ordinary Romanians were outraged to learn that their heroic prince was depicted as a bloodsucking ghoul in the West.

Professor Elizabeth Miller, an expert in medieval history and the head of the Canadian chapter of the Dracula Society, explains: "The writer of the novel "Dracula," Bram Stoker, took the name Dracula from the historical figure, from Vlad, but he didn't know very much about Vlad. Vlad certainly wasn't the inspiration for his novel, as many people think. So the connection is actually very thin, very tenuous, but it's been totally blown out of proportion, of course, which has all kinds of consequences, because a lot of the resentment among some Romanians about the Dracula concept is a belief that Bram Stoker denigrated one of their national heroes by turningculture and its traditional image of the vampire as embodied by Dracula, and the Romanian historical depiction of Vlad the Impaler.

But the society is not all about stuffy research and analysis. Amid the academic presentations, there is plenty of time for fun. Not everyone at the congress takes the high road when it comes to Dracula, as Miller explains.

"You'll get some people of course, who are entirely historians, who have no interest in the vampire side of it at all, and who are very serious in the exploration of the life and times of Vlad Tepes. And then you get the people at the other extreme, who are only interested in the popular culture side of it and the movies, and the comic books and who have a