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The nineteenth-century Western model of the vampire, also inherited in the cinema, pulp literature and comics of the 20 th century, and in role-playing games and videogames of the 21st century, is that of a person, most often aristocratic and with a castle to be somewhere in eastern europe, where it is not even clear whether he/ she is dead or not, but which causes sickness and death to the unsuspecting people around him/her, most of the time by sucking their blood. The Carpathians, which extend from Bohemia to Serbia, passing through Slovakia, poland, Ukraine and Hungary, represent the scenario par excellence in Western vampire fiction to this day. Anyone who knows these mountains knows how beautiful and pleasant they are. However, it was necessary to create a counterpart to the amenity of the western countryside, in particular to the english countryside, therefore the Carpathians were to become the most dismal and sinister place in the world.Thus was born the myth of the Carpathian vampire who, in addition to being successful in the dominant and now obsolete media of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was even more successful in the media of the twentieth century and his fame still does not seem to diminish today. our study starts from the etymology and the original meaning of the word vampire, and focuses in particular on the literary aspects that have led this figure, very present, albeit with different names, in the foklore of the whole planet, to take on ever more different aspects compared to the past, but then crystallized on an idealized nineteenth- century Gothic model.