Countess Báthory and Count Dracula

.

.

Countess Erzsébet Báthory (7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) aka the "Blood Countess" and the "Bloody Lady of Čachtice" was a Hungarian noblewoman who enjoyed torturing her servants and took up an interest in the black arts. Legend has it she was beating a servant girl for some minor infraction when the girl's blood spilled on her arm. Báthory immediately determined that her skin had improved where the blood landed, so she had the girl bled to death and bathed in her blood.
.

Although it seems unlikely, Báthory was convinced that this technique was making her young again, and she decided to keep it up. For about ten years she bathed in and drank the blood of kidnapped peasant girls on a regular basis. Eventually, her nobility was her downfall. She decided she needed a better quality of blood (possibly when her continued aging became too difficult to ignore), and started to prey on girls of higher birth. This obviously did not sit well with the nobility. They ordered her arrest.
.

More than six hundred and fifty girls (according to one witness) had fallen victim to Báthory's obsession with eternal youth. Her primary servants, the ones in charge of the bleeding, were sentenced to death, but it was considered gauche to try and execute nobles, so Erzsébet Báthory herself was never formally put on trial. In 1610, she was imprisoned in Čachtice Castle where she remained bricked in a set of rooms until her death four years later. Though not tried in a court of law, she was nonetheless convicted on eighty counts in a judicial process common in witchcraft and Inquisition trials. On 21 August 1614, Erzsébet Báthory was found dead in her castle. Since there were several plates of food untouched, her actual date of death is unknown. She was buried in the church of Čachtice, but due to the villagers' uproar over having the "Blood Lady of Čachtice" buried in their cemetery her body was moved to her birthplace at Nagyecsed in the Kingdom of Hungary where it is interred at the Báthory family crypt.
.

The Báthory case is perhaps the first real example of the notion that the blood of others will somehow provide eternal youth, but the supernatural vampire itself was popularised in the public imagination with references to folklore by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897).
.

Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish novelist and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. In London Stoker met Hall Caine who became one of his closest friends. He dedicated Dracula to him. It was in London that Stoker wove together a series of legends and existing vampire lore to define the parameters of the modern vampire, including aversions to silver, garlic, sunlight and the cross, sleeping in coffins and, not least, the vampire exhibiting sharp canines. He attached the "Dracula" name to his story almost as an afterthought, based on the historical Vlad Tepes.
.

Dracula, despite its florid verbiage, sometimes almost drowning the awesome visuals and chilling ideas, was still far superior by comparison to the most popular fiction of that era, and it became a bestseller, sending chills down the spine of the repressed Victorian English and rekindling a gruesome interest in all things vampiric.
.

The story of Dracula grew by leaps and bounds, and vampires quickly became a staple of Western culture, accelerated by the introduction of cinema. One of the earliest and most influential movies of the silent era was Nosferatu, an "adaptation" of the Dracula story which was sufficiently adapted for Stoker's estate to successfully sue for copyright infringement.
.

The official version of Dracula, released in 1931, launched Bela Lugosi on a star-studded career path that would end in heroin addiction and Ed Wood movies. It did more for the urban legend than it did for its leading man, thrusting the concept of the vampire firmly into the forefront of popular thought, where it has stayed ever since.
.

The idea of the vampire enflamed the modern mind. It is hardly surprising to discover that people really (a) believe in them and (b) want to meet or even become one to achieve "eternal" life. When Anne Rice penned an insanely popular series of first-person vampire novels beginning in the 1970s, hordes of teenagers and even otherwise non-impressionable adults became fascinated with the idea of vampires all over again. Many found Rice's vision compelling and convincing, and some strongly believed her characters were either real or based on some sort of reality. Rice has denied this, and her version of vampirism is far removed from the lore and legend given due credit in Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece Dracula.

.

.