10 Sharpest Intersecting Films Between Vlad The Impaler And Dracula

8. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

The loss of Vlad's bride was, like much of the tale of the Impaler, pieced together from a combination of propaganda pamphlets and folklore surviving from the time. The story goes that she was in retreat at Vlad's refuge in Poenari, when a threatening message was fired by arrow by a traitor from within his brother Radu's camp. It carried an admonition that Poenari's defenders were no match for the advancing Ottoman troops, and that all was lost. Believing that the marauding Turks would get to her before her husband could return, the despairing woman committed suicide - apparently by drowning. This is the legend that informs Elisabeta's (Winona Ryder) plunge from the battlements to her watery grave in the river below, in Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated (and at the time of release, sometimes derided) interpretation of DRACULA. It's also the backstory that makes Gary Oldman's long-haired Vlad into a tragically romantic figure in the film's opening scenes, set in 1462. It's actually at odds with Stoker (as with other elements of the film, which might more accurately have been called COPPOLA'S DRACULA), but it's largely responsible from expanding the multimillion-dollar movie's constituency from horror geeks to include a general female audience. When Vlad curses God at Elisabeta's death, and is transformed into a subhuman, demonic figure - ultimately a vampire - for his sacrilege, the audience is with him all the way. In his pursuit of Mina Harker (not Lucy, as in Dan Curtis's film), he seeks merely to embrace the reincarnation of his bride again. When Dracula is ultimately dispatched - staked through the heart and decapitated with a knife - it's not merely the destruction of an ultimate evil, as with most gothic vampire stories, but a merciful release from immortality that frees him to meet Elisabeta in the afterlife.

None of the above scenes appear in Stoker's novel, being derived instead from historians Florescu and McNally, or even the Curtis TV version. Count Dracula's altering appearance throughout does mirror how Stoker described him growing gradually younger when gorged on blood, but also reinterprets classic cinematic versions like NOSFERATU (1922). And there's no doubt that here, the vampire count and Vlad the Impaler are one and the same - albeit the heroic impaler of the Ottoman wars, rather than the cruel prince of folklore. We see a suffering legion of Turkic soldiers placed on spikes to die in long-shot (apparently not enduring the orificial mutilations that are believed to have occurred), but we know this is in revenge for the insufferable loss of his bride and to defend his tiny country. The Vlad of legend who sexually disembowelled his consort on a whim is wholly absent from Oldman's tortured but tender interpretation of the role.