Free! I feel so free!
A starkly told tale, Countess Dracula (1971) is a lurid, gamey story of a noblewoman, deprived of her husband and her beauty, who accidentally discovers the blood of virgins will restore her beauty.
For a short period.
And then she’s uglier.
Whether it’s the movie, or the editing for television, I cannot tell, but its sketchiness detracts from the story. Segues are abrupt and confusing. The main characters do get relatively full treatments, but the supporting characters, who are often performing important tasks, such as kidnapping the noblewoman’s daughter so that she may impersonate her to win the affections of a young man with whom she’s become infatuated, exist purely for the purposes of the story; I cannot imagine them doing anything but evaporating to dust once the story has passed their neighborhood.
Resentful of old age?
Because of this lack of empathy, there is little feeling of horror here, only of pity for her victims, virgins or not, who suffer her hatpin in the throat, as well as the audience, who is left wondering why the noblewoman could possibly think she can do this more than two or three times.
Here’s the thing: this is based, however loosely, on a real person, Elizabeth Báthory. From Wikipedia, Elizabeth was …
… a Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer from the Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been labelled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer,[3] though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1585 and 1609.[4] The highest number of victims cited during Báthory’s trial was 650. However, this number comes from the claim by a serving girl named Susannah that Jakab Szilvássy, Countess Báthory’s court official, had seen the figure in one of Báthory’s private books. The book was never revealed, and Szilvássy never mentioned it in his testimony.[5] Despite the evidence against Elizabeth, her family’s influence kept her from facing trial. She was imprisoned in December 1609 within Csetje Castle, Upper Hungary (now in Slovakia), and held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up where she remained imprisoned until her death five years later.
Countess Dracula, however sloppily made, shocks in this unexpected manner: the criminal activities, if not the miraculous transformations, may have actually occurred, and involved far more victims. It’s a pity the movie deviates from the historical story, for the Countess never stood trial. Instead, she was imprisoned in a walled room, where, isolated, she survived for several years. The swift punishment implied in the movie may have not been nearly as exacting as the non-judicial punishment ordained for her, presumably by the royal court.
But the movie, on its own terms, is less than affecting.
