Do You Like Medieval Warfare And Vampires? ‘Dracula Untold’ Might Surprise You.

When I was 14, I spent my Easter school holidays parked in front of my Mac Classic, retyping Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula down to every old-fashioned em-dash and “to-morrow”. I’d just borrowed the book from the library, and it’d had such a profound effect on me that I wanted to make it my own (they didn’t have Project Gutenberg back then).

If I were the sort of person who described my interests in terms of nerddom, I’d be a Dracula nerd. I can talk your ear off about the Gothic tradition that inspired Stoker, and the way he decisively shaped more than a century of pop-cultural vampires – and vampire hunters. That’s why I was excited to see if the action-adventure film Dracula Untold delivers on its promise to shed new light on a story that’s so far had more than 200 screen adaptations.

I came away pleasantly surprised by how neatly it weaves the vampire mythos into a medieval war movie based on the life of the historical Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431-1476/7), known as the Impaler for his cruel punishments. Dracula Untold refreshes the canon with an origin story: in most Dracula stories, he’s always ‘just been’ a vampire, or is suffering a ‘curse’. But this film shows Dracula as a man who chooses vampirism because of what it can do for his family and his country.

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A Medieval Dracula With Modern Military Goals

In Hollywood’s time-honoured tradition of developing two similar but unrelated projects at once, this is the first of two new films based on the real-life Vlad the Impaler (the other is Vlad, a Braveheart-esque epic with no vampire elements, based on a spec script by actor Charlie Hunnam).

Vlad has been the subject of several historical dramas in his native Romania, but it seems odd that more Dracula movies haven’t exploited him. One of the few was the 2003 direct-to-video thriller also named Vlad, in which Billy Zane (sporting a silly Eastern European accent) must protect a foxy American student from undead lord Francesco Quinn.

The medieval Vlad’s father joined the chivalric Order of the Dragon; Dracula means ‘son of the Dragon’. His life has become so thoroughly entangled in myth (he didn’t start getting called ‘the Impaler’ until after his death, in gruesome German propaganda pamphlets) that his story is ripe for dramatic exaggeration. What’s surprising is how faithful Dracula Untold is; and what’s interesting is that it shows Vlad’s philosophy to be a recognisably contemporary militarism.

Prince Vlad (Luke Evans) urgently seeks to protect his realm (Wallachia, here called Transylvania because that’s popularly synonymous with vampires) from the Ottoman Turkish army because he’s bloodily familiar with life under the Turks. He learned to fight – and impale – as a child in Constantinople, where he was the playmate of future sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper), who now leads the invading force.

I enjoyed their dynamic – Vlad the brooding hunk versus Mehmed the cocky sophisticate – largely because of its intertextual resonance with Tamara Drewe (2010), the pastoral comedy in which Evans and Cooper played romantic rivals for the title character (Gemma Arterton).

The film’s portrayal of Vlad as a former enslaved child soldier is historically inaccurate (he was really a political hostage, and he never fought for the Turks), but sadly familiar in modern guerrilla warfare. Invoking the loss of childhood innocence also makes it seem plausible that Vlad would do anything to prevent his own son (Art Parkinson, who plays the youngest Stark, Rickon, in Game of Thrones) becoming a similarly brutal killer. And his decision to use vampirism as a defensive weapon of mass destruction is tragic and self-defeating in the same way that the US and its allies habitually escalate war in the name of peace.

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Dracula Begins – The Vampire As Byronic Action Hero

It’s also revealing of our culture’s superheroic saturation that Vlad treats the ‘particular set of skills’ that come with being a vampire – super-senses, super-strength, turning into a flock of bats, and so on – as a shortcut to achieving his political goals.

After Vlad only barely escapes a horrific man-eating creature (Charles Dance) in a mountain cave, he foolishly hopes to make it his ally. Instead, the wily master vampire persuades Vlad to drink his blood on a hire-purchase basis – Vlad gets three days of Turk-slaying vampiric powers, and will regain his humanity if during that time he can avoid daylight or drinking human blood. Cue Vlad dispatching hundreds of soldiers with his bare hands, and commanding legions of bats. The whole thing is very Batman Begins.

Evans’ appeal is that he combines physical power and capability with something introverted and melancholic. As his wife Mirena, Sarah Gadon has little to do but help the audience see the tenderness that motivates this reluctant action hero – and to embody what his vampirism is costing him. She gets that once you go Drac, you never go back.

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Entering A New Universe Of Stock Horror Characters

Dracula Untold (or Dracula: Year Zero as the project was originally known) has been in the works for years, and was originally set to star Sam Worthington and be directed by Alex Proyas. It underwent last-minute reshoots to tie it in with Universal’s planned reboot of its monster characters (which include Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolf-Man) as an integrated Shared Monsters Universe to rival the superheroes of Marvel Studios.

Film nerdbros and their comments sections seem pretty unenthused about this. “The question is: why bother?” writes Russ Fischer at /Film. “There’s little to suggest that Dracula Untold is particularly good.”

Adds Devin Faraci at Badass Digest: “Of course the connection is likely slight enough that, should Dracula Untold bomb (and I’ve heard it’s pretty bad), they can walk out of it and salvage a new Dracula movie without having the stink of this one on it.”

Thing is, Dracula Untold really isn’t that bad. As a standalone historical fantasy it’s not brilliant, but it is solidly enjoyable, propelled by its protagonist’s desires rather than by meaningless bombastic CGI-candy. As a revisionist take on an old story, it feels nimble and sophisticated in comparison to Stuart Beattie’s stodgy, tryhard, unintentionally hilarious I, Frankenstein, or the distressingly bad baddassery of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. And there’s plenty for history nerds to me to chew on (don’t get me started about Thor Krisjansson’s Nordic villain ‘Bright Eyes’ and the Varangian Guard).

And as an origin story, I’m sold. As someone who suffered through the onscreen butchery of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and has really enjoyed the recent TV series Penny Dreadful, I would watch the hell out of a superhero team of stock-character monsters fighting their deathless enemies throughout history.

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Dracula Untold is in cinemas now.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She founded online pop culture magazine The Enthusiast, and author of the book Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit. She blogs on style, history and culture atFootpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.