Anyone even slightly familiar with horror knows the name Count Dracula. The central villain of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel has by now become a household name and a layman’s term for vampires. But only history buffs and genre devotees are familiar with his female counterpart, the Blood Countess Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory. Known as the world’s most prolific female murderer, Erzsébet has become notorious for slaughtering hundreds of young women, intent on bathing in their blood.
In the latest season of Ryan Murphy’s Monster series, a young Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) becomes fascinated with the historical villain, enchanted by her cruelty and confidence. But this is not the first fictionalized recounting of Báthory’s story. Over the years, many genre creators have reimagined the Blood Countess as a vain and sadistic torturer and a vision of internalized misogyny.
The true story of this legendary serial killer is still shrouded in mystery, with many details lost to time. Of course, the facts of her abnormal life have been recorded by unreliable men who benefitted from her monstrosity.
The History Behind the Blood Countess
In 1560, Erzsébet Báthory was born into an aristocratic Hungarian family with connections to Transylvanian royalty. At the age of eleven, she was betrothed to Count Ferenc Nadasdy, whom she married when she was just fifteen. He was known to be a sadistic man and may have taught his wife to brutally torture their household servants, which was unfortunately accepted at the time. Two years after this political marriage, Erzsébet began ruling Castle Csejte alone while Nadasdy fought continual wars. Widowed at the age of forty-four, her husband’s death seems to have destabilized the aging Countess and sparked a relentless reign of terror.
Though always a cruel mistress, Erzsébet began extensively torturing young girls, usually between the ages of ten and fourteen. According to witnesses, Erzsébet and a trusted circle of senior staff would crush the hands of servant girls or cut their fingers off with shears. After brutal beatings, she would submerge her victims in freezing water or use pliers to pull out large chunks of their flesh. Perhaps most disturbing, she would starve these young women then force them to drink urine or eat cooked pieces of their own skin.
In 1609, Erzsébet opened a finishing school for wealthy young women, having run out of victims in neighboring towns. After a few weeks, every one of her students had mysteriously died, and dogs began unearthing bodies shallowly buried on the castle grounds. The disappearance of these aristocratic daughters attracted the attention of Hungary’s king, and Erzsébet was accused of torture and murder. While her noble status kept her away from the executioner, the Countess was walled up in the tower of Castle Csejte until her death in 1614.
Countess Dracula (1971)
The first well-known cinematic version of this story is Peter Sasdy’s Countess Dracula. Alongside the 1897 publication of Stoker’s novel, rumors began to coalesce about Erzsébet’s vampiric tendencies. The admitted torturer was fond of biting her victims and known to rub human blood along her lips, though this was probably a treatment for “falling sickness,” which would today be called epilepsy. Sasdy leans into vampire lore with the film’s ominous tagline: “The more she drinks, the prettier she gets. The prettier she gets, the thirstier she gets.”
However, Sasdy’s Countess Elisabeth (Ingrid Pitt) is a different sort of predator. In the wake of her husband’s death, the cruel mistress begins bathing in blood when she discovers its healing properties. But this is far from a hopeful remedy. After sponging the substance onto her skin, Elisabeth sheds her wrinkles and hag-like warts. She completely transforms into a voluptuous blonde and begins impersonating her own teenage daughter. Each time the spell wears away, Elisabeth becomes more monstrous. She must feed this gruesome habit with a continual stream of virginal women to maintain her youthful alter ego.
Though a charming Hammer Horror film, Countess Dracula explores destructive vanity while fetishizing virginity. When Elisabeth murders a sex worker, she finds that the resulting blood has no effect and begins targeting ostensibly virtuous girls. Desperate to maintain the power beauty grants, Elisabeth turns her rage on younger women instead of the men responsible for her oppression. She eventually winds up a withered crone, imprisoned and taunted as Countess Dracula.
