WAS DRACULA BASED ON VLAD THE IMPALER?
Obviously Vlad wasn’t an impossibly old vampire who couldn’t go out in the day and disliked garlic in his cooking. Y et the three-time voivode (prince) of Wallachia and Dracula do make a gruesome twosome, what with Vlad’s taste for torture and impaling his enemies – hence the nickname. As many as 100,000 died at his hands, including tens of thousands in one go, impaled at a battle in 1462 to scare the invading Ottomans.