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Is Dracula a myth?
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Bram Stroker's chilling vampire tale has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897, and his blood thirsty Count Dracula has captured the world's imagination. Today, Dracula is more popular than ever. In the contemporary sense, he is portrayed as a monster with an erotic desire and an insatiable thirst for human blood. Yet the Hollywood caricature of the vampire lover is a far cry from Stroker's gruesome fifteenth - century Prince Vlad Tepes. Humans have believed in the vampire since the dawn of civilisation. The European association of the bat with the vampire, is of comparatively recent origin. The vampire bat subsits on blood alone, sucked from live animals. The vampire bat is also known to transmit diseases to birds and mammals (including man) by feeding on their warm blood, hence the possible association between being bitten and contracting the symtoms of the un-dead.
Vlad Tepes or "Vlad the Impaler" was a Romanian prince born in Transylvania. And Transylvania was no fantasy land, but a genuine region which existed in Western Romania, with its own rich and terrifying traditions of vampire lore. It's evident that a combination of myth and folklore has combined over centuries to culmunate in what we know as the Count Dracula story.
Vampire existence is not real as we know it. The vampire should rest in his grave like any other dead person - but instead he doesn't. He exists in another dimension. A twilight zone between life and death. He is un-dead. The grave, however, holds no respite for these monsters, for they are bound to a life of darkness and decay. They move in the shadows and appear in public only in the spotlight of Dracula's Cabaret Restaurant.
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