Transylvania from 1860 and then back 500 years probably had a high percentage of people who were petrified their sins would lead to eternal damnation?
Possibly, but there would also be plenty of people unafraid of death in the warrior societies he lived through, as well as lots of vacuous young people in the nobility of those times.
The isolation theory* doesn’t really fit well with him identifying a film camera as soon as he saw it because he’d lived through 500 years of technological change, to paraphrase him.
*Isolation theory – he wasn’t exposed to sophisticated society because of where/when he lived.