Daughters of Darkness (1971)
The same year, another iteration of the Blood Countess would emerge as a more empowering antihero. Set in modern-day Belgium, Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness follows a glamorous woman named Elizabeth (Delphine Seyrig) and her much younger secretary Ilona (Andrea Rau) as they vacation in the off-season of a seaside town. The seductive women hit it off with the hotel’s only other guests, a newlywed couple named Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet). Meanwhile, a mysterious killer is murdering young women and leaving their bodies drained of blood.
When the hotel’s old clerk remembers the seemingly ageless Elizabeth from decades ago, we discover that she is the real Countess Báthory, kept alive for centuries on a steady diet of virgin blood. Kümel also blends vampiric legend, presenting Ilona as a female familiar to the powerful huntress. But his Elizabeth serves as a liberator of sorts, luring Valerie away from her increasingly abusive husband. Though we know she is killing innocent women and likely planning to seduce the young bride into servitude, Stefan emerges as the story’s true villain, a violent man who deserves his fate.
When the ancient vampire meets a sunny end, we’re left on a strange note of empowerment. An unsettling coda shows Valerie speaking with Elizabeth’s voice as she befriends another attractive couple. Rather than a monstrous hag stealing the lifeblood of virgins, this Elizabeth is an enchanting woman who presents unhappy wives with a lavish alternative to heteronormative suffering.
Stay Alive (2006)
Though William Brent Bell’s cult favorite features an admittedly reductive history, the Countess Bathory (Maria Kalinina) of Stay Alive accurately reflects Erzsébet’s place in modern culture. The film’s title references a video game in which players must traverse the dangerous Gerouge Plantation, the Countess’s legendary home and final resting place. The game begins with an incantation that must be read aloud by Hutch (Jon Foster) and his friends. The “prayer’s” final line, “let the blood of many cleanse me, preserving beauty eternal,” nods to legend while unleashing the Countess’ violent ghost, allowing her to target victims in the real world.
Elizabeth’s video game avatar resembles a female Count Dracula with a blood-red dress and stiff high collar topped with jet-black hair severely swept back from her face. Pinprick eyes gleam from cavernous sockets as she hunts her victims in a horse-drawn carriage. The plantation is filled with undead girls, victims of the Countess’ finishing school. She seldom appears in reflective surfaces — terrified of seeing her aging face — and her spirit can be trapped by driving three nails into her body, reminiscent of a stake driven through the heart.
Though dangerous to all who play her game, Countess Bathory specifically targets beautiful young women, stringing them up by their feet to drain their blood. Mirroring historical fact, Bell’s Countess was sentenced to isolation and walled up in her tower to die in obscurity. Perhaps this is why she’s wreaking havoc once again. A final scene shows that though Hutch has destroyed Countess Bathory’s ghost, the game has become a viral sensation, only bolstered by its underground appeal. With each repetition of its opening “prayer,” Elizabeth’s spirit will become more powerful.
Hostel Part II (2007)
When news broke that Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II would center on three female victims, more sensitive fans feared misogyny and exploitation. But the 2007 sequel is a surprisingly feminist story of complex morality and empowerment. This nuance can be seen in the film’s most disturbing sequence, a ritualistic murder based on the Countess Báthory legend.
When three young art students take a weekend trip to Slovakia, Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) becomes smitten with a dashing local. But her moonlit date goes dreadfully wrong and the coed winds up in the clutches of the Elite Hunting Club, a shadowy organization that facilitates torture. Lorna and her friends are kidnapped and auctioned off to ultra-wealthy bidders from around the world who pay millions for the pleasure of causing their deaths.
We rejoin Lorna hanging nude and bound, above an ornate stone spa. As she desperately tries to free herself, a gorgeous woman walks into the room. Also nude except for expensive jewelry and heels, this mysterious woman lies in a candlelit tub and caresses a pair of sharp scythes. Lorna screams and begs for release as the woman slices open her skin, luxuriating in the rain of blood pouring over her body and into her mouth.
This brief but memorable scene eliminates one of the story’s main cast while providing a harbinger for horrors to come. But otherwise it serves as a standalone vignette. The woman identified in the credits as Mrs. Bathory (Monika Malácová) does not utter a word of dialogue, and we do not see her again after this horrific scene. But she exists to show the spectrum of horrors women must face in a patriarchal world.
