The need to imagine and create Balkan monsters was already a long established tradition in western europe and britain when Stoker published Dracula in 1897 (during the days of the infamous "Near East" Question aimed at the Balkans). According to Stephen Arata, in the marauding, invasive Other that Dracula embodies, British culture saw its own imperial practices mirrored back to itself in a monstrous form, representing its own fear of reverse colonization. For Goldsworthy, Dracula is a metaphor for the Balkan condition, for the Western demonisation of the Balkan's status in Europe a as site of monstrous impurity. From a British standpoint, Dracula's rapid advance as an alien force in London is particularly threatening because he makes himself invisible among the English, an insidious but no less monstrous 'other'.

In his version of Dracula, Stoker reproduces a British anthropologist's misspelling of the word vlkoslak. The reference is to the word vukodlak, the Serbian word for werewolf. Stoker also has his monster speaking of the "the great shame of my nation… the shame of Cassova." This is a reference to the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the site of the mythic defeat of Serbia by the Ottoman Turks in Serbian national mythology.

Current media representations of the Balkans remain haunted by this monstrous spectre of vampirism. During the NATO bombing, representations of the Serbs as a primitive, irrational, bloodthirsty and monstrous peoples reached their pinnacle, in both subtle and not so suble form. To cite a typical example: in a story that NATO ultimately had to acknowledge was false and admit responsibility for after one of their missiles struck a convoy of kosovar refugees, the London Sun ran the headline, "Serb Monsters Shot Refugees then Blamed Us" (April 20, 1999). This tradition of staged horror and exercised revulsion is part of long term historical lens through which the west views the Balkans, but rarely if ever interrogates from its standpoint of proclaimed superior rationality and humanitarianism.