from the grave, to the terror of this bystander— a scene not included in the final cut of BARON BLOOD.
NE OF THE MOST talked-about publishing events of 1972 was Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu’s In Search of Dracula: A True
History of Dracula and Vampire Legends. This pop his- torical text allegedly “proved” that Bram Stoker’s liter- ary creation had been based on Vlad Tepes of Wallachia (1431–1476), a bloodthirsty Romanian warrior who impaled his enemies on stakes arranged around his outdoor banquet table—thus winning him the nick- name “Vlad the Impaler.” The McNally/Florescu book was later turned into the semi-documentary film In Search of Dracula (1974), filmed in Romania by direc- tor Calvin Floyd, and starring Christopher Lee. This book, like the burgeoning ecology movement, reflected a growing concern, first within the counterculture and then rippling out into mass culture of the late 1960s and early ’70s, about getting back to basics, going “back to the land” and examining one’s “roots”—and these ideas naturally found expression in the fields of popular entertainment, including the horror cinema.
