Countess Dracula
Sir: Taking our giant wolfhound O'Higgins for a stroll on St Os- wald's Day to the haystacks where once stood our baronial gallows tree, there was time to ruminate whether the mass media have an implicit duty to try to get history right. How can we learn from the past if its not allowed to be stran- ger than the. 'poetic licence' of fiction?
These thoughts welled up after a Hammer horror film, Countess Dracula, reviewed by Christopher Hudson in the first SPECTATOR to reach us after the serene peace from daily mail granted us by the postal strikers. The heroine, de- lightfully reincarnated by Ingrid Pitt (ivhom 1 long to meet), was my 4other's ancestress Elisabeth Bfithory.
She was inbred and a bit batty: her father was George Bathory, Count of Szatmar, and her mother was a sister of the ferocious Stephen Bfithory, Prince of Tran- sylvania and King of Poland. It's perhaps sad that her husband, the 'Black Hero', is being buried at the film's start. For this ancestral grandpa of mine was a genial general whose joyous party trick was to throw two captive Turks into the air and catch them both on two swords as they came down. Also, the film gives them an only daughter, when so many many of us descend from their son, General Count Nadasdy, the 'Hero of Kanisza'.
Certainly, the film gets the Bathory coat-of-arms right on the 'Blood /Countess's' carriage-cloths and on the walls of her vast castle, which rose like a Magyar St Michael's Mount out of the wooded Slovakian plain. The decor too is splendid. as good as film convenience could contrive: prob- ably modelled on Frakno, where my Estcrhazy kin kept Turkish prisoners tinder the lash for thirty Years, hewing an incredible well deep down out of the stark, rock.
But the film itself is quite un- necessarily kid's stuff compared to our ancestral grandma's real life. In it, she only murders half a dozen girls, kills them outright, and even starts running out of virgins for her blood-baths. In fact, it was proved at the trial in 1611 that she'd got through over a hundred (though only eighty corp- ses were unearthed); they were tor- tured before being drained for bath essence to soothe her wrin-
kles; and when she was arrested a number of intact virgins were being held in reserve in her dun- geons—rather like our Highland cattle in olden-time winter, who contributed alive for 'blood pud- dings' and were so weakened that spring was known as the 'lifting time', when they were carried out to grass again.
A Magyar scholar wrote to me about this exotic• grandma: 'Elisabeth Bathory was one of the most extravagant personalities known to Hungarian history. Apart from her pathological case, she was of a great culture, gen- erous and brilliant; a typical case of schizophrenia, which has not been studied scientifically, only exploited for low-level horror stories'.
This brings us to the point. If we must have real people por- trayed in films, and not novel folk like Sherlock Holmes or Flashman, do let's try and get them right. This is no plea for whitewashing, as witness the example that drew forth this discourse—but just for historical truth from the mass media when they depict real people: warts and all.
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