Dracula is back — a $1M killing

Press, 19 August 1978, Page 15

Dracula is back — a $1M killing

By

RUPERT BUTLER,

Features International

The year of the Dracula. That is what 1978 seems all set to be in show-busi-ness history. Just 55 years since the vampire count first appeared on the screen — in a German silent movie — he has suddenly become a 51.75 M superstar, sparking off an unprecedented boom in "Dracula-mania” around the world. By the end of this year, the smash-hit Broadway musical “Dracula,” will be in London’s West End, followed by two top budget Hollywood remakes — one starring Laurence Olivier. In America, there is a multi-million dollar explosion of books and films; while next month, the British Dracula Society will embark on a 14-day tour of the Trans y 1 v a n i a n mountains where, according to the

Victorian author, Bram Stoker, Dracula lured his blood-bank of victimsAnd, inevitably, these devoted fans of Stoker will be making for one particular road in Transylvania “If you don’t know which road, then your’re not up in your Dracula,” reproves Bruce Wightman, a former actor who is chairman and cofounder of the Dracula society. “It is a stretch in the Burgo Pass where the English lawyer Jonathan Harker picked up the b 1 a c k-curtained coach which took him to the castle of Count Dracula.” Once they have gazed on this historic spot, the visitors will dine on steak and golden wine. What else? After all, that was what the Count gave Harker on that fatal night.

“Glasses will be raised at the first hint of dusk. This was the time Count Dracula came alive,” Wightman says. It was in this sinister world of the undead that Bram Stoker, an Irishman who had been company manager to the Victorian actor Henry Irving, concocted a yarn peopled with c 1 o a k-and-fang aristocrats, hunchbacked gravediggers, and lunatic doctors. “It was not entirely a world of the imagination,” Wightman says. “Dracula himself, for example, was the real-life Vlad 111, nicknamed the Impaler. “He slaughtered invading Turks with terrible cruelty — usually by sticking them cm stakes. He also used this punishment on his own people for theft.”

Stoker steeped himself in historical truth and legend about Vlad and Rumania, and he got his facts right. “Stoker describes in close detail that road where Harker was picked up in the coach. He even gets the correct number of bends. “This was a great puzzle to Victorian enthusiasts of Dracula. They even went, as we have done, to check. How had Stoker done it? After all, until he popularised it, Transylvania was remote and mysterious. “He never set foot in the place. All his research was done in the British Museum, poring over documents, maps, mediaeval histories, portraits, and woodcuts. “He took some liberties, Of course. Vlad didn’t reign in Transylvania at all, but over the kingdom

of Wallachia, which was nearer to Bulgaria. Stoker moved him north for the purposes of his story.” Not that the Rumanians mind. Indeed, they have taken full advantage of the Dracula cult by hastily building in the appropriate place an inn called the Golden Crown. It was at the Golden Crown that Dracula and Harker had their steak and golden wine. Proprietor of the new inn is hotelier and Dracula specialist Alexandru Misiung. He also happens to be Rumania’s Minister of Tourism . .. Dracula fever is not confined to Britain. There are now clubs in the United States, Malaysia, Australia, and, most spec-

tacularly, the United States. “The Americans go for Dracula in a big way,” I was told. “At Boston University, you can even major in Dracula. In fact, you can major twice — once in Dracula in myth and legend and once in Dracula as literature. And both Britain and America spawn learned journals about their hero.” Was there any real-life connection between Vlad and vampirism? “There is one curious fact,” Bruce Wightman admits. “There are historical documents which tell of a strange disease which scourged through Wallachia at the time Of Vlad’s death. “Modern medical science would probably call it leukaemia ..