It's little recognised that, in terms of making the connection between the historical Vlad the Impaler and the fictional Count Dracula, Vlad's traditional enemies got there long before any of us. In his book Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around The World, international exploitation-movie distributor Pete Tombs cites the black-and-white Turkish film DRAKULA ISTANBULDA. Pre-dating the first Hammer vampire movie, DRACULA (1958), by six years, this is the type of traditional gothic horror movie which - with the exception of Curtis's and Coppola's DRACULAs - we've tended to avoid in this article. The movie's Dracula figure, played by Atif Kaptan, is a sleek, almost bald-pated figure in a tuxedo, like a humanoid version of the thin, angular NOSFERATU. He bears no resemblance to a longhaired, 15th-century warlord at all, and the film itself contains such Turkish crowd-pleasing elements as erotic belly-dancing. But the devil is in the detail: DRAKULA ISTANBULDA is adapted from a Turkish novel entitled Kazikli Voyvoda, in itself a pretty blatant rip-off of Stoker's Dracula. The revelatory factor is in the translated title, The Noble Impaler; for there was an automatic assumption among the Turkish popular fiction and film industries that Count Dracula was the historical bogeyman also known as 'Kaziglu Bey', or the impaling leader. They had identified him via the brief references in Stoker's novel, even if few in the West had. In the following decades, Ottoman-era muscleman heroes from Turkish comics, such as MALKOCOGLU (1967) and KARA MURAT (1973), would be pitted against villainous, bald-headed versions of Vlad the Impaler. KARA MURAT contains grim elements of some of the dark tales about Kaziglu Bey: dignitaries who refuse to remove their turbans in his presence have them nailed to their heads; when the Impaler's mistress pretends to be pregnant, he orders her to be disembowelled. As a Turkish exploitation-movie character, Vlad made the jump between historical tyrant and vampire in KARA BOGA (The Black Bull, 1974), where he was revived, Hammer Dracula-style, by a ritual with virgin's blood. Vlad was eventually staked and beheaded like the vampire count in Stoker's novel. By this time, in the USA and Western Europe, Florescu and McNally's In Search Of Dracula had cemented the connection between Vlad the Impaler and the fictional bloodsucker. The Turks - who, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, were shocked when the cruelty of their own sultans was outdone by the ruler of a small European principality - must have wondered what took us so long.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
