Digging for Dracula

Carla Laemmle, niece of the founder of Universal Studios, who was the first person to ever speak in a Dracula ‘talking’ movie and who lived on the actual movie lot for a number of years; Bela Lugosi Junior, son of one of the big screen's most well-known character vampires; Jeanne Youngson, wife of an Academy award-winning producer and director, who established the first-ever (maybe the only) Dracula Museum, in New York; Forrest Ackerman, sadly departed, the world's foremost collector of artifacts horror and fantasy and originator of the sexily-clad vampirellas; Vincent Hillyer, a former California almond farmer once married to the sister of the Shah of Iran as well as to Milly Vitale, a prominent Italian actress, who offered $10,000 to anyone who could bring him a vampire and had two doctors lined up to verify the find - these are just some of the colorful, larger-than-life characters Sean Hillen met during his search for the origins of Dracula. Not to mention a midnight meeting in the ruins of Vlad the Impaler's castle, deep within the rugged mountains of Wallachia, Romania.