The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  You are my true children. Not Ursula or Pál or Miklós. And you are also my true inamoratos, my most beloved, not Ferenc, who was only ever a husband.

  If tabloid gossip and backlot hearsay is to be trusted, this scene has been considerably shortened and toned down from the original script. We do not see the Countess’ sexual congress with the wolves. It is only implied by her affections, her words, and by the lewd canticle of a voyeur crow. The scene is both stark and magnificent. It is a final still point before the coming tempest, before the horrors, a moment imbued with grace and menacing tranquility. The camera cuts to Herr Kramer in its counterfeit tree, and you’re watching its golden eyes watching the Countess and her wolves, and anything more is implied.

  INT. ČACHTICE CASTLE/DRESSING ROOM. MORNING.

  The Countess is seated before a looking glass held inside a carved wooden frame, motif of dryads and satyrs. We see the Countess as a reflection, and behind her, a servant girl. The servant is combing the Countess’ brown hair with an ivory comb. The Countess is no longer a young woman. There are lines at the edges of her mouth and beneath her eyes.

  COUNTESS (furrowing her brows):

  You’re pulling my hair again. How many times must I tell

  you to be careful. You’re not deaf, are you?

  SERVANT (almost whispering):

  No, My Lady.

  COUNTESS (icily):

  Then when I speak to you, you hear me perfectly well.

  SERVANT:

  Yes, My Lady.

  The ivory comb snags in the Countess’ hair, and she stands, spinning about to face the terrified servant girl. She snatches the comb from the girl’s hand. Strands of Elizabeth’s hair are caught between the teeth.

  COUNTESS (tone of disbelief):

  You wretched little beast. Look what you’ve done.

  The Countess slaps the servant with enough force to split her lip. Blood spatters the Countess’ hand as the servant falls to the floor. The Countess is entranced by the crimson beads speckling her pale skin.

  COUNTESS (whisper)

  You . . . filthy . . . wretch . . .

  FADE TO BLACK

  FADE IN:

  INT. DREAM MIRROR.

  The Countess stands in a dim pool of light, before a towering mirror, a grotesque nightmare version of the one on her dressing table. The nymphs, satyrs, and dryads are life-size, and move, engaged in various and sundry acts of sexual abandon. This dark place is filled with sounds of desire, orgasm, drunken debauchery. In the mirror is a far younger Elizabeth Báthory. But, as we watch, as the Countess watches, this young woman rapidly ages, rushing through her twenties, thirties, her forties. The Countess screams, commanding the mirror cease these awful visions. The writhing creatures that form the frame laugh and mock her screams.

  FLASH CUT TO:

  EXT. SNOW-COVERED FIELD. DAYLIGHT.

  The Countess stands naked in the falling snow, her feet buried up to the ankles. The snowflakes turn red. The red snow becomes a red rain, and she’s drenched. The air is a red mist.

  FLASH CUT TO:

  INT. DREAM MIRROR.

  Nude and drenched in blood, the Countess gazes at her reflection, her face and body growing young before her eyes. The looking glass shatters.

  FADE TO BLACK

  The Hungary of the film has more in common with the landscape of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm than with any Hungary that exists now or ever has existed. It is an archetypal vista, as much a myth as Stoker’s Transylvania and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Styria. A real place that has, inconveniently, never existed. Little or nothing is said of the political and religious turmoil of Elizabeth’s time, or of the war with the Ottoman Turks, aside from the death of the Countess’ husband at the hands of General Giorgio Basta. If you’re a stickler for accuracy, these omissions are unforgivable. But most of the men and women who sit in the theatre, entranced by the light flashed back from the screen, will never notice. People do not generally come to the movies hoping for recitations of dry history. Few will care that pivotal events in the film never occurred, because they are happening now, unfolding before the eyes of all who have paid the price of admission.

  INT. COUNTESS’ BEDCHAMBER. NIGHT.

  GIRL:

  If you have been taught the prayer, say the words aloud.

  COUNTESS:

  How would you ever know such things, child?

  GIRL (turning away)

  We have had some of the same tutors, you and I.

