Venom - Countess Bathory

Sunday, time for a classic!

"Countess Bathory" is a tune on the second album "Black Metal" by English heavy metal band VENOM. It was released in November 1982, during the great flourishing of metal music in the UK that was the new wave of British heavy metal, and is considered a major influence on the thrash metal, death metal and black metal scenes that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The cover art was made by the band's bassist and singer Conrad "Cronos" Lant.

"Countess Bathory" is a tune about "The Countess Erzsébet Báthory".

Elizabeth Bathory is a very suitable subject for a Black Metal song. The American prostitute Aileen Wournos, who was executed in 2002 and made famous in the film Monster, is sometimes referred to erroneously as the first female serial killer. There have of course been female killers throughout history, but the name of the Blood Countess stands out amongst even the most prolific and depraved.

The Countess Erzsébet Báthory to give her her proper name was born in 1560; she was a highly intelligent, educated and literate Hungarian noblewoman who lured dozens of young women to their deaths with promises of well-paid work as maidservants. Her victims were tortured horribly before being murdered, purely for her gratification.

At that time the lives of ordinary people counted for little or nothing, and the authorities turned a blind eye to the murders, but eventually, the King was forced to intervene after a priest raised the issue at the royal court; the official investigation uncovered a house of horrors, and the widowed countess and her conspirators were arrested but she was spared execution to avoid a scandal; instead she was confined to her castle until her death in 1614. One witness at Elizabeth's trial spoke of as many as 650 victims; the most conservative estimate is 36. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth has become the stuff of legend; one claim, which may or may not have been true, was that she bathed in the blood of virgins because she believed this would keep her eternally young.

The 1971 horror classic Countess Dracula starring Ingrid Pitt is based on Bathory's life; although one reviewer described it as "a fictionalization - and ultimately, a trivialization - of one of history's true friends," the film sacrifices sensationalism to historical accuracy and is rather watchable.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed; 7 August 1560 – 21 August 1614) was a Hungarian noblewoman from the noble family of Báthory, who owned land in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania).

Báthory has been labeled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer, though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1590 and 1610. There is no hard evidence about the whole murder case. The highest number of victims cited during Báthory's trial was 650. However, this number comes from the claim by a servant girl named Susannah that Jakab Szilvássy, Báthory's court official, had seen the figure in one of Báthory's private books. The book was never revealed, and Szilvássy never mentioned it in his testimony. Despite the evidence against Báthory, her family's importance kept her from facing execution. She was imprisoned in December 1610 within the Castle of Csejte, in Upper Hungary (now Slovakia).

The stories of Báthory's sadistic serial murders are verified by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest. Stories describing Báthory's vampiric tendencies, such as the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, were generally recorded years after her death, and are considered unreliable. Her story quickly became part of national folklore, and her infamy persists to this day. She is often compared to Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia (on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based); some insist she inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), though there is no evidence to support this hypothesis. Nicknames and literary epithets attributed to her include The Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.

Enjoy today's classic, the video is filmed live In London At The Hammersmith Odeon 1985.



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