Mrs. Bathory is demure and sophisticated, particularly when compared to Todd (Richard Burgi) and Stuart (Roger Bart), the men who purchase Lorna’s friends. A study in toxic masculinity, these abhorrent men both purchase their victims to live out a misogynistic fantasy. Todd longs to symbolically punish beautiful women while Stuart wants to murder a proxy for his headstrong wife. Yet Mrs. Bathory’s actions are arguably more disturbing. Though she never states a clear motive, we assume she wants to bathe in Lorna’s blood and absorb her youthful vitality, maintaining the privilege beauty guarantees in a system run by toxic men.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026)
The fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s Monster similarly paints the broad strokes of Erzsébet’s story, reworking facts to fit a feminist agenda. Young and impressionable, Lizzie becomes obsessed with the myth when her household servant Bridget (Vicky Krieps) introduces her to more worldly literature. This Elizabeth (also Krieps) is a severely stylish French queen obsessed with bathing in virgin blood. Aided by a clan of violent young women she calls her Furies, Elizabeth rounds up girls from the surrounding countryside and slaughters them in a basement torture chamber, specifically built with drains in the floor.
Alongside this horrific practice, creator Ian Brennan gives Elizabeth a sympathetic backstory. As a teen, his Elizabeth was sexually assaulted and gave birth to the resulting child. Just moments after the baby is placed in her arms, we watch as a midwife whisks the tiny girl away and drowns her in a bowl of water. Years after her attacker’s death, Elizabeth rounds up his teenage daughters and gets her revenge by draining their blood. Though rewritten through a feminist lens, this does fit the real Countess Báthory’s pattern of punishing women for the cruelty of men.
Like the rest of the series, Brennan plays fast and loose with historical facts. We do know that at thirteen, Erzsébet gave birth to an illegitimate child, who was subsequently passed to a local woman, though we do not know the infant’s fate. Historian Kimberly Craft believes this may have been a youthful indiscretion and that claims of rape were embellished to protect Erzsébet’s betrothal to Nadasdy. However, we also believe that her wealthy fiancé was an extremely sadistic man. Rumor has it that the illegitimate child’s young father was castrated before his execution, an ironic punishment for deflowering Nadasdy’s intended bride and a dehumanized addition to his estate. While we cannot prove what actually happened, the truth may align more with Brennan’s rageful retelling.
Elizabeth Báthory’s Legacy
In the 1980s, historians began to reexamine Erzsébet’s life. Perhaps she wasn’t a serial killer but a vulnerable woman turned into a monster by men who benefited from her public demise. The Countess (2009) and Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008) are relatively fact-based biopics which take drastically different views of her villainy. Other interpretations like Mama Dracula (1980) and Chastity Bites (2013) use Erzsébet’s life as a springboard to examine our disturbing fascination with virginity, while Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess film takes a comedic approach, casting Isabelle Huppert as the iconic vampiress.
But it is worth remembering that Erzsébet was once a real woman with a complex legacy. Was she a prolific serial killer or a powerful ruler framed for all time by greedy and jealous men? Though we will never know exactly what happened in Castle Csejte, the truth is likely somewhere in between. Probably a victim of abuse herself, Erzsébet lived at an extremely dangerous time in which women were treated as property. Powerless to combat this dehumanizing system, she turned her rage on other women and delighted in their suffering.
But contrary to her story’s most scandalous detail, Erzsébet probably didn’t bathe in blood. Reports of this disturbing practice did not emerge until nearly a century after her death and likely have more to do with her convenient last name than with any documented fact. However, this myth has come to define her legacy, transforming a historical figure into the female face of patriarchal violence. Desperate to maintain her place in a toxic system, the Elizabeth Bathory we’ve come to know is a monstrous warning to aging women, reminding us to step aside for younger women or risk becoming a monster ourselves.
