Elizabeth Bathory (Dracula the Undead)

"You took me away all I loved. Now I'll make your worst enemies my best allies. I will take away all that you have most dear. "Let the children come to me." Is not that what you said?"

- Elizabeth Bathory after the death of her children.

Countess Elizabeth Bathory is the main antagonist of the novel Dracula the Undead, written by Dacre Stoker (Bram Stoker's great-grandson) and Ian Holt and the first official sequel to Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. It is one of the many literary versions inspired by the equally famous historical character sadly famous for its serial killer and torturer.

Personality
Elizabeth Bathory appears right away as a ruthless and sadistic assassin, with no regard for human life and a strong propensity for carnal pleasures, torture and murder. However, behind this face of pure wickedness is also a fragile woman, made a monster from a terrible past and full of pains and traumas, such as forced marriage with a cruel and violent man, the departure from her aunt (with whom she had braided a sickening report) and especially the death of the two children, who were the dearest thing she had. These traumas have contributed to transforming it into a diabolical being, full of anger and hatred towards the whole world and the Christian religion, with total contempt for feelings (by observing a portrait of two young men in love, she comes to define that feeling as a he was lying, having been his first experience with a man who would never have wanted to marry a nightmare of suffering and humiliation) and a fierce desire for revenge against mankind who wanted to submit to his command. His anger is also directed towards God, to whom he was once a devout man, and he feels guilty of abandoning him at the time of need and having taken away his two children, and to whom should he become a devotee adept of Satan, in honor of which he organizes many of his orgiastic and sacrificial rituals. It is also considered a paladin of those who believe in the reietta of society (needy, homosexual, people with sexual deviance) to whom promises a kingdom will be able to live free of any persecution once implemented his plan of conquest of the world.

In addition to his children, the only person Elizabeth had established a deep bond was Dracula (supporter of this version of his rebirth as a vampire). Such love, however, is destined to turn into hatred and rivalry once Dracula (in this version described as a humorous antihero and truly devoted to God) will realize how cruel and dangerous he has become. This bond is the reason that Elizabeth is brought to hatred and jealousy with Mina Harker, with whom Dracula had intertwined a loving relationship.

Character story
The tragic story of Elizabeth Bathory began when, just fifteen, he was forced to marry Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a fat, crude, alcoholic and violent man, older than twenty, who violently abused her during their first night of wedding. The traumatic experience rooted in the girl's head, still virgin and completely inexperienced in sexual matter, the idea that romantic love as he had always imagined did not exist. After the violent consummation of the sexual act, the girl tried to escape the deadly cold of the night, preferring to die rather than living alongside the man she had married, but unfortunately her escape was fired by her husband's servants, who forced her to return from him. In the three years that followed, Elizabeth took advantage of her husband's lack of intelligence, refusing to appreciate his lasciviousness and lasciviousness, suffering all kinds of violence and abuse, and looking for the right opportunity to put him in the sack. Appealing to his husband's vanity, he convinced him to take command of Hungarian troops in the war against the Ottoman empire, hoping to die in battle, convinced that victory would shine on his family and promise him, once he won the conflict he would he changed his name to Countess Nadasdy (Elizabeth actually, after the marriage, was allowed to keep his surname as a nubile woman, as his family was more powerful than Ferenc's, with the utter disgust of the latter). During the absence of her husband, Elizabeth came to humanitarian work by helping men and women in need, praying to God that her husband died in combat and believing Ferenc's guards had by now abandoned the idea of ​​fleeing. It was on a lunar eclipse that the girl managed to run away from her husband's castle to go to his Aunt Karla's home, with whom she was able to live for a certain period of quiet existence. Things changed when he discovered that the aunt, a woman with the austere and feared appearance of God, and a widow of four husbands, had murdered her four consorts because they had discovered why she refused to lie with them; Karla was in fact a lesbian, and she was thanks to her that Elizabeth, who before marrying Ferenc had shown particular tendencies towards serving, discovered her true nature and intertwined a loving relationship with her aunt. Faced with the beauty of that new relationship, infinitely more enjoyable and loving than any relationship she had with her husband, Elizabeth began to rebel with God. Afterwards Elizabeth intertwined a relationship with a young aunt of her aunt who, jealous of her grandson, he hung the servant.

Relations with Karla abruptly interrupted when a handful of soldiers sent by the family fled to Aunt's house to bring Elizabeth from Ferenc back. After her return, Elizabeth had two sons by her husband, Ursula and Andