Count Dracula Research Paper

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When people hear the world “Dracula” they think black cape, red blood, and white vampire. The creative story of Count Dracula is fiction, but the inspiration behind it is as real as life itself. In the words of Richard Means, “‘Dracula’ is the story of the Transylvanian Count Dracula, a vampire who terrorizes a group of friends, led by Abraham Van Helsing, in his search for victims in London.” The novel by Bram Stoker is widely known and popular throughout most of the world, although not many people know the initial spark for the story. The fictional character, Count Dracula, was actually inspired by Vlad Tepes, a ruthless Romanian prince, who truly earned his horrid reputation. Some people don’t believe this to be true, but there are many …show more content…

He inherited his name, Vlad, by being born into a royal heritage. His royal bloodline also meant that one day he would get the chance to rule his family’s kingdom. Vlad also went by “Dracula” because of his family’s associations. “..Vlad was known as ‘Dracula’, because his father belonged to a society called the Order Draconis. As this made his father a ‘dragon’, it made Vlad ‘Dracula’, which means ‘son of the dragon’” (Means). Stoker learned of Vlad’s reign from a Hungarian professor, Arminius Vambey. Means explains this connection and also says it is believed Vambey “greatly influenced the novel’s central ideas”. Stoker must have been truly intrigued by these horrifying historical accounts of Vlad causing the spark for his work renowned piece of …show more content…

“Some particularly gruesome accounts claimed that Vlad liked to dine among the impaled bodies of his victims, and would even dip his bread into their blood” (Was Dracula a real person?). There are paintings of Vlad dining on his victims everywhere, and most of them revolve around this one common story. In the story, Vlad held a banquet with his enemies as his guests. As if this didn’t seem suspicious enough, he knew “they would challenge his authority” (The Real Dracula) and had a vicious plan. He took them all as prisoners and led them outside the city. “If they really numbered in the hundreds, the executions must have taken a long time. The last victims had to watch in terror for hours. One by one, the prisoners were impaled--run through with a sharp stake” (Goldberg and Itzkowitz, 13). The prisoners had come for a peaceful, elegant evening, but hey ended up having their last night ever, watching in terror as the doom approached. To make matters worse, the people murdered at the banquet weren’t the only ones affected by this

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