  The second reel begins with the arrival at Csejte of a woman named Anna Darvulia. In hushed tones, a servant (who dies an especially messy death farther along) refers to her as “the Witch of the Forest.” She becomes Elizabeth’s lover and teaches her sorcery and the Prayer of Ninety Cats to protect her from all harm. As Darvulia is depicted here, she may as well have inhabited a gingerbread cottage before she came to the Countess, a house of sugary confections where she regularly feasted on lost children. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, and following an admittedly gratuitous sex scene, the subject of cannibalism is introduced. A peasant girl named Júlia, stolen from her home, is brought to the Countess by two of her handmaids and partners in crime, Dorottya and Ilona. The girl is stripped naked and forced to kneel before Elizabeth while the handmaids burn the bare flesh of her back and shoulders with coins and needles that have been placed over an open flame. Darvulia watches on approvingly from the shadows.

  INT. KITCHEN. NIGHT.

  COUNTESS (smiling):

  You shouldn’t fret so about your dear mother and father. I know they’re poor, but I will see to it they’re compensated for the loss of their only daughter.

  JÚLIA (sobbing):

  There is never enough wood in winter, and never enough food. We have no shoes and wear rags.

  COUNTESS:

  And haven’t I liberated you from those rags?

  JÚLIA:

  They need me. Please, My Lady, send me home to them.

  The Countess glances over her shoulder to Darvulia, as if seeking approval/instruction. Darvulia nods once, then the Countess turns back to the sobbing girl.

  COUNTESS:

  Very well. I’ll make you a promise, Júlia. And I keep my promises. In the morning, I will send your mother and your father warm clothing and good shoes and enough firewood to see them through the snows. And, what’s more, I will send you back to them, as well.

  JÚLIA:

  You would do that?

  COUNTESS:

  Certainly, I will. I’ll not have any use for you after this evening,

  and I detest wastefulness.

  This scene has been cut from most prints. If you have any familiarity with the trials and tribulations of the film’s production, and with the censorship that followed, you’ll be surprised, and possibly pleased, to find it has not been excised from this copy. It may also strike you as relatively tame, compared to many less controversial, but far more graphic, portions of the film.

  COUNTESS:

  When we are finished here . . .

  (pause)

  When we’re finished, and my hunger is satisfied, I will speak with my butcher—a skilled man with a knife and cleaver—and he will see to it that your corpse is dressed in such a way that it can never be mistaken for anything but that of a sow. I’ll have the meat salted and smoked, then

  sent to them, as evidence of my generosity. They will have their daughter back, and, in the bargain, will not go hungry. Are they fond of sausage.

  Júlia? I’d think you would make a marvelous debreceni.

  Critics and movie buffs who lament the severe treatment the film has suffered at the hands of nervous studio executives, skittish distributors, and the MPAA often point to Júlia’s screams, following these lines, as an example of how great cinema may be lost to censorship. Sound editors and Foley artists are said to have crafted the unsettling and completely inhuman effect by mixing the cries of several species of birds, the squeal of a pig, and the steam whistle of a locomotive.
The scream continues as this scene dissolves to a delirious montage of torture and murder. The Countess’ notorious iron maiden makes an appearance. A servant is dragged out into a snowy courtyard, and once her dress and underclothes have been savagely ripped away, the woman is bound to a wooden stake. Elizabeth Báthory pours buckets of cold water over the servant’s body until she freezes to death and her body glistens like an ice sculpture.

  The theatre is so quiet that you begin to suspect everyone else has had enough and left before The End. But you don’t dare look away long enough to see whether this is in fact the case.

  The Countess sits in her enormous lion- (or dragon- or tigress-) footed chair, in that bedchamber lit only by candlelight. She strokes the wolf pelt on her lap as lovingly as she stroked the fur of those living wolves.

  “We’ve had some of the same tutors, you and I,” the strange brown girl says, the gypsy child who claims to be afraid of the shadows in the small room that has been provided for her.

  “Anna’s never mentioned you.”

  “She and I have had some of the same tutors,” the child whispers. “Now, My Lady, please speak the words aloud and drive away the evil spirits.”

  “I have heard of no such prayer,” the Countess tells the girl, but the actress’ air and intonation make it’s obvious she’s lying. “I’ve received no such catechism.”

