Reviews for the recently released Dracula Untold are in, and the overall consensus is that the effort was rather lackluster.
The vampire epic scored a 40 on Metacritic and earned a paltry 26 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes .
One criticism of note involved the way the Dracula mythology was combined with that of an existing person known as “Vlad the Impaler.”
Said reviewer John Niccum of Dracula Untold ,
Only in Hollywood can someone who earned the name Vlad the Impaler be the good guy. He’s a loving husband. A strong father. A dude positively dripping with nobility … when he’s not dripping with other people’s blood.
Here, Niccum touched on the rather interesting decision to change what would otherwise be a terrifying antagonist into the film’s main protagonist.
When you think about it, this move makes little to no sense. Dracula is a horror figure based on someone who can be considered a real-life villain.
Between man and monster, there is little room in the established mythos for an authentic representation of goodness.
There were various criticisms of Dracula Untold , but the one that stands out the most is the re-imagining of a would-be villainous hybrid as a hero. It just would have made more sense to let the bad guy BE a bad guy.
More than enough source material from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and historical accounts about Vlad the Impaler exist to create a truly chilling version of the merged characters to life.
Dracula Untold , rather than paint Vlad as a loving father figure, could have focused more on the man who allegedly :
(1) Impaled his enemies on blunt stakes and laughed as they died in agony.
(2) Ate bread soaked with the blood of his enemies.
(3) Boiled a man to death and forced others to eat his remains.
If these actions were put on screen, it could be argued that they would be far scarier than a CGI transformation into a colony of bats.
So why the reluctance to let a bad guy be bad ?
It could be that making Dracula a misunderstood tragic figure with a heart of gold seemed less predictable than making him a monstrous villain.
This thinking is probably the by-product of living in a post- Twilight world.
Perhaps if someone is bold enough to pick up the pieces of this epic movie that fell a little flat, we can get a better version of Dracula Untold .
One let’s Dracula be the terrifying villain he’s meant to be while borrowing from the more twisted elements of the man he’s based on.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons ]
