Vlad III, the 15th-century prince of Wallachia better known as Vlad the Impaler, built his reputation through terror as much as tactics. This film traces his rise amid the constant power struggles between Wallachia, Hungary, and the expanding Ottoman Empire, and the brutal methods he used to hold his throne and resist Turkish domination. Impalement, his signature punishment for enemies and traitors alike, gets detailed treatment, along with the chronicles and woodcuts that spread his fearsome image across Europe in his own lifetime. The film follows his repeated exiles and returns to power, his uneasy alliances, and his eventual death fighting the Ottomans. It also considers how a regional warlord's name got attached centuries later to Bram Stoker's Dracula, turning a historical figure notorious for cruelty into a folkloric monster. Interviews and narration separate documented atrocities from the legends that grew up around them, leaving a portrait of a ruler whose violence was, by most accounts, entirely real.