Vlad Țepeș

In 1897, when Bram Stoker published his famous novel "Dracula," the young medium of film was slowly but surely taking root. Stoker's novel was particularly inspired by the combination of the personality of his employer, the actor Sir John Irving (1838-1905), and the myth of Vlad Tepes (1431-1476), Prince of Wallachia. The novel's path to success was fairly straightforward and soon eclipsed any historical ties to the real Dracula. Starting with unofficial adaptations in Weimar, where F. W. Murnau made his vampire Nosferatu (1922), the Dracula theme became very popular, and with the move to Hollywood, Dracula (1931) became an iconic movie monster. Dracula thus became more and more distant from his origins, and after Universal exhausted all its ideas, the next generation brought, for example, a line of horror films under the Hammer label. Thus, when Romania made a nationalist film about Dracula, who was not a vampire, it was a major turning point in the previous interpretation of Vlad the Impaler. Doru Nastase's film is a lyrical portrait of a dreamer who gave his life to fight the Turks and protect his homeland. The film charts six key years of his rule when he was dedicated to rooting out corruption within his own ranks and trying to maintain his complex foreign policy relationships. Perhaps the only drawback is the absolute absence of any female characters, as it’s hard to believe that there would be no women at all in either the Wallachian or Turkish court. The final result sums up the fact that after this era Vlad was betrayed again and again and spent long years in captivity. He finally returned to the throne for the last time in 1476, but by then he had only two months on the throne before his final end. Doru Nastase has succeeded in filling a gap in the existing phenomenon, and it would only be meritorious if the ranks of both views of the historical and mythical persona of Dracula were slowly being balanced. However, this is obviously not possible, and if there is a comparable subject on which this can be illustrated, there is the case of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who may have become a movie monster later than Dracula, but even she never seems to strike a balance between looking at a historical figure and a beast from horror literature. (02/01/2013)