic music festival. It reigns supreme in the small collection of dance music festivals in the greater region, and the blood-sucking growth in Romania isn’t stopping.

In 2016, the parent company Untold Universe debuted Neversea, an event taking place in Constanța, a beach town on the Black Sea. A counterbalanced winter event, Massif, takes place in Poiana Brasov, home to a ski resort.

According to Billboard, Untold will stretch beyond the region into Dubai to launch another dance festival in February.

Although the folklore of Dracula has made it out of the region, the Blood Network program remains local. The festival’s second year saw donors being allowed to donate at both transfusion centers and a mobile donation center that traversed the country.

The mobile option has become a lifeline for the campaign, and the process is as easy as showing up to the donation center, giving blood and receiving a free festival day pass on the spot.

Leading up to this year’s four-day fest, the center hit 12 Romanian cities between May and June. This year “more than 5,000 donors gave more than 2,200 liters (roughly 580 gallons) of blood,” reported Billboard.

The charitable component of the Untold Festival is important in a country where donated blood is hard to come by.

“Unfortunately, the donation in Romania is low, around 2% of Romanians donate blood,” Ania Vladescu, strategic partnerships manager at Regina Maria Private Healthcare, told the outlet. “The Blood Network campaign created by Untold is very good, necessary and welcomed — it helps a lot.”

The Blood Network has a partnership with blood recipient Regina Maria Private Healthcare to help facilitate drives. Vladescu believes that there have been 37,000 donors over the festival’s eight-year lifespan.

For every person who donates, three lives can be saved, according to Vladescu — meaning that more than 100,000 people have been helped by the campaign.

“Anyone else who would have done such a campaign, anywhere in the world, would not have had the same trigger of authenticity as Untold, being a festival in the heart of Transylvania, the so-called land of Dracula,” Vladescu added. “The vampire who normally sucks blood, this time invites you to donate blood to help people who suffer and save their lives.”