With the popularity of all things vampire in recent years, it should come as no surprise that the icon of all vampires, Dracula, would be once more resurrected to garner his share of the attention. Dracula: The Vampire and the Voivode, a documentary produced in association with the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, is just the latest to jump on the vampire bandwagon. The film is not concerned with modern manifestations of the genre like True Blood and Twilight. What it is concerned with is Bram Stoker, his 1897 novel, and its relation to Transylvania and to a 15th century Wallachian prince sometimes held up as Stoker's model for the undead Count. Essentially the documentary aims to separate the facts about the vampire, Count Dracula, and the Voivode (Prince) Vlad the Impaler from the fictions.
Using the typical talking heads—everyone from scholars to tour guides—the film visits sites from the author's life, places actually mentioned in the novel and places that may have been the actual sources for scenes in places that Stoker had never seen. It is well known that Stoker had never been to what he called Transylvania, what we call Romania. His descriptions of the countryside at the beginning and end of his novel came right out of travel books he may have been reading and his vivid imagination. There is, as the documentary makes clear, no castle near the Borgo Pass. There is in fact no Castle Dracula. The Castle Bran now often touted as the original of the Count's ruined edifice has nothing to do with Stoker or even Vlad. As some scholars suggest, it is more likely that Stoker based his description on castles he was familiar with in Ireland and Scotland.
Whitby, on the other hand, the seacoast town in England where the ship carrying the Dracula coffins comes aground, was in fact the place where Stoker wrote a good deal of the novel. Its landmarks—the harbor, the 199 church steps and the graveyard at St. Mary's Church—are places the novelist would have actually known. The same is true for most of the British settings. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these settings, both those that he knew and those that he didn't, is the local attempt to capitalize on the association with Dracula. Whether it's the walking tour of Dracula sites in Whitby or the erection of a faux Castle Dracula in Romania, if you can see your way to making a buck, fact or fiction, it doesn't make a lot of difference.
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