A handful of Scriptshadow readers pushed me to review this screenplay. Did the Dracula origin story suck luscious grade-A blood or did it just suck?
Genre: Period/Horror
Premise: The origin story of Dracula. A young Transylvanian king named Vlad must fight off a Turkish army intent on stealing his only son and destroying his kingdom.
About: This script made it onto the 2006 Black List. There doesn’t seem to be much information out there about it other than that it was included on the Black List. I’m assuming the writers have been steadily working on assignments since, but I can’t find anything else that they have in development. I know the script is very well liked by Dracula enthusiasts.
Writers: Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless
Details: 4/28/06 draft
I had no idea what this script was about when I picked it up, so I had no idea that it was actually a prequel to Twilight and about Robert Pattinson’s great great great great great great great great grandfather. That’s right, this script is about the ultimate vampire, Dracula himself! Or “Vlad,” as he liked to be called before the nickname stuck.
Now I’ll say this – if you’re not into Dracula – like really into Dracula – this script probably isn’t for you. But if you’re a Dracula geek, if you wear a black cape to work and impale people for fun and eat Count Dracula cereal (I only do one of these things – I’ll let you guess which one), then you’re going to be really happy. Because this script is like Dracula porn. It’s Dracula University. We find out how he got his name. We find out why he drinks blood. We find out how he learned to turn into a bat.
And then we get some sweet cameos! Like Baba Yaga. Do you know who Baba Yaga is? She’s this witch who used to eat babies for brunch. And then there’s Caligula. You know who that dude is? He used to have these wild orgies and kill anyone who got near him. His appearance here is badass, almost as memorable as the Medusa scene in the original Clash Of The Titans.
So then why didn’t I love this thing? Because, sadly, I’m not a Dracula geek. I gave it a chance though because the Scriptshadow readers said it was great. And sometimes, even if I’m not into subject matter, I can like a script based purely on the characters and the journey. Here, though, I felt like I needed a Dracula Encyclopedia to follow the journey. More on that soon. But first, let’s take a look at the plot.
It’s 1462 in the Carpathian mountains, in a little place called Transylvania. A warrior-king name Vlad presides over the town, serving as its protector, a job he must tend to often, since the nearby Turks are constantly hitting him up for tax money. Now this isn’t the Dracula you know from books and movies. This guy is nice. He actually helps people and cares about his peasants n’ stuff.
That niceness is about to be tested though, since one of the Turk Warlords comes by and tells Vlad the Turk king wants his newly-born son. Vlad doesn’t take kindly to baby-stealers, so he slashes the warlord in half and sends a message to the Turks that the Transylvanites aren’t going to be your little bitches anymore. You go Vlad!
But it turns out the Turks are the least of his worries. Someone is out there killing Turks like they were baby frogs, and it isn’t long before that someone gets his hands on Vlad too. Who is this mysterious murderer? Why Caligula of course! And Caligula lives up to his name, killing Vlad! I think. I was a little confused about that. But anyway, Vlad is now undead, so I guess he didn’t officially die, and he kills Caligula back (that sounds like a cool Bond title: “A Kill For A Kill”), adding insult to injury by drinking his blood to steal his powers. Now Vlad has super vision and super climbing ability and is a lot stronger. Only downsides are he craves human blood now and is sorta dead. So, yeah, that part sucks.
Vlad heads back to his family in Transylvania and gets ready for a major onslaught by the Turks. I never knew the Turks were so badass in the 1400s, but I guess they had a huge army. They were going to use this army to fight someone else but they’ve decided to send the whole thing to tiny little Transylvania, kill themselves some Vlad, and take his son as well.
Also, as if all of this weren’t bad enough, Vlad has to find out who’s responsible for making him this way. I thought it was Caligula but I guess it’s someone more powerful than that. The man behind the man. If he can find and defeat him, he can become alive again and live a happy life. If not, he’ll be doomed as this undead coffin-riding flying vermin forever, which is, like, so not cool.
Here’s the thing. Reading this felt like how a 14 year old girl might feel when watching Lord Of The Rings for the first time. There’s just sooooo much information being thrown at you that if you don’t have SOME prior affinity with the material, you’re going to be lost. And I was so lost. The plot summary above was about as simple as I could make it. But the actual plot was way way more complicated.
Some gypsies steal Transylvania’s money so Vlad can’t pay the Turks. He goes and kills them. The mountain next to him starts spitting out blood. A mysterious killer starts killing Turks and the Turks think it’s Vlad. So Vlad has to go find out who’s really killing the Turks so the Turks don’t kill his people. The Turks want a thousand warriors from Transylvania. Vlad says he’ll fight instead. But then they change their mind and want Vlad’s baby. Vlad finds out Caligula is killing the Turks and is killed by Caligula. And that’s just the first half!
I talk about goals a lot on this site, and to make sure your characters are always going after goals. Now you can change the goals up if you want, so your hero is going after one thing, achieving it, then going after something else, etc., etc. As long as your hero is being active, your story should move along nicely. But if there are too many goals and we’re waiting too long for the ‘BIG’ goal to emerge, we start to get impatient. And that’s how I felt here. It wasn’t until the middle of the screenplay before we learn that Vlad’s ultimate goal is to find and defeat the person who turned him this way so he can become “normal” again.
Personally, for me, it was too long of a wait. I think for others who are really into the mythology of Dracula it wouldn’t be as much of a problem because they enjoy these little side-journeys. But for someone confused half the time about which way was up, I would’ve loved more clarity and direction in the plot. I liked where it ended up, with the Turks attacking Transylvania on the mountain. That would be a hell of a battle on the big screen. I was just frustrated by how much work I had to do to get to that point. This is NOT an easy read. It is something you have to invest 100% of your concentration in to keep up with.
And that definitely weighed on me. At times it felt like boxes were being checked – get the blood-drinking thing in there, get the bat thing in there, get the wolf thing in there – that I was being taken through the mythology beat by meticulous beat, and that’s when I struggled most. The script is best when it’s sailing along and relaxing. Like that Caligula scene, where he’s slitting the hanging soldiers’ throats one by one. That was an awesome effortless scene.
And there was a lot of great imagery here. As someone who e-mailed me said: “This is a movie!” And it is! The vampire trend is probably dead for awhile now that Twilight has ended. But that still leaves the door open for quasi-vampire material that doesn’t fit into the Twilight box. And Dracula: Year Zero definitely doesn’t fit into that box.
I just wish I was more into Dracula so I could’ve enjoyed it more. What did you guys think?
[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The longer it takes to get to the main character goal that’s driving your screenplay, the harder it is to keep your reader interested. People want to know what your script is about fairly early. They want to know that Bruce Willis is trying to fix this little boy’s problem in The Sixth Sense. They want to know that Cobb is trying to implant a thought into this man’s mind in Inception. The sooner you rope us in with the major goal, the sooner we understand what movie we’re watching and can settle in. I just wanted to know what the goal was in “Dracula: Year Zero” much sooner. I’m not saying you CAN’T do it the other way. I’m just saying it’s a lot harder.
