HELLAH HORRAH: Hell No Myth Descent: Dracula Untold

Written By Tya Alisa Anthony

Tarot Card: Strength (Power Chosen, Power Endured)

Hellah’s back — and tonight we talk about vampires with purpose.

Not the brooding nightclub poets.

Not the glittering immortals with great cheekbones and no consequences.

I’m talking about the kind of vampire born from a decision.

Dracula Untold hits differently than most modern vampire films because it doesn’t start with seduction — it starts with responsibility. Before the fangs, before the shadows, before the myth, we meet a man trying to protect something fragile:

His family.

His people.

His home.

And that shift alone changes the entire mythology.

Most vampire stories ask: What happens when a human becomes a monster?

This one asks:

What happens when a good man accepts monstrosity to save others?

Enter Vlad III Dracula — not the caricature history remembers, but a ruler standing at the edge of impossible choices. The threat is real, the war unavoidable, and the cost of survival higher than any kingdom can afford.

So he makes a deal.

Not with romance.

Not with destiny.

With darkness.

The transformation is brutal and beautiful at the same time. Bats swirl like storm clouds, the sky bends around him, and suddenly Dracula is less a monster and more a force of nature. Power doesn’t creep in quietly — it arrives like thunder.

That’s why this film resonates.

The vampire myth here isn’t about hunger.

It’s about sacrifice.

He drinks darkness so others don’t have to. He becomes the terror invading armies will remember long after the war ends. It’s myth-making in real time — the moment when a man realizes history will never forgive him but chooses the path anyway.

And that’s where the tarot card lands.

Strength.

Not brute force. Not domination. True Strength in tarot is the courage to confront the beast within and hold it without losing yourself. Vlad’s battle is never with his enemies — it’s with the thirst. With the temptation to let power erase the humanity that motivated the sacrifice in the first place.

Every time he chooses restraint, he remains a hero.

Every time he loses it, the legend grows darker.

That tension is what makes Dracula Untold stand apart from the endless parade of stylish bloodsuckers. This Dracula isn’t just immortal — he’s burdened. Carrying the knowledge that the world may only remember the monster.

Final Hellah truth:

Sometimes the scariest creatures in myth are not born evil.

Sometimes they are born from love pushed past its limits.

And if history remembers you as the villain…

but your people survived because of it?

That’s not horror.

That’s legend.

— Hellah 🖤🦇

🔮

HELL NO MYTH ORACLE INDEX

  • What You Wish For → The Devil (Hunger for power)

  • Ready or Not → The Tower (Collapse of inherited wealth)

  • Weapons → The High Priestess (Hidden rituals)

  • Dracula Untold → Strength (Power chosen to protect)

Tya Alisa Anthony

Tya Alisa Anthony is an American artist, photographer, writer, and independent curator whose work explores memory, mythology, ancestry, and the quiet ways people leave themselves behind in the objects they touch. For more than twenty years, her practice has existed at the intersection of visual research, education, and cultural storytelling, investigating resilience through the body, the landscape, historical archives, and the natural world.

Working across photography, collage, cyanotype, botanical collections, handmade books, and mixed media, Anthony approaches each body of work as an evolving archive rather than a finished statement. She is drawn to weathered photographs, heirlooms, medicinal plants, folklore, ritual objects, forgotten architecture, and the symbolic language that connects cultures across time. Her work asks how identity is preserved, transformed, and remembered.

Alongside her studio practice, Anthony has spent more than two decades building educational programs, exhibitions, and community-centered initiatives that expand access to the arts. Her leadership has helped shape institutions, mentor emerging artists, develop sustainable systems, and create spaces where creativity becomes a lifelong practice rather than a privilege.

Anthony’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Octopus Collection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collections.

She is currently creating Organic Tarot, a 78-card hand-collaged tarot deck and accompanying memoir that intertwines mythology, autobiography, botanical symbolism, and the archetypal journey of transformation. The project reflects the central thread running throughout her career: that art is not simply something we make—it is a way of understanding ourselves, preserving what matters, and leaving a map for those who come after us.

http://www.tyaanthony.com
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