The truth behind the legend: Dracula


Many movies have been known to be better than the novel they have been inspired from but this is not the case of Frank Coppola’s film: Dracula. Although Coppola is a great director his film is inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel that has no historic truth. Personally I think that both movie and book are awful.
The book, written and published in 1897, speaks about the great Count Dracula, the vampire. It is said that he lived in Transylvania, a land of horror and fear, where he used to feed with blood from innocent people, thus transforming them into vampires. Actually Transylvania is a part of modern day Romania and it is not dominated by fear and terror. The book also speaks of Dracula’s Castle on the Borgo Pass, but it doesn’t exist. These things could be explained by the fact that Stoker had never been to Romania. It is believed that Count Dracula was actually Prince Vlad the fifth of Wallachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler. He was a cruel leader who used to impale his enemies to frighten them. Vlad stayed at the Bran Castle, that is often mistaken with Dracula’s Castle. This is a great opportunity for locals to expand tourism however as Daniel Farson pointed out in his article entitled “Fiction is stranger than truth”, “unless the Romanians build a Castle Dracula on the Borgo Pass with piped sound effects of howling wolves, if you want to follow in Stoker’s Transylvanian footsteps you are perhaps better off reading the book”.
Coppola’s film is in my opinion fit for our kids because to quote Richard Mayne “the mixture of Dracula’s toad-like transformations, smoke, blood and marble-white maidens fails to stir or stab our gut. We goggle and admire, but we feel no chilling thrill. This is magic, not horror”. Maybe the film isn’t that bad but the novel is certainly a bad joke.