Ghost projects in Transylvania

Distraught over ghost projects? Dismayed by blood-sucking contractors? There is a silver bullet (usually reserved for werewolves) and that may just be a trip to the horror capital of the world, Romania. Or so I thought.

This wasn’t, as cowboys and sophomore congressmen facing the ICI say these days, my first rodeo. Second only to my love of all things fanged and winged are Cold War tales of spies and poisoned umbrella tips. I had a job many moons ago looking into film co-productions for Filipino moviemakers in the Eastern bloc that brought me to Bucharest. That put me in the eerie situation of playing music to drown out conversations in wire-tapped embassies (yes, seriously); and unsettling warnings not to take photos of the lines for bread and toilet paper or face deportation. Nothing would come of any of all the stress and sleuthing, despite the fact that the economics were just fine.

Ironically, Romania is now doing brisk business as a morbid movie and emo teleserye-making paradise. Imagine this: instead of becoming the second home for the Netflix sensation, Wednesday, it may (just maybe!) have been the backdrop for Shake, Rattle and Roll No. 57.

And one can understand why: Romanian skies come dramatically moody, with great plains and winding mountain roads perfect for battle scenes or chase sequences. The scale of the buildings is tremendous and there isn’t an awful lot of intrusive industrialization, no cables, no powerlines, nor grid towers. In the autumn, the forests go from burnt oranges and crimson reds to the scarecrow, leaf-shorn outlines in which fear-fans delight. The weather is not punishing and to provide rom-com moments, there are always flocks of adorable sheep and horse-drawn carts picturesquely cued to appear across the landscape. (Did I mention that the food is amazing—a satisfying mix of Turkish slash Italian flavors?)

Wednesday, in case you’ve forgotten by now, is that blockbuster pop-goth mystery series for teens starring Jenna Ortega and more recognizable for an older generation, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays her mother, Morticia Addams. Directed by the dark master Tim Burton, its first season was filmed in Romania.

On the first day, the tongue-twisting Castle Cantacazuino in Busteni is on the program. It’s better known to viewers as the facade of Nevermore Academy, the place where Wednesday is a “legacy” brat among a whole class of brooding outsiders.

Built by the real-life 19th-century billionaire Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, who was a generation ahead of Jose Rizal, it has a phantasmagoric architecture typical of the Neo-Romanian style that is part Italian, part Ottoman Empire (with spires and onion-topped towers) and part over-the-top Gilded Age. That peculiar mix that makes it very hard to place in any particular time or place is what makes it such a satisfying setting for fantasy tales. On the outside, it rises outlandishly high and half-timbered, like a Shakespearean palace on steroids. The place is overrun by Asian fangirls all eager to have a glimpse of the new-age Harry Potter school. (You can actually check into the hunting lodge nearby, if you are so inclined.)

For OG Nosferatu addicts, however, the main attraction is Bran Castle. To add an extra shiver down your spine, it’s officially in the province called Transylvania. Here it is known as”‘Castelul Bran” and to all the rest of us horror maniacs as “Dracula’s Lair.”

Bran is about four hours away from the capital city of Bucharest and we race past the giant Therme Bucereste at the start of the trip as I gaze at its brightly colored flags enviously. It’s billed as the biggest European indoor spa and is a theme-park situation of bubbling pools under a glass dome. Old-school beauty treatments are what first put Romania on the map, in the same way that Koreans are exploiting glass-skin tourism — and when one thinks of it, what Los Baños should have been. (Yet another opportunity at world domination missed!)

The drive is through dense and almost endless forested peaks shrouded in a slow, rolling “blackout” fog; it’s truly like traveling through an actual movie as a vampire-hunter.

Bran Castle finally appears and it stands like a gray, foreboding eminence across a textbook-barren field. Built by Saxons in medieval times, the site adds a caveat that Count Dracula himself only spent a few months there but nobody minds these spoiler-alerts. The experience is breathtaking, literally, since you must trudge up a steep incline to the castle gates and the halls are not more than a shoulder’s width (the better to fight off midnight intruders).

Our host has made the trip a little more interesting with cosplay characters dressed as executioners and all sorts of villains. (There’s a photograph somewhere on this page of me nibbling on a silicone hand.)  Instead, however, of obliging us to drink blood out of gory chalices, there was a very nice white wine served from a trestle table to warm our veins.

Back in Bucharest, we were pulled back inadvertently into the world of “Build, Build, Build” and what could instead be, alas, a more familiar Department of Public Works and Highways scenario.

This was more like the Soviet-era capital that I first traveled, with gigantic wedding cake-like buildings. There is an entire section of the city that mimics the Paris etoile with a pint-sized version of the French Arc de Triomphe in the middle of several boulevards that radiate around it like spokes of a wheel. Known as the “Arcul de Triumf,” it commemorates the victories of World War II. (The one in Paris remembers the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.)

The centerpiece, however, is the Parliament building, gleaming and positively enormous. It’s less like an edifice to glorify Napoleon Bonaparte and more like a monument to Benito Mussolini. Its pristine white marble (which we are told is quarried entirely from Romania) has a touch of the forum of Victor Emmanuel II. The prime minister who built it, Nikolai Ceaucescu, would suffer a similar fate as Il Duce at the hands of an outraged populace.

Tourists are processed carefully and passports must be presented for intense scrutiny, as if we meant it harm. (The security didn’t realize that as Filipinos we have a great respect for pomp and circumstance, even if ill-gotten.) On the outside, the palace stands over 84 meters tall and is considered the biggest government building in the world, edging out even the Pentagon. Invisible is a capacious nuclear bomb shelter several floors beneath that may not be viewed.

Despite all the factoids, the Parliament is anonymous and cold. Almost two-thirds of its interiors have not been completed, despite the fact that pound for pound it’s also billed as “the heaviest building in the world.”  One can only conclude it was built from an overblown budget that had, for the lack of better word, gone completely amok.

And that, amid the Bicam deadlocks and threats of stalled economic progress, underlines the indelible lesson we must all take to heart—that a ghost project is nothing more than our very own and personal horror show.