Just in time for the release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse next week, it’s been revealed that star Robert Pattinson shares the same lineage as Vlad III Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler, who is believed to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The relation was researched by Ancestry.com and released to The Associated Press.  Apparently Pattinson’s tie comes from his relation to the British royal family. The current English Princes, Harry and William, are Pattinson’s distant cousins and Vlad the Impaler is their distant uncle.

“Tracing Pattinson’s family back to Vlad was difficult research, but the pieces that unraveled created the perfect accompaniment to the Twilight Saga, ” said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com.

“Without any myth or magic, we find royalty and vampires lurking in Pattinson’s life — making his story just as supernatural as the one he’s playing on screen.”

So who is Vlad the Impaler?  Vlad III Dracula was born in Transylvania and grew up to rule over Wallachia (now known as Romania) from 1456 to 1462.  Wallachia was in chaos when Vlad took the throne, so he became known as a harsh ruler who liked to impale his enemies on spikes in his front lawn (thus “Vlad the Impaler”).  While there are no solid numbers of how many people he killed, it’s estimated around 40,000 to 100,000.  He ruled with an iron fist and he only gave terrible and sadistic punishments to those who broke the law.  The stories that circulated about Vlad Dracula after his eventual ousting were increasingly horrible in nature and the vampire tale is supposedly originated in the Slovakian area, so it’s generally assumed that Bram Stoker put two and two together for his 1897 novel Dracula.

In what can only be described as a publicist’s dream, the same folks at Ancestry have discovered another link to Vlad’s legacy- Twilight series book writer Stephanie Meyer also shares a biological link to the English royal family.