Irish author, Bram Stoker released his novel Dracula is an 1897, the novel tells the story of Dracula's move from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Despite being the most widely known vampire novel, Dracula was not the first. It partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla, which predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years. Carmilla, was first published in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1871, it tells of a lesbian vampire who preys on a lonely young woman. Carmilla is able to pass through walls, and sleep in a coffin. Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood was a serial from the mid-Victorian period by James Malcolm Rymer. The vampire is portrayed as an aristocratic man, like the character of Dracula, and was created by John Polidori in The Vampyre in 1819. Varney was a major influence on later vampire fiction, most notably Bram Stoker Dracula. Varney had fangs, which lefts puncture wounds on the necks of his victims, he had hypnotic powers, as well as superhuman strength. Bram Stoker's notes for Dracula show that the name of the count was originally Count Wampyr, but Stoker became intrigued by the name Dracula. Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia was a member of the House of Drăculești, a branch of the House of Basarab, also known by his patronymic name: Dracula. He was dubbed Vlad the Impaler ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Vlad used various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. A still-living victim was mounted on a long stake, driven through the rectum and emerging through the mouth to expire agonizingly over a period of hours or, depending on the position of the stake, this method could be a very slow excruciating death. It could often take days for death to occur if major organs were not pierced. Vlad usually had a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs and a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp, because the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the buttocks and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other body orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests. Victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake. This real-life Dracula might not have sucked blood out of his victims’ necks, but he still drank it in a different way: by dipping chunks of bread into buckets of blood drained from the people he impaled. The fifteenth century manuscript The Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia, by Michel Beheim, describes how Vlad would invite a few guests to his mansion, provide them with a feast, and then have them immediately impaled at the dinner table. With the bodies still draped over the stakes, he would finish his own food and then dip his bread into the blood collecting in buckets below the bodies. Vlad tortured thousands while he ate and drank among the corpses. Vlad often ordered people to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs. But his favorite method was impalement on stakes, hence the surname "Tepes" which means "The Impaler" . Historians put the deaths at the hands of Vlad anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000. When the Turkish army got to Targoviste, they found the infamous “Forest of the Impaled”—20,000 Turkish bodies displayed on stakes. Vlad the Impaler probably caused more rivers of blood to flow than any other tyrant in the history of the world. But despite all the brutality he was a people's ruler and always sided with the poor. He returned stolen land to the poor, built churches and defended the country against the numerous Ottoman attacks. Vlad is revered as a folk hero in Romania as well as other parts of Europe for his protection of the Romanian population both south and north of the Danube.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLover of all things horror, writes on the dark-side of life Archives
March 2016
Categories |