The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The windswept and foreboding mountains of Transylvania; the moon shines silver from behind clouds, bats move through the air and somewhere wolves howl, the ‘children of the night’ making ’sweet music’. Lightning flashes, illuminating an imposing fortress amid the peaks. We’ve seen similar set-ups in endless vampire films, but now Castle Bran, often referred to as the ‘real’ Castle Dracula, is the centre of a legal controversy. Some sources claim that Bram Stoker uses Castle Bran for his model for Dracula’s lair, although famously Stoker never got closer to Wallachia and Transylvania than the British Library’s reading room, picking up parts of Romanian folklore and history, appropriating the actual historical figure of Vlad Dracul (popularly known as Vlad the Impaler) for his definitive literary vampire who has stalked a thousand nightmares since the Victorian era (although it should be noted that the ruins of Slains Castle on the Scottish coast near Cruden Bay, right across from where Stoker maintained a holiday cottage, is a very strong contender for his model of Castle Dracula too).

(Castle Bran, photographed by Jose Fuste Raga/CORBIS and borrowed from the National Geographic site)

Bran was seized by the Communist authorities in Romania in the 1940s and has only been returned to the legal heirs – the Hapsburgs – in recent years. Canny Romanians have made an industry from the castle’s associations with the vampiric count, drawing in tourists from all over the world and selling as many souvenir vampires as Scots sell tartan cuddly Nessies (the historical Vlad, however, is still regarded as a national hero for his ferocious defence of the country from the encroaching Turkish armies). With their former property now returned to them the Hapsburgs wish to sell the castle for a tidy sum (asking price is some £40 million if you fancy a middle-European country getaway home for yourself) which has infuriated the Romanian authorities, as this BBC video report makes clear. More than a century after Dracula was first published and we’re still talking about those characters and the places connected with them; for all the clunkiness of parts of the novel (which has never been out of print in that time) Stoker clearly hit on something which continues to chime with readers of books and comics, theatre goers and movie audiences, still drawn in and fascinated after all this time so much that even a property sale in a distant country commands attention simply because of the magical words ‘Dracula’.