Dracula Untold: One part horror to 20 parts fantasy

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THE IMPALER: Luke Evans plays Vlad III Tepes Dracula, the real prince of Wallachia of the 1400s.

The first impression is of an overwhelmingly brown world where everyone shouts a good deal. The newest film in the long line that is the Dracula franchise is being filmed in Northern Ireland, where it shares a backdrop, a good many technicians and a common spirit with Game of Thrones. It is clearly one part old-style Dracula horror to 20 parts fantasy adventure.

Don't imagine the cadaverous Nosferatu descending a staircase, his own grotesquely magnified shadow his only companion in living death. Don't imagine Bela Lugosi's eyes turning red as he moves in on a maiden's jugular. Dracula Untold isn't that kind of film.

Enter Luke Evans as Vlad III Tepes (the Impaler) Dracula, the real prince of Wallachia of the 1400s; by the end of the film, he will be one of the undead, destined to become Bram Stoker's monster. Evans has yet to win his fangs; right now, his Vlad is deliberating over how much tribute he is prepared to turn over to the evil Ottoman sultan Mehmed II and, more specifically, whether to accede to Mehmed's demand that he send his son to train as one of his elite personal guards, the janissaries.

"Courage, anger, even love; none of this matters to a prince! All that matters is his duty to his people!" booms an adviser in a sonorous olden-days voice.

That's the kind of film this is.

Executive producer Alissa Phillips describes Dracula Untold as an "origin story"; a tag more usually attached to Batman Begins or the X-Men prequels.

In an age dominated by comic book blockbusters, Universal has found itself without anything like a Marvel franchise in its bottom drawer; what it does have are the so-called Universal Monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman and the Mummy, stars of Universal movies from the silent era right into the 1950s.

Dracula Untold goes back five centuries to find the man who would become Dracula - a pallid figure with a long white moustache and hair on his palms - in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. There is some academic debate over the extent to which Stoker intended his Dracula to be identified with Vlad the Impaler. His anti-hero was originally called Count Wampyr, which he changed to Dracula after reading about Vlad in a history of Romania he borrowed from the library in Whitby, where the novel is set.

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Dracula Untold: One part horror to 20 parts fantasy

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero