10 Sharpest Intersecting Films Between Vlad The Impaler And Dracula

2. VLAD (as yet unproduced)

In 1979, the Romanian national film industry produced the biopic VLAD TEPES. Released three years after the 500th anniversary of Vlad III's death in battle, it can safely be assumed director Doru Nastase was working with the blessing of Nicolae Ceausescu. The Romanian Conducator (leader) may have been a communist, but his totalitarian nationalist sympathies lay with the 15th-century Voivode who his government celebrated in 1976. Ceausescu had also banned all vampire movies as "anti-Romanian propaganda"; in the final days of his regime in 1989, as he attempted to flee by helicopter before he and his wife were executed by firing squad, it's said that he headed for the Impaler's old residence of Tirgoviste, which offered no escape route. VLAD TEPES - which can be seen on YouTube, though sans subtitles - is a heroic costume drama with a strong dollop of nationalist sentiment. Vlad's defensive triumphs against the Ottoman Empire are celebrated, but his many alleged crimes are ignored. It makes the viewer wonder how the filmmakers could attach the word 'TEPES' to the title, given that it does mean, after all, 'Impaler' in Romanian. "As the script now stands, we don't touch on vampirism," said Sons Of Anarchy actor Charlie Hunnam of his first major project as a screenwriter, in the late noughties. "That was my one non-negotiable area when we were developing it€" As with the Romanian propagandists of the 1970s, his VLAD was to deal with the Wallachian warlord as a human being, not a monster. He was, however, still tuned into the darkness of Vlad's life, times and predicament. Mooted as a co-production between Brad Pitt's Plan B and Summit Entertainment, producers of the TWILIGHT franchise, Hunnam saw his bloodstained historical epic as "more BRAVEHEART than 300", and was fascinated by elements which, while foreboding, were all too human rather than supernatural: "When he took his throne back after his father had been murdered, he did that using a contingent of gypsies, murderers and thieves that he found in the forest; he didn't hire mercenaries. He had a real affinity for the darker side of society. I think he felt like he was an outcast too€" While conceding, "Vlad is such a brutal man and the trick is to make him sympathetic," the aspiring screenwriter had charismatic bad boy Colin Farrell in mind for the role. Time has ticked on though, and Farrell, while a fine actor, may no longer be considered the box-office pull he briefly was; it's a moot point as to whether VLAD may ever be produced, given that DRACULA UNTOLD may have damaged its dark history pitch by presenting Vlad as both a conventional hero and a morally agonised vampire.