Elizabeth Báthory: Popular Culture
Elizabeth Bathory has been featured in several films, literature, and games, as one of the most notorious and frightening villains, or monsters. She’s usually depicted as a vampire or at least an undead creature somewhat resembling a vampire. Some stories have made over her tale, and spun it into something new. For example, Stay Alive, the film in which Elizabeth Bathory comes back from the dead to kill people who have risen her spirit with the aid of a horror survival game. In this version of the Elizabeth Bathory tale, she’s actually some sort of urban legend from New Orleans. Instead of being Hungarian nobility, Elizabeth was depicted as a presumably French/Creole woman in turn of the century New Orleans, who ran a finishing school. According to the film, she tortured, killed, and bathed in the blood of all the girls attending her school, that happened to be on a large plantation. Although factually incorrect, it’s an interesting take on the Bathory crimes.
More historically accurate films that revolve around Elizabeth Bathory have been in the works for years, but have never actually surfaced. Several details about movies such as “Bathory” and “The Countess”, as well as numerous other foreign movies with the same subject matter, surfaced in 2005 and then later fluttered away. It would almost seem like the subject itself is cursed; since apparently no one is actually able to make a decent and at least partially accurate version of the film. Other film references occur in different films. For example, in Hostel II, a woman named “Mrs. Bathory” tortures a young girl by slicing up, draining her of blood, and then bathing in it. Bathory is also a main figure in several fictional and non-fiction novels, where some have attempted to explain and educate, or simply terrify generations of vampire lovers. Some anime even features Bathory as an antagonist as well. Any way around, Elizabeth Bathory has been a source of fear for hundreds of years; it seems that, if her original goal was to live forever, and be feared for centuries, she has succeeded.