10 Sharpest Intersecting Films Between Vlad The Impaler And Dracula

9. Dracula (1973)

The first film to take on board Florescu and McNally's thesis preceded their documentary. The '73 version of DRACULA was a TV movie (also shown in cinemas around the world), directed by Dan Curtis, who had created the US gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (1967-70). His vampire count was the craggy character actor Jack Palance, who had specialised in western villains from SHANE (1953) onwards. Despite Palance's Ukrainian origins he was no Bela Lugosi, playing his Dracula as a man of action and (as specified by horror writer Richard Matheson's script) a bereaved lover. For historically cloudy detail had emerged about Prince Vlad losing his young wife, transferred here to make Stoker's story into one of lost love, and encapsulated in a painting of his old life which Dracula hangs on a wall in the study of his castle - but his princess's face is that of the hero Jonathan Harker's fiancee, Lucy Westenra. (She's Mina Seward in Stoker's novel - Lucy is her friend who Dracula victimises and vampirises, bringing back from the grave.) It's a concept that would be repeated in the disingenuously titled BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992), but Curtis's DRACULA found its main echo in comic-book form. When Marvel Comics artist Gene Colan drew the title character for the '73 launch of The Tomb Of Dracula, he based the Count's appearance on Palance. The strip also incorporated, in traditional comics style, an origin story: shown in flashback, Vlad's bride is held hostage by a Turkic warrior, who rapes her. By this time Dracula has been transformed into a vampire by a gypsy curse, and he wreaks a terrible vengeance. The comic book would never come to the screen - but it did give the world a spin-off franchise, the BLADE trilogy (1998-2004), in which Wesley Snipes played a former African prince infected by vampirism, a character first seen in The Tomb of Dracula.