Messing with the Myth
They drink blood, they burn in the sunlight, they cower from a crucifix and a stake through the heart can kill them; they are vampires. Well, that's what I used to think, anyway.
Filmmakers tweaking the details surrounding the vampire legend is nothing new. Vampires in Underworld focused on hunting Lycans, not humans. In Van Helsing, Dracula took a stake through the heart and laughed about it. The vampires in The Satanic Rites of Dracula wore fuzzy vests and listened to funky music on their motorcycles. Twilight doesn't count: if you can go out into the sunlight and survive, you are not a vampire. You might as well say that zombies have an incurable hunger for...a nice ham sandwich.
In the visual medium of film, there also has been a necessary distinction between Nosferatu and Dracula. Max Schreck was Nosferatu, Frank Langella was Dracula. If you try to combine the two you get some stomach-churning wrinkly bat thing that tries to seduce you (read: Gary Oldman in Coppella's Dracula).
In the recently released Dracula: Untold however, details are more than tweaked. According to this film, Vlad the Impaler was actually a cuddly family man who just happened to kill thousands of people. To him, impaling people on spikes was just an unpleasant task that had to be done, much like going to the dentist. He was also not the first vampire: that was some creepy crinkly thing that lived in the mountain caves. Thus, the filmmakers were simultainously implying that Vlad was a decent, upstanding man with all the right motivations and that he impaled thousands on spikes before being taken over by the devil.
At first, I thought Dracula: Untold was going soft on the vampire myth. Then I realized it was just the opposite. They gave a pass to Vlad the impaler. They implied that it is possible to commit those kinds of acts and still be well adjusted. They ripped away the central essence of Dracula, the danger that lies in being seduced when you know better. I want to give props to those who created Dracula: Untold for trying something radically different, but I can't. It just sucks, in all the wrong ways.