Dracula Untold: Vampires and the Rise of the Prince of Darkness

by Christopher Barr

“The Life of All Flesh Is the Blood.”

(Leviticus, 17:14)

“Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.”

– Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Your body’s dying.  Pay no attention, it happens to us all.”

– Lestat, Interview with a Vampire

Dracula Untold is not a good movie, it is a movie that drenches itself in mythology and is subsequently sucked down to the lower murky depths of cliché and imitation.  The movie failed to respect the endless well of source material it could easily have drawn from.  Its concern, as in the case of most all Hollywood studio productions, was to reach the broadest somnambulistic audience possible and thus necessitate the obligatory watering down of some of its source material.

The story surrounds a Prince that is on the brink of war with an invading massive Turkish army from the Ottoman Empire during the 15^th century.  The Sultan of Turkey is seeking a thousand young boys from the kingdom that Prince Vlad rules over, a kingdom with little army to defend against the Sultan’s demands.  The thousand boys would be trained to fight in the Sultan’s army to further the growth of the Ottoman Empire.

Vlad and two of his soldiers happen upon a cave in the mountains while searching for a Turkish scouting party that have entered Transylvania territory.  Instead of encountering the scouting party of Turks, Vlad and his men are met with the vicious force of an ancient sorcerer and master vampire, who quickly dispatches of Vlad’s men and drives him out of the lair.  Vlad’s escape from the creature was a result of the sun’s beaming rays, deadly to the creature, blanketing the mouth of the cave and preventing him from devouring Vlad along with his ill-fated men.

The movie mildly goes into the real Vlad the Impaler’s dark past, along with his war crimes against the many people he was responsible for murdering.  Living a life of war, historical Vlad realized early on, in order to defeat the enemy you cannot do it with mere swords, you must make yourself more than a man, you must make yourself a monster.  Vlad did just that by slaughtering a village of people close to the Turkish border and ordering his men to impale their bodies on long vertical stakes, covering a field with hundreds them. 

Superstition and sorcery were common views that weakened the resolve of most men in those parts, at that time in its history.  Vlad knew that this was the only way to ward off attack on his kingdom of Walachia.  The problem is the movie didn’t quite portray him as the monstrosity he truly was in actual history.  The unspeakable tortures he was responsible for have no equal, even among the most bloodthirsty tyrants of history, such as Herod, Nero, and Diocletian.

Vlad Dracul Tepes was a monster on his own without all the vampire mythos attached to him four centuries later by author Bram Stoker.  In Dracula Untold he was more relatable, his actions were more understandable given the plight he was forced to deal with.  Sure it was just a movie, so liberties are a reality in order to maintain a cohesive narrative for a modern audience to absorb, but the argument could be made that the aficionados of historical Eastern Europe, in all likelihood, wish they would just tell a story about Vlad the Impaler without all the vampire baggage.  Regardless, the vampire is part of it and will always be.

In the movie, in order to defend his land, Vlad made a Faustian deal with the devil of sorts.  He went back to the cave in the mountains and confronted the gangrenous master vampire who, instead of ripping him to pieces and drinking six pints of his ‘life force’, the creature provided Vlad with the gift of strength, speed and ferocious power …with a catch.  Vlad has three days to last without feeding off another human before the spell/curse is lifted, returning him to his human mortal form. 

He drinks the blood of the devilish creature from a broken cranium of a long since murdered skeletal victim and then ‘turns’ into one of them.  He awakens in the forest with no soul and with sensory perception overload.  He is able to look up and glance at the quivering starry blanket that is the fabric of space with telescopic sight.  He can hear a spider swathe a hapless insect with webbing that sounds like an axe splitting a tree trunk open.  He hears the howls and movements of the forests various animals and creatures, seeing them with a set of eyes that transcends solid objects at will, allowing him to see veins and heat signatures from all living creatures, man or beast.

With a voracious hunger for blood, Vlad attacks the Turks with magic and an established will to destroy his enemy with the power of the undead, drawing from the black lakes of evil, while avoiding the looming sunrise soon to follow.  He is able to transform himself into vast legions of ravenous bats and with the celerity of a madman with no bounds, swoops menacingly down and obliterates hundreds of invading Turks all at once, like the smashing force of a monstrous battle hammer.

“’The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.’…It was true.  The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they couldn’t even believe in?”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

The vampire, a preternatural being, has a long murderous bloodline dating all the way back to biblical times and throughout Christian mythology.  It all started with the sacrificial lust for blood to keep evil spirits at bay.  Within the folklore of Christianity; Lilith, first wife of Adam was said to be reputedly impatient with the first man’s sexual ineptitude.  Lilith went on to become queen of the demons and evil phantoms.  She would suck the blood of babies in their cradles and young men, robbing them of their vigor and potency as they slept.  Lilith was guilty of dismissing Hebraic belief and breaking Mosaic Law that forbids draining and drinking the warm blood of living things.

“Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.”

(Leviticus, 17:14)

In the New Testament the parable goes that Christ saved humankind by spilling his blood, before his ultimate sacrifice on the cross.  Christ saw the redemptive significance in his blood under the symbolic guise of wine shared with his disciples during the Last Supper.  The Gospel of John emphasized the regenerative properties of blood.  During the early years of Christianity the fathers had to redefine their interpretation of the virtues of blood, fearing a return to human sacrifice and cannibalism.

The link between the belief of vampires and Christianity can also be found in the Neoplatonic idea of a life after death.  This suggests that the body is a mere shell, a material covering that rots away while the soul lives on in another world, awaiting resurrection at the Last Judgement.  Vampires in Christian phenomenology are “souls in pain,” beings that belong to neither the world of the living nor that of the dead.  They are plagued to wander between worlds searching for vitality and in some cases, peace from their suffering.  These were nomadic rejecters of religious faith and have thus been made to suffer an eternity of pain.

The spread of the vampire legend from an anecdotal character to entering a European widespread collective consciousness was a result of the Bubonic plague in the 14^th century.  To avoid infection the panicky people rushed to bury the victims of the plague, and in some cases so quick to bury them that they did not even verify that they were clinically dead.  Days later when a family vault was opened the corpses were often in perfectly preserved shape but spotted with blood.  It didn’t take the locals too long to think that the corpses had become vampires, while in actual reality free from extraneous belief systems, the corpses were in fact hapless victims still alive and suffering a long and agonizing death in their coffins, and likely wounded themselves in their bleak attempt at escaping their crypts.        

The 15^th century lunatic Gilles de Rais, once a guard for Joan of Arc, spent his remaining days in southwest France torturing, slaughtering and drinking the blood of two to three hundred children, with a deranged alchemist attempt at finding the secret to the “philosophers’ stone” in blood.  Vlad Tepes was born the year of Joan of Arc’s death in 1431.  He is the primary source of Bram Stoker’s supernatural monster but not without the help of the 17^th century Countess Erzsebt Bathory.  A woman nearly as equally sick as both Vlad the Impaler and Gilles de Rais, kidnapped and tortured up to three hundred young girls with the belief that their blood could cure her from aging.  She would drink their blood and bathe in it on occasion to preserve her youth as long as possible.  When she wasn’t bathing in the blood of a thousand virgins, she would further her studies into Black Magic while viewing the torture and unremittent beating of young girls.  These girls would have spikes and needles punctured into their bodies and necks, and then were bound in skin-tearing ropes as they roll around in the snow naked, freezing to death.

Stoker took Vlad’s gothic surname, which translates into devil or dragon, along with his archetypical shadowed legend and Bathory’s use of blood to maintain everlasting youth, and created one of the most recognizable fictional characters known to the world, parallel to that of Batman and Superman.  This story became a true turning point in the history of vampirism in literature.  John William Polidori, also an influence of Stoker’s, is credited for the first vampire to appear in his novel The Vampyre.  This all came about in Geneva in 1816, while held up with a couple traveling companions; a competition was challenged by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, fueled by copious amounts of laudanum by candlelight along with his companions, to see who among them can create their own tales of suspense.  Byron came up with a story about a vampire that he never finished but confided the plot to Polidori who went on to write his tale of the un-dead vampire.  Another one of the traveling companions, Mary Shelly went on to write one of the all-time best novels on terror ever written, Frankenstein. 

“I know nothing of God, or the Devil.  I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul.  And as far as I know, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.”

– Armand, Interview with the Vampire

The vampire has appeared in hundreds of films, books and comic books.  The vampire has been described in every incarnation from a sexual predator to a rock star, also ranging from a grotesque bottom-feeder to a romantic leading man.  Some renditions in film have been pretty good like in the case of Interview with the Vampire, 30 Days of Night, Byzantium, Daybreakers, the first Underworld movie, Night Watch and Day Watch, and even From Dusk Till Dawn and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Then there have been many of these vampire movies that were not so good and ultimately forgettable like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Twilight Saga, Van Helsing, Vampire in Brooklyn, The Lost Boys sequels, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Dracula 2000, Kiss of the Vampire, Vamp, and Once Bitten.

Among the best is Let the Right One In and the American remake Let Me In, Nosferatu and it’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampire, Dracula (1931), Near Dark, Only Lovers Left Alive, Salem’s Lot, Horror of Dracula, Shadow of the Vampire, Fright Night and it’s Colin Farrell remake, The Lost Boys, Blade and Blade 2.  Television has had the always enjoyable and incredibly layered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spin-off series Angel as well as a pretty good run with True Blood and the recently aired The Strain.

As for books Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the quintessential book on the mythological creature.  Anne Rice has The Vampire Chronicles which has been received well among the great seductive lore in the canon, but I Am Legend is one of the great celebrated vampire stories in book form ever written. The Historian was quite fascinating as well as Let the Right One In along with Salem’s Lot.

“The cross.  He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun.  This, too, drove the vampires away.  Why?  Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?”

– Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

What makes the great stories so resonating and long lasting is they are about us, not vampires at all.  Richard Matheson’s I am Legend novel is about the last man on earth that is forced to barricade himself up in his house of desolation from bloodthirsty vampires.  But it’s actually about loneliness, loss and addiction; it is a philosophical journey inward while everything outward has gone to hell.  The films Let Me In and Only Lovers Left Alive are about living and adapting oneself to a seemingly alien world, with the former focusing on developing the strength to survive in an often unforgivable world.

Dracula Untold chose the spectacle route and inundated its canvas with CGI effects to such an extent that the performances became smothered and plastic.  The basic premise of good vs. evil vs. evil again could have been interesting with more detail put on character development and less on spectacle.  The sad state here is the market for a big movie like this is designed around an international audience.  As a result the concept and the dialogue must be able to translate into many languages.  Audiences from all over the world must be able to follow the basic story and have a rudimentary understanding of what the characters are saying to each other.  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was able to avoid this trap where movies like Van Helsing have not.

“The vampires have always been metaphors for me.  They’ve always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.”

– Anne Rice

A little movie like Only Lovers Left Alive can build their characters within the mythology of vampires and still maintain quality and great story.  The problem with a lot of the bad ones is they want all mythology and as a consequence they fail critically time and time again.

Dracula Untold ends tragic for the character but creepily victorious for the audience because he becomes what they want him to become, Dracula the vampire.  He loses everything, his wife and son, he loses the respect and allegiance of his people and army, and certainly worse than all those combined; he loses his soul to wander the earth as a creature that drinks the blood of his unsuspecting victims for eternity.  We cheer for him in a similar way that we did when Tony Stark became Iron Man and Bruce Wayne became Batman.  The only glaring difference is Iron Man and Batman fight for what’s good; avoiding unnecessary killing at all costs, Dracula survives because of killing.

Dracula is a tragic character; there is no doubt about that, certainly a treacherous creature but never the less tragic as a result.  His curse has condemned him to a life of solitude, a life without love and a life shaded in a nocturnal existence.  His humanity is peeled away from him only to be filled by a murderous fiend.  Dracula Untold turned him into a superhero of sorts and stripped away all the heartbreak that Bram Stoker stitched so tightly to the core of his fable.  Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is a ghoulish figure, a hairless rat of sorts that hides just behind the slice of a shadow.  Like Dracula, he too has condemned himself to the stone walls of his castle, only coming out of the shadows when absolutely necessary.  These stories are in-depth allegories that investigate the human condition using the metaphor of the vampire. 

Like so many contemporary stories, Dracula Untold has no interest in the human condition or imparting a cautionary tale on what could happen if one disconnects oneself from the tribe.  Unlike its predecessors, this film’s tragic narrative doesn’t lie within the story rather it comes from the uninspired society that it’s disseminating itself to.  The tragedy is us, the audience desiring Dracula to be a hero and be cool doing it.  It’s likely when people saw a screening of Nosferatu back in the early twenties; they all didn’t leave the theatre wanting to be a vampire.  I’d hope they left the theatre feeling a sense of gratitude for who they have in their lives coupled with being absolutely freaked out by what they just watched.  Which is a good thing because that’s what vampires of the night hopefully do for us; they make us want to connect with living, breathing people and hang on.

“Do not wake yet, I beg you.  Why will you not believe me?  Sleep …sleep forever.  May your breast heave while pursuing the chimerical hope of happiness – that I allow you; but do not open your eyes. Ah!  Do not open your eyes.”

– Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror