Overbury Ink

Meet Ian LeWinter, the writer behind Blank Must Die , through this series where he reveals to us glimpses of  the quagmire of his creative inspiration

Volume I

FICTION BORN FROM REALITY

I love it when fiction is built on the far stranger truths of real people, real history, or real science. Take the legendary vampire Dracula and his real-life counter-part Vlad III Dracula, Prince of Wallachia, more commonly known with his epithet, The Impaler. This real-life abomination of humanity was known to summarily impale just about anyone, in as slow and agonizing a fashion as possible, which often lasted hours or even days.

With Vlad, the facts far outpace the fiction. For instance, according to some 15^th century German manuscripts, the real Vlad ordered over 10,000 Transylvanians impaled in the city of Sibiu alone. He burned villages to the ground. He skinned, roasted and boiled people, feeding their flesh to their friends and relatives. All the fictional version of this madman did was drink blood, mentally enslave a few servants, and transform himself from human to bat. Nolo contendere.

But you can’t do the subject of “Characters Born from Vlad” justice without mentioning one of today’s most celebrated icons, The Dark Knight. Bob Kane noted the movie “The Bat Whispers” was a source of inspiration for his character Batman. “The Bat Whispers” was itself based on the 1926 silent film “The Bat” (from which the “Bat Signal” was born) which features a caped killer. Echoes of Vlad.

What’s more, Batman is often seen as a dark, morally-flexible crusader against the forces of evil. Vlad also saw himself as a perpetrator of atrocity who would bring about social stability in Transylvania and ultimate victory over the dreaded Ottoman invaders.

Like the children of Vlad III, many of the themes in Blank were born from “stranger-than-fiction” reality. I remember reading “The Hot Zone” in 1995 and thinking that Ebola was a wildly fascinating aspect of life. It seemed so mysterious and so lethal, popping up on the surface of our world, creating havoc and horror and then vanishing again. It definitely seemed worth deeper inspection. The director Wolfgang Peterson seemed to agree with his 1995 thriller, “Outbreak”, starring Dustin Hoffman. And as Hollywood is known to do (and Ian and Don also), Mr. Peterson gave Ebola the one thing that it’s sorely lacking — the ability to go airborne.

In fact if you spend any time digging into the who and where of this little critter, you find out that if Ebola were airborne and outbreaks were to occur in heavily populated areas, it would be very bad. For me it wasn’t just about the speed with which it killed, it was also very much about the manner in which it killed. I’ve not yet been confronted with an actual example of a human body deep in the throws of viral hemorrhagic fever, but I can imagine how horrific it must be.

After a number of books and pages of information ingested about the virus, I arrived at the same conclusion that I imagine Mr. Peterson did: fashioning a virus based on the real-life nightmare was far more than enough to make a frightening point.

And it wasn’t just Mr. Peterson and me. It turns out that if rumor be true, the Soviets tried to marry the killing prowess of Ebola to the infective capability of Smallpox. That sure doesn’t feel like a “Great minds think alike” moment to me! (To be continued)