10 Sharpest Intersecting Films Between Vlad The Impaler And Dracula

5. True Horror (TV Series): Dracula (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Mya_pMwwE Written and directed by Ben Chanan, this particularly hair-raising entry in the UK Channel 5 series (other episodes dealt with the true stories that allegedly inspired Frankenstein and werewolf movies) went out at 4am in the morning and featured stringy-haired Francis Magee as Vlad Dracula. C5's squeamishness about putting the programme out in its usual midnight slot is perhaps understandable. Acknowledgement of the Voivode's cruelty prefaces a scene of his 'armas' - Vlad's squad of torturers and executioners - applying animal fat to a stake, and then ramming it up the bagged pantaloons of a screaming boyar (feudal landowner). "Then grease is put on top and the person is put on the floor, and it's inserted anally as far as you can," forensic biologist (and Consul of the Rhine Parts for the Transylvanian Society of Dracula) Dr Mark Benecke matter-of-factly describes, "and then you just lift up the person. Then the person will slowly slide down usually. In the better situation the person dies from circulatory shock, which means the circulation shuts down and then you cannot survive that. This is a relatively quick death. In other cases people will just stand there and die slowly." The TV drama-documentary depicts the impalement of the first boyar as an agonised anal crucifixion. Though described more by suggestion than by graphic gore, it's still very strong, bloody stuff for the television medium. In True Horror, there is an effectively gothic staged evocation of the 'Forest of the Impaled', which has the look of a vintage late 60s/early 70s Brit horror movie about the witch craze. The budgetary limitations restrict the figures of the impaled to maybe two dozen extras at most - which seems to ring truer than legends of 20 thousand impaled bodies. "These stories were preserved in pamphlets that seem to have had quite a wide readership across Europe," acknowledges Kim Newman, author of the Anno Dracula novels in which the vampire count dominates Great Britain. "They were full of all the lurid details of the terrible things he'd done. There's a very tabloid edge to this sort of literature. It's sensational literature; the real reason it's a bestseller is that it's very gruesome stuff." "It's easy to issue an order that somebody else carries out," observes M.J. Trow, author of a a study entitled (naturally enough) Vlad The Impaler, "but Vlad is a hands-on killer and that makes him a very different kind of man indeed." Such cast-iron certainty may seem incongruous, given that what we know about Vlad's activities outside the Ottoman Wars originates from folklore and propaganda pamphlets. But then, given that the nature (if not the number) of his trademark punishments seems incontrovertible, what is the likelihood of ordering or committing such mutilations WITHOUT receiving some form of gratification from it? This is the focus of True Horror: Vlad the sadist. Due to its concentration on the darkest aspects of history - and also probably its budget - Vlad the war hero, as celebrated in the Dracula movies of the last two-and-a-half decades, is nowhere to be seen. "He continued effecting the worst and most heinous way of torturing people and seemed to get a real sense of enjoyment from doing it," claims forensic psychologist Laura Richards. This introduces a scene of Vlad raping a blonde serving wench over the dining table, accompanied by the screams of an impaled priest outside. The contention is clear: there was no greater stimulant to his sexual desire (or indeed his epicurean appetite) than cruelty, and sometimes the two elements may have combined.