The Pleasure of being a Vampire: A review of The Blood Countess
by Aksharaa Agarwal
She’s a barge in an underground canal; she’s a bright red streak against the night.
These are not ways one would typically describe a very real historic (alleged) serial killer and rumoured vampire of yore, but that’s exactly how Ulrike Ottinger reimagines the myth of Erzsébet Báthory. Arriving upright much like Nosferatu, her countess does not invade the night. She does not loom in the shadows. She does not lurk. She is present, enigmatic, and alight. Less Count Dracula and more Miranda Priestly, Norma Desmond or Frank-N-Furter, she’s a vision in red, turning heads everywhere she walks, from as much terror as delight. Isabelle Huppert is radiant, pale inset ruby, perfectly in place being the haughty heart, and her legend lets itself to the very one she portrays.
Ottinger is not attempting the moody, period-accurate faux-biography, the troubled tale of an anti-heroine, not even the modern Mary Antoinette. To her, the countess is pure fantasy. Dripping in what looks like couture, she’s here for fun, fun, fun, her cape dragging across the floor, carted around town in a horse-drawn carriage. She’s only here to bask in her own glory, pay customary visitation, and put the nice people of Vienna in their places, crashing a sight-seeing tour group in the process. She does also mean to destroy that book which could undo Vampire-kind if it ends up in the wrong hands, less a threat and more an afterthought, which is all too unfortunate for her distant nephew, utterly horrified that he must curb his cravings rather than be rid of them forever so that he may enjoy mortality as much as he does baked delicacies. A cast of perfectly coupled, tongue-in-cheek caricatures complete the plot; Vampirologists with names like Theo Bombastus and Nepomuk After bite, Inspectors Doubter and Doppler, and even the young nephew Baron Rudi Bubi Strudl, whose therapist Theobald Tandem is only too busy indulging himself and dismissing his patient’s paranoid delusions. Though the Countess is mostly cosying up to squirming women, none of them quite catch up to her, or her own trusty sidekicks, her bat or her maid.
Staked, then, with feast set and blood let, its meandering riches overflow, be it French, German or quips in Russian. It’s Eurovision all over again, its cabaret! There’s belly dancing, war re-enactments and more. an excessive, parodic, decadent romp, The Blood Countess is the latest installment in a trend of letting the Vampire subgenre get its comedic camp makeover-takeover. Wig, snatched.