Handbook of the Vampire: The Bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory

Written for Handbook of the Vampire by Cristina Santos the Chapter Page can be found here.

One of the early comments in this chapter that struck me was the fact that the Erzsébet Báthory story is one of the witch/vampire hybrid. This hybrid is found scattered throughout the megatext but I had never really looked at Báthory in that way. When pointed out, it is obvious. Not only is she (in many versions of the tale) aided by a woman versed in witchcraft but the whole bathing in blood to gain youth and vitality is certainly within the sphere of magic/witchcraft.

Santos looks at a variety of texts to explore the development of the mythologisation of the historical Báthory into the Bloody Countess – primarily prose, but also touching into both films and TV series that have reached into the myth. It was only after reading this, and considering this article, that it struck me that the author did not use the film Countess Dracula within the chapter; an omission given that the Hammer film likely brought the Báthory story to a generation of cinemagoers and the conflation of Báthory with Dracula in the title. The author looks at the way “his-stories” about the countess were constructed by those with power and a vested interest in her demonisation, which make the historical documentation complex. I will mention that the author does state that Gilles de Rais did not undergo a vampiric mythologisation (10), this is not entirely true. Whilst de Rais is considerably less well known, J K Huysmans (for instance) does liken De Rais to a vampire in his 1891 novel Là-Bas.

One thing I do like, when reading reference works on vampires, is to get new media to look at. Santos has put me on the track of the series American Horror Story: Coven and Salem, with aspects in them using that Báthory-like witch/vampire hybrid and the cosmetic use of or bathing in blood. Certainly, at the time I wrote this article, Coven had an instance of energy vampirism in the first episode (and the link above goes to my thoughts on the season). As for the essay, it was a very good read, it didn’t suffer from the missing Hammer film (I only thought of it after the fact) and the de Rais comment is minor. An excellent entry to the Handbook.