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Universal and Legendary have been running around the Internet all day trying to take this trailer down. And we’re not sure why, because holy crap this thing looks amazing. Admittedly, not in a positive way, but it still looks pretty amazing.
Essentially the story is Dracula Begins. The noble warrior Vlad Tepes, faced with an unstoppable army of vaguely brown people, chooses to become a monster to face down the Sultan, with lots of visual cues shamelessly swiped from 300. It’s the kind of movie that should be scored entirely with metal solos, but for some reason, movie trailers use soft ballads to score action movies these days.
Needless to say, historically speaking this is almost total crap. Some of it is accurate: Tepes did indeed enrage the Ottoman Empire because, loveable scamp that he was, he’d sneak into Turkish camps, using his knowledge of the language, and set up devastating ambushes and surprise attacks. And they did send a massive force to kill off Vlad and make Wallachia, as it was known at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire.
But Vlad didn’t get the nickname “The Impaler” because of his lovemaking style. We’re talking about a guy who, to fight off what amounted to a tax argument, killed nearly 50,000 people in the most horrifying manner he could possibly conceive of while waging a bloody guerrilla war. While it’s believed his reputation for cruelty and violence was exaggerated by his enemies, who largely wrote the history, the dude was roughly as cuddly as an iron maiden. It tells you how much life sucked there that the Romanians still regard him as a folk hero.
But who cares? This looks like it’s full of gore, swordfights, and vampires kicking ass. And that’s what we want from this movie. It arrives October 17th.