Did you know that the archfiend best representing the Halloween season—namely, Count Dracula—is fake news?
I don’t mean that he’s fake in the sense that he’s fictional—which, of course, he is—but rather that his popular image reflects a pattern we now recognize and see on a daily basis: propagandistic forces working to transform heroes into villains.
Count Dracula entered the popular consciousness in 1897, with the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, which surrounds the exploits of an undead bloodsucker from Transylvania. Stoker borrowed the name Dracula and some historical background from an account of Wallachia and Moldavia. Although the extent of his knowledge of Vlad III Dracula (c. 1430–1476), also known as Vlad the Impaler, remains disputed, subsequent popular culture has firmly fused the historical ruler with the fictional monster.
Long before Stoker’s novel, hostile accounts had portrayed Vlad as a sadist who tortured and impaled his victims—including small animals and insects, when he couldn’t find any humans.
Among other depravities, these accounts say that Vlad boiled people alive, shredded others “like cabbage,” forced parents to eat their children, husbands to eat their wives’ breasts, forced Muslim Tatars to swallow their own semen, and built secret trapdoors to drop his victims on cunningly located stakes below.
Historians have challenged the reliability of these accounts, recognizing the role of enemy propaganda in demonizing Dracula. Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press was still a recent innovation, and Vlad’s enemies made great use of print to publicize his alleged atrocities.
But what happens when the omitted context is restored? Behind the familiar monster emerges a story of captivity, religious warfare, and a vastly outnumbered ruler who turned his enemies’ methods against them.
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