The title character of Countess Dracula (1971) isn’t related to that better-known Transylvania-stationed count; they’re spiritual cousins at best. The character’s closest analog is instead the infamous Elizabeth “Blood Countess” Báthory, a real-life Hungarian noblewoman who between 1590 and 1610 tortured and killed at least 80 girls and young women. (Some people speculate the true number is a far higher 650.) The common — though much-doubted — legend goes that delusional vanity and an obsession with aging motivated her. Convinced that regularly bathing in gallons of youthful blood would seal in everlastingly dewy skin, Báthory felt she had no choice but to kill to stay satisfactorily beautiful.
Countess Dracula revolves around an elderly, recently widowed countess named Elisabeth Nadasdy (Ingrid Pitt) who discovers accidentally early in the movie (she runs into a young woman who’s been injured) that a smear of young blood on the skin is a great dewrinkler — a discovery that then leads her to look into whether a bath in the stuff will do the same for the rest of the body. (It works! Great for Nadasdy, not the women peasants she rules.)
Though one might assume, based on its basic subject matter, that Countess Dracula may come to play out like a darkly funny or uniquely horrifying account of the beauty-is-pain mantra, the film surprisingly unfurls pretty bloodlessly. Essentially it’s not-very-good Báthory fanfic. Although a pivotal transitional film for Hammer Film Productions — which was shifting away from its decades-strong reliance on generally tasteful baroque horror movies toward scuzzier horror more reliant on antagonistic female sexuality — Countess Dracula almost entirely foregoes ambitions to be an effective horror movie to reify uninteresting palace-intrigue drama.
This flatly shot and staged film neither relishes much in the Nadasdy-centric body horror inextricable from the story nor the horror Nadasdy and those complicit in her reign of terror wreak on the helpless young women on whom they prey. Countess Dracula is bafflingly more focused on the relationship Nadasdy begins having with a soldier (Sandor Elès) — doomed obviously because she can’t hide her fucked-up beauty secret forever — and Nadasdy’s long-suffering lover’s (Nigel Green) efforts to steal Nadasdy back for himself. It’s like the director, Peter Sasdy, knew what audiences might be looking for in a movie like this one — probably bodice-ripping, bold violence, and a blackened sense of humor — and purposely sought to either take the heat out of them or avoid them entirely.
Expectations-dodging might have worked if Countess Dracula were invested, say, in trying to craft a psychologically compelling portrait of this 17th-century villainess and did a relatively good job of it, or if the plot were restructured as a mystery where villagers kept disappearing for reasons obscured until the very end of the film. (What Nadasdy is up to is certainly shocking enough to function well as a big and belated plot twist.) But the lukewarm soap opera we end up with is likely to make one wish the movie more closely adhered to the conventions Sasdy seems intent on steering clear of, or even abandoned its premise entirely and lived up to its title more literally: have the movie be yet another adaptation of Dracula (1897) but have Pitt subversively fill in the role of the infamous count.
Countess Dracula’s biggest sin might be its refusal to let us have any wicked fun with the eponymous character. Although Pitt, who became a horror icon in the early 1970s thanks to a run of milestone films (1970’s The Vampire Lovers, 1971’s The House That Dripped Blood, 1973’s The Wicker Man), is predictably enjoyable to watch — she’s always game for anything thrown at her — the film seems to openly despise the character, as if she was purely a nuisance, a chicly dressed gnat. This isn’t to say that Countess Dracula should work overtime to foster sympathy for her — more that, in a movie like this one, Nadasdy should either be developed as a genuinely scary villain or have her evil be so luxuriant that we love hating her. Countess Dracula’s wall-to-wall wasted potential is almost as suffocating as the castle in which its bloodthirsty noblewoman commits her imaginatively heinous crimes.
Peterson Reviews 