  “Then shall I teach it to you? For when they are done with me, the shadows might come looking after you, and if you don’t know the prayer, how will you hope to defend yourself, My Lady?”

  The Countess frowns and mutters, half to herself, half to the child, “I need no defense against shadows. Rather, let the shadows blanch and wilt at the thought of me.”

  “That same arrogance will be your undoing,” the child replies. Then all the candles gutter and are extinguished, and the only light remaining is cold moonlight, getting in through the parted draperies. The child is gone. The Countess sits in her clawed chair and squeezes her eyes tightly shut. You may once have done very much the same thing, hearing some bump in the night. Fearing an open closet or the space beneath your bed, a window or a hallway. In this moment, Elizabeth Bathory von Ecsed, Alžbeta Bátoriová, the Bloody Lady of Čachtice, she seems no more fearsome for all her fearsome reputation than the child you once were. The boyish girl she herself was, forty-seven, forty-six, forty-eight years before this night. The girl given to tantrums and seizures and dressing up in boy’s clothes. She cringes in this dark, moon-washed room, eyelids drawn against the night, and begins, haltingly, to recite the prayer Anna Darvulia has taught her.

  “I am in peril, O cloud. Send, O send, you most powerful of Clouds, send ninety cats, for thou are the supreme Lord of Cats. I command you, King of the Cats, I pray you. May you gather them together, even if you are in the mountains, or on the waters, or on the roofs, or on the other side of the ocean . . . tell them to come to me.”

  Fade to black.

  Fade up.

  The bedchamber is filled with the feeble colors of a January morning. With the wan luminance of the winter sun in these mountains. The balcony doors have blown open in the night, and a drift of snow has crept into the room. Pressed into the snow there are the barefoot tracks of a child. The Countess opens her eyes. She looks her age, and then some.

  Fade to black.

  Fade up.

  The Countess in her finest farthingale and ruff stands before the altar of Csejte’s austere chapel. She gazes upwards at a stained-glass narrative set into the frames of three very tall and very narrow lancet windows. Her expression is distant, detached, unreadable. Following an establishing shot, and then a brief close up of the Countess’ face, the trio of stained-glass windows dominates the screen. The production designer had them manufactured in Prague, by an artisan who was provided detailed sketches mimicking the style of windows fashioned by Harry Clarke and the Irish cooperative An Túr Gloine. As with so many aspects of the film, this window has inspired heated debate, chiefly regarding its subject matter. The most popular interpretation favors one of the hagiographies from the Legenda sanctorum, the tale of Saint. George and the dragon of Silene.

  The stillness of the chapel is shattered by squealing hinges and quick footsteps, as Anna Darvulia rushes in from the bailey. She approaches the Countess, who has turned to meet her.

  DARVULIA (angry):

  What you seek, Elizabeth, you’ll not find it here.

  COUNTESS (feigning dismay):

  I only wanted an hour’s solitude. It’s quiet here.

  DARVULIA (sneering):

  Liar. You came seeking after a solace that shall forever be denied you,

  as it has always been denied me. We have no place here, Elizabeth.

  Let us leave together.

  COUNTESS

  She came to me again last night. How can your prayer protect me

  from her, when she also knows it?

  Anna Darvulia whispers something in the Countess’ ear, then kisses her cheek and leads her from the chapel.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  Two guards or soldiers thread heavy iron chain through the handles of the chapel doors, then slide the shackle of a large padlock through the links of chain and clamp the lock firmly shut.

  Somewhere towards the back of the theatre, a man coughs loudly, and a woman laughs. The man coughs a second time, then mutters (presumably to the woman), and she laughs again. You’re tempted to turn about in your seat and ask them to please hold it down, that there are people who came to see the movie. But you don’t. You don’t take your eyes off the screen, and, besides, you’ve never been much for confrontation. You also consider going out to the lobby and complaining to the management, but you won’t do that, either. It sounds like the man is telling a dirty joke, and you do your best to ignore him.

