The Blood Countess: Isabelle Huppert Leads an Eccentric Vampire Mystery

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The Blood Countess movie poster

Beauty sleep has never been this bloody.

Isabelle Huppert Gets Bloody in This Very Strange Vampire Tale

The Blood Countess is a vampire comedy-horror from acclaimed German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, with Isabelle Huppert taking on the role of the infamous Hungarian noblewoman Erzsébet Báthory, and tather than offering another grim historical recreation of Báthory's life and the horrific legends surrounding her, Ottinger turns the infamous figure into an eccentric undead character wandering through modern-day Vienna.

And judging by the film's wonderfully bizarre premise, this is very much not the sort of vampire movie where everyone stands around looking miserable in a castle for two hours, where Báthory awakens from her long "beauty sleep" and resurfaces in Vienna alongside her devoted maid Hermine, played by Birgit Minichmayr, and the pair embark on a strange quest for a mysterious red elixir while becoming tangled up with vampirologists, police officers, a therapist and Báthory's vegetarian nephew.

Ottinger's official description calls it a "baroque-eccentric Vampire Mystery," and that is probably a much better indication of what to expect than simply calling it a horror movie, and the film is clearly interested in the mythology surrounding Báthory rather than attempting to recreate her life literally. 

Oh , and there is also a dangerous book involved which could potentially threaten the entire vampire world.

Ulrike Ottinger Turns a Centuries-Old Legend Upside Down

Ottinger directs from a screenplay she wrote herself, with dialogue developed in collaboration with Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author best known internationally for The Piano Teacher and the filmmaker has also revealed that she originally wrote the screenplay way back in 1998, meaning The Blood Countess spent almost three decades in some form of development before finally reaching the screen.

Isabelle Huppert plays Báthory as an immortal vampire rather than simply portraying the historical woman, giving the character an aristocratic, detached quality that allows the actress to lean into the film's stranger comedy.

The cast around her includes Birgit Minichmayr, Thomas Schubert, Lars Eidinger, André Jung, Marco Lorenzini, Karl Markovics, Felix Oitzinger, Tom Neuwirth, better known as Conchita Wurst, and Burghart Klaußner.

From Elizabeth Báthory to the Vampire Myth

The real Erzsébet Báthory lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and became infamous through accusations that she tortured and murdered young women, and the much-repeated story is that she bathed in their blood to preserve her youth became one of the most enduring pieces of vampire-adjacent folklore attached to her name.

The Blood Countess takes that mythology and pushes it firmly into fantasy, and gives the film much more freedom to be playful, absurd and deliberately theatrical rather than getting bogged down in the endless question of which parts of the Báthory story were historical fact and which were later embellishment.

The Blood Countess had its world premiere at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2026, screening in the Berlinale Special section, where the response has been particularly positive toward Huppert, with critics highlighting her performance as one of the film's major strengths.

Teaser Trailer


When Can You See The Blood Countess?

The film is scheduled for a cinema release on October 29, 2026, with Neue Visionen and Filmladen handling distribution.