The Countess

Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Bathory is one of the most enigmatic female figures in history. Though known as one of the first serial killers (well, this claim is pretty unfair, almost any king or pope of those or previous times would easily beat her records), it's odd that her history/legend has not managed to reach such popularity as the history of Vlad the Impaler III. Well, I guess that's because there has not been a popular book loosely inspired on her life, like there has been with Vlad.

Long in short, common knowledge about Bathory says that she was a crazy blood thirsty bitch that murdered hundreds of young peasant girls to get bathed in their blood (thinking that it would keep her young and beautiful... what a bizarre beauty treatment...)
Until recently that was also my understanding about "the blood princess", but I found out about some different views on her story after reading the fascinating book Dracula The Un-Dead. I can't easily express how much I love this book, a page-turner that in an incredibly imaginative way manages to bring together 3 so praised "monsters" as Dracula, Jack the Ripper and Bathory (a pity they didn't add Frankenstein to the mix :-) Bathory is one of the main characters in the book, and though shown as a grotesque diabolic character, it outlines an early existence of suffering and despair that ends up throwing her into a life of perversion and hatred. I'm really longing for some intelligent director to take advantage of this book to do a new Horror blockbuster.



When I finished the book my interest in Bathory was well woken up, so I searched some more information about her and found out that first it's not clear that her attrocities were so numerous as it's popularly thought, and second, that some sources think all of it was a conspiracy against a wealthy, intelligent and powerful woman (3 qualities that obviously made her dangerous to other envious aristochrats). Well, if we think of the Inquisition in Spain, and how liberal women were tortured and burned at the stake across all of Europe accused of practicing witchcraft, this second take on her story seems plausible to say the least (well, things are not so different now, dissent and alternative perceptions are still stigmatized and punished, though in a less "visceral" way, manners have changed, but not the underlying thinking...)

A couple of months went by until I found this excellent film, The Countess. a romatic drama telling us Elizabeth's story. Yes, a romantic drama, maybe you were expecting something along the lines that scene in Hostel 2 acting as a perfect homage to Bathory's common myth (when a girl is hung upside down and bled to dead while a nude Eastern Europe woman baths in her blood...), this film has nothing to do with that (though as you can feel from my description of the scene, I would probably love a film like that).
The story depicted in the film follows the common interpretation of Bathory's life and explores the events that led her into her cruel habits. It's an interesting examination of how destructive love (or the absence of it) can be, and digs into our deepest fears, the fear of getting older, that process that can make us lose ourselves, and that so clearly reminds us of the certainty of our end.
Though as I've said the official story conveyed here aligns with the popular myth, just at the beginning we're warned about how uncertain our knowledge of past events is and how subject it is to manipulation, therefore leaving a small window open to alternative views:

History is a tale told by the victors
Who are the victors?
Barbaric warriors, mad kings and greedy traitors
Maybe most of our histories are made of fables fabricated by those glorious victors