Dracula

Although myths about vampires had existed since ancient times, Bram Stoker's Dracula is considered by many to be the work that launched the vampire into the human lexicon, and is undoubtedly the most popular and well-known vampire story ever written.  Stoker's inspirations for Count Dracula are heavily debated, but most agree that Dracula was based in part on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, a fifteenth-century Romanian ruler known for his indiscriminate brutality, which included a taste for impaling people alive on wooden spikes and watching them die in slow agony.