"The Draculas on Dracula"

Denise Noe: How do the two of you feel about your popular incarnations, taken as a whole? Do you like the fictional Count Dracula, or do you dislike him? Your Ladyship?

Elizabeth Báthory: I've always felt close to Count Dracula. He had style. Whisking in and out of people's lives, the big dramatic cape, showing off that gleaming smile. A charming fellow. He's always reminded me of myself.

DN: Your Majesty?

Vlad Tepes: Dracula as seen by the general public is much closer to Liz than to me. A vampire is a murderer--and no offense, Liz, but a political tyrant is in an entirely different league. A vampire, like a murderer, goes at it one-on-one. So it's as if his life is in some sense equivalent to his victim's. As head of state, I had huge groups of people impaled at a time.

EB: I murdered groups of people too, Vlad. I didn't kill 650 girls by going at it just one at a time.

Vlad: Yes, yes, I know, Liz. But you didn't slay hundreds or thousands on a single day either.

EB: (Sigh.) True.

Vlad: But my principle objection to the fictionalized Dracula is that he is much too sexy.

EB: Perhaps that's why I'm partial to Dracula. Everyone knows I was a sensuous woman.

DN: Could you elaborate on that, Your Majesty? What specifically makes Dracula "sexy" and why do you dislike it?

Vlad: In both books and films, Dracula appears as a kind of fanged Don Juan. He seeks to lure people, especially women, into sexual sin.

But, in fact, I did everything possible to make sure women guarded their chastity. An adulteress had her genitals ripped apart and was skinned alive. Girls who lost their virginity and widows who fooled around were also tortured to death. Dracula's Wallachia--Liz's home was Transylvania, though I had some holdings there--was no place for hussies.

I was a moralist. The vampire legend misses that completely and it was central to my life.

DN: Your Ladyship, did you also consider yourself a moralist?

EB: I'll have to admit I did not. I DID follow religious ritual quite conscientiously--I tried to arrange Christian burials for all my victims, as well as attending Church faithfully--but I really tortured and murdered for pleasure. Perhaps, in today's jargon, I'd be a murder addict.

DN: Yes, Your Ladyship, that would probably be the way you'd be described on "Oprah" or "Dr. Phil."

EB: If I lived today there might be a 12-step program for people like myself, a "Murderers Anonymous."

Cannibalism was not my main thing, but I did occasionally bite chunks of flesh off of girls--yum, yum! Jeff Dahmer was on the right track when he tried to start a similar group called "Cannibals Anonymous." But the prison authorities tore down his notice. I think that's outrageous.

DN: I believe they assumed that Dahmer's note for "Cannibals Anonymous" was a joke because cannibalism is so rare there couldn't be another one at the prison.

EB: It happens more often than you think! It's just being covered up the way incest used to be, and way Satanic cults and UFO abductions are still being swept under the rug by the same people who want to lull the public into a false sense of security.

DN: Getting back to you, Your Majesty, don't you think the manner of execution you favored might have contributed to the sexualization of Dracula? Impaling does rather suggest the male organ in excitement.

Vlad: Only if you have a dirty mind--as just about everyone does in your terrible, post-Freudian world. Sex, sex, sex, everywhere--it's disgusting!

There was nothing sexual about impalings! They were done for their deterrent effect. We were centuries away from TV so it was the best way to maximize the number of folks who saw what I did to miscreants and, thus, were warned away from crime.

Anyway, what I favored was a hard-nosed approach. It didn't have to be impaling per se.

DN: Your Majesty, why do you think art has viewed you in a sexual rather than a moral light?

Vlad: Bram Stoker wrote his novel in the Nineteenth Century when that decadent Freudianism was coming into vogue. Now, Stoker was well aware that free sex is an awful thing. He should have known--since he died from syphilis.

But then he chose me--me!--to represent the sexual libertine. That was all wrong. It was libelous. Everything Hollywood did was based on Stoker's fallacy—"Nosferatu" and all the others.

EB: I was a victim of the times, too. For several decades, people were forbidden by law to even mention me or my games. When the edict finally wore off, they were in the middle of a vampire scare so my story mixed up with the current fad.

DN: How so, Your Ladyship?

EB: That business about me bathing in or drinking blood to keep my youth--it's all a bunch of nonsense. I was a beautiful woman but I wasn't at all vain. Besides, I don't think blood even works to fight off wrinkles.

If it did, I'm sure ladies today would be drinking blood, at least if they if they could get a prescription for it, and the better health spas would offer blood baths. Considering all the things women in your culture do to make themselves pretty--having their faces cut into and pulled back, pointing lasers at their wrinkles, objects stuck into their breasts, fat cut out of them--drinking or bathing in blood seems rather mild.

DN: Do either of you have a message that you would like to send to the contemporary world as we move into the 21st Century?

EB: Yes, people in your culture are always griping about the lack of good help. When a girl failed to iron my ruff properly, I took the iron and burned her face with it. They paid attention to their work after that.

Vlad: I have a lot to say to the modern world. A firm hand is what's needed these days. Your talk shows are filled with people complaining about the homeless. We had a similar problem in Wallachia and I solved it. I invited all those who didn't work to a free banquet. Like your own welfare recipients, the loafers of my kingdom couldn't pass up a chance to get something for nothing. So while the vagrants were inside feasting, I had all the doors locked and set the place on fire.

Did you know that when I was Prince we kept a goblet of pure gold in the public square and it was never stolen? Law and order was more than a slogan when I was in power. Modern people have such loose morals, such disrespect for the law--but a Dracula administration would clean it up in no time!

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Previously published in "MonkeySpank"