With Halloween just around the corner and fully immersed in what has become, in recent years, the month of terror par excellence, one cannot stop thinking about the many characters of the genre who are inspired by people from the real life.
From serial killers to figures of nobility, writers and screenwriters throughout history have found in reality the most terrifying of inspirations to create a fiction with the most honorable of pretensions: to terrify the greatest of the brave.
One of the best-known and most widespread stories of this reality-fiction dyad is that of Count Dracula, the character created by Bram Stoker at the end of the 19th century, who was made into a film in 1992 by Francis Ford Coppola in the movie starring Gary Oldman: Dracula by Bram Stoker. de Dracula it has always been said (“always”) that Stoker was inspired for his creation by the figure of Vlad Tepesknown as Vlad “The Impaler”. But that may simply surprise you. it isn’t true.
The first thing that should be denied (although it is not so much a hoax as some occasional confusion) is that Dracula was the first vampire in history, far from it. When Stoker published his novel in 1897, the mythology, as well as folklore and literature, around the figure of the vampire was already widely known and widespread..
In fact, there is a story from 1844 written by Karl Von Wachsmann titled The mysterious stranger, from which Stoker directly took some of the elementssuch as control over a pack of wolves or the power to transform into mist. In the vampireby Polidorifrom 1819, the vampire was already presented as a kind of seductive gallant.
Stoker wanted this figure of the elegant and powerful vampire for his novel, although He also did not want to renounce everything that, for centuries, popular culture had drawn around the figure of the vampire.such as, for example, telepathy, superhuman strength, mental control over “repulsive” beings (spiders, rats), nocturnality, aversion to garlic and crucifixes and, of course, the need to drink blood to feed themselves. .
Stoker then created a vampire count, isolated in his castle in the Transylvanian Carpathians.who lived with three concubines and who committed, throughout the four hundred pages of the novel, atrocities such as kidnapping a baby so that his girlfriends could devour him, killing the mother or murdering, one by one, all the men in the family. crew of a ship (the Demeter). Also, tangentially, we see in Dracula for the first time to Dr. Van Helsing, who finally decapitates and drives stakes where they are needed.
Although it seems inconceivable today, and despite the fact that other authors such as Conan Doyle praised Stoker’s work, The novel remained on the fringes of marginality until, in 1983, Oxford University included it on its list of essential works.. Just nine years later, Coppola worked his magic and popularized the novel to levels that, with complete certainty, would have been unimaginable for its author. And that’s when the legend spread: Dracula had really existed. His name was Vlad Tepes, “The Impaler.”.
Denying a hoax born in the Internet era is very difficult. Denying an urban legend that takes root before the information age is even more so.
The first question is: who was Vlad Tepes?
Vlad III Tepes or Vlad “The Impaler”, prince of Wallachia, was also called Vlad III Dracula (Draculea, in Romanian) because he belonged to the House of Drăculeşti, started by his father, Vlad II Dracul, to differentiate himself from the other branch of the Basarab family, the House of Dănești. Both houses disputed the throne of the Principality of Wallachia for more than a century, although it was almost always the House of Drăculeşti that held the title.
Vlad III Dracula ruled as Wallachian prince during three different periods in the second half of the 15th century, and, indeed, even during his lifetime his cruelty was famous.although it must be said that almost all the historical records of the time come from the Catholic Church, especially from papal letters and annotations, and from some German literature. For example, the master singer Miguel Beheim wrote a poem supposedly based on a story told by a monk who had escaped from Vlad’s prison.
According to these writings, He boiled people alive in giant pots of boiling water and had a strong taste for impaling people and animals. undesirable. They say that on one occasion he had three Turkish emissaries impaled for refusing to remove their turban, and ordered the turban to be nailed to their heads with a stake. There is a 15th-century German woodcut showing the prince feasting in his “forest of impalements.”
However, in Romania there are no historical chronicles about him prior to the 19th century, although there was folklore, songs and oral tradition, in which he was spoken of as a strong and fair leader, and what they all seem to agree on is that that his brutality helped strengthen the government of Wallachia and even bring Catholicism there.
How, then, did Vlad Tepes come to relate to the character of Bram Stoker? Well, actually Dracula, from Tepes, only took the name.
Stoker, like every person who wants to write a novel, had an idea and looked for some documentation. An author called Emily Gerard published in 1888 The land beyond the forestwhich talked about Transylvanian landscapes and superstitions. This book would serve as inspiration for Stoker for the setting of his novel which, at that time, was going to be titled The Undead (The undead) and whose protagonist was the Vampire Count (Count Wampyr).
There is a record, this exists, of an 1820 book that Stoker checked out of the public library in 1890 (seven years before his book was published), by historian William Wilkinson entitled Considerations on the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. BUT In this book, although there is talk of a Draculea, it apparently does not make direct reference to any Vlad. Stoker simply liked the name, and decided that his protagonist would not be called “Vampire Count” but “Count Dracula.”. In this book about principalities, Dracula is not associated with impalements, and in Stoker’s work, at no point does Dracula impale anyone.
The character of Dracula, except for the name (from this historical treatise) and the geographical setting (from Emily Gerard’s book), has nothing to do with Prince Vlad Tepes.
It is clear that there are two truths: reality is stranger than fiction, and imagination, sometimes, feeds itself.
