Summit Planning Real Vampires with ‘Vlad’

Published by Jeff Leins on: December 8th, 2009

Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the defanged, sparkly vampire Twilight saga, will continue to drain the genre with an action-packed Dracula origin story titled Vlad.

Brad Pitt is producing with his Plan B partner Dede Gardner, though he won’t be wearing fake fangs again.  Music video director Anthony Mandler, who worked with Rihanna, the Killers, and Eminem, is making his feature film debut based on a script by Charlie Hunnam.

The story centers on the legend of Vlad the Impaler, according to the Heat Vision blog, about how he supposedly transformed from a young prince into Dracula.  Why not call it Vlad the Impaler?  A slight change, but one that bluntly guarantees a good skewering.

Like all minimalist filmmaking now, the visual style was compared to that of 300, so I guess the studio plans to remake Bram Stoker’s iconic story on the cheap.  An “action-oriented” version with the look of a graphic novel?  Well, at least promises were made to impale someone.  The less bloodless vampire romance the better, I suppose.