di Emanuele Basile

Count Dracula is one of the most important characters of European literature thanks to sir Bram Stoker who had invented him by taking inspiration from Vlad Tepes, a Romanian general who fought against Turks. History tells us that when this very cruel man won the battle all the enemies he made prisoners were impaled in a very horrible forest to scare everyone to attack Romania. After this event, a lot of people started naming him as “Dracula” which means “Dragon” or “The Devil”; this was due to his violence. However, it was only with Bram Stoker, a famous Irish writer, that he took part in European Gothic novels and then, as we can see nowadays, he started being loved by more and more people until he became a real star of the cinema; indeed over two hundreds movies, each with their version, were based on him. Everyone knows that Count Dracula was a vampire, the most powerful one whereas, like the other vampires, he had the same strengths and weaknesses too even if he has been being the chief of all of them for many years. He lived in a very big ancient secluded castle in Transylvania so close to the local cemetery that you could see a lot of graves coming out of the ground from its huge windows. However, the Count always slept during the day and only when the shining sun left his place for the silvery moon and the azure sky turned into a blue sky, often covered by clouds that hid the bright stars, he woke up. Indeed, as we know, vampires are creatures of the night because the sunlight can burn and, consequently, destroy them. As a matter of a fact they are scared of everything which is able to hurt them like as the sunlight, the crucifix, the holy water, the garlic and so they dislike all of these things. On the other hand, the vampires love the dark, the blood, the cold places and the coffins where they sleep because they don’t need to breathe to survive because they are already dead. Even if they are very powerful and can live for thousands of years, there are some ways which allow you to destroy them definitely, like as burning them or cutting off their head but, the most efficient existent way is to drive a stake of poplar to their heart. Someone thinks that vampires are still alive but don’t worry, if you meet one of them you can recognize him by his look. They have a very pale cold skin, two red eyes which give you the impression they have something weird and a pair of very long canines they use to bite your neck and suck your blood. Moreover, you can also pay attention to their way of talking; indeed they have got a pretty deep voice and they speak slowly with elegance and eloquence and their knowledge is so wide because they are so old. Other aspects you have to consider in your valuation are their athletic skills, in fact, they are very strong and are able to jump very high and run so fast and, obviously, they can use their main power: vampires can turn into bats and fly but only at night, the moment of the day where they live as we have already told before. Adding these powers with the previous features we have announced before, we can easily understand how vampires can arouse interest in the readers and I advocate the idea they are the most impressive characters in horror tales.