  The film has returned to the snowy soundstage forest. Only now there are many more trees, spaced more closely together. Their trunks and branches are as dark as charcoal, as dark as the snow is light. Together these two elements—trees and snow, snow and trees—form a proper joyance for any chiaroscurist. In the foreground of this mise-en-scène, an assortment of taxidermied wildlife (two does, a rabbit, a badger, etc.) watches on with blind acrylic eyes as Anna Darvulia follows a path through the wood. She wears an enormous crimson cloak, the hood all but concealing her face. Her cloak completes the palette of the scene: the black trees, the white of the snow, this red slash of wool. There is a small falcon, a merlin, perched on the woman’s left shoulder, and gripped in her left hand (she isn’t wearing gloves) is a leather leash. As the music swells—strings, woodwinds, piano, the thunderous kettledrum—the camera pans slowly to the right, tracing the leash from Darvulia’s hand to the heavy collar clasped about the Countess’ pale throat. Elizabeth is entirely naked, scrambling through the snow on all fours. Her hair is a matted tangle of twigs and dead leaves. Briars have left bloody welts on her arms, legs, and buttocks. There are wolves following close behind her, famished wolves starving in the dead of this endless Carpathian winter. The pack is growing bold, and one of the animals rushes in close, pushing its muzzle between her exposed thighs, thrusting about with its wet nose, lapping obscenely at the Countess’ ass and genitals. Elizabeth bares her sharp teeth and, wheeling around, straining against the leash, she snaps viciously at this churlish rake of a wolf. She growls as convincingly as any lunatic or lycanthrope might hope to growl.

  All wolves are churlish. All wolves are rakes, especially in fairy tales, and especially this far from spring.

  “Have you forgotten the prayer so soon?” Darvulia calls back, her voice cruel and mocking. Elizabeth doesn’t answer, but the wolves yelp and retreat.

  And as the witch and her pupil pick their way deeper into the forest, we see that the gypsy girl, dressed in a cloak almost identical to Darvulia’s—wool died that same vivid red—stands among the wolves as they whine and mill about her legs.

  Elizabeth awakens in her bed, screaming.

  In a series of jump cuts,
her screams echo through the empty corridors of Csejte.

  (This scene is present in all prints, having somehow escaped the same fate as the unfilmed climax of the Countess’ earlier trek through the forest—a testament to the fickle inconsistency of censors. In an interview she gave to the Croatian periodical Hrvatski filmski ljetopis [Autumn 2003], the actress who played Elizabeth reports that she actually did suffer a spate of terrible nightmares after making the film, and that most of them revolved around this particular scene. She says, “I have only been able to watch it [the scene] twice. Even now, it’s hard to imagine myself having been on the set that day. I’ve always been afraid of dogs, and those were real wolves.”)

  In the fourth reel, you find you’re slightly irritated when film briefly loses its otherwise superbly claustrophobic focus, during a Viennese interlude surely meant, instead, to build tension. The Countess’ depravity is finally, inevitably brought to the attention of the Hungarian Parliament and King Matthias. The plaintiff is a woman named Imre Megyery, the Steward of Sávár, who became the guardian of the Countess’ son, Pál Nádasdy, after the death of her husband. It doesn’t help that the actor who plays György Thurzó, Matthias’ palatine, is an Australian who seems almost incapable of getting the Hungarian accent right. Perhaps he needed a better dialect coach. Perhaps he was lazy. Possibly, he isn’t a very good actor.

  INT. COUNTESS’ BEDCHAMBER. NIGHT.

  Elizabeth and Darvulia in the Countess’ bed, after a vigorous bout of lovemaking. Lovemaking, sex, fucking, whatever. Both women are nude. The corpse of a third woman lies between them. There’s no blood, so how she died is unclear.

  DARVULIA:

  Megyery the Red, she plots against you. She has gone to the King, and very, very soon Thurzó’s notaries will arrive to poke and pry and be the King’s eyes and ears.

  COUNTESS:

  But you will keep me safe, Anna. And there is the prayer . . .

  DARVULIA (gravely):

  These are men, with all the power of the King and the Church at their backs. You must take this matter seriously, Elizabeth. The dark gods will concern themselves only so far, and after that we are on our own. Again, I beg you to at least consider abandoning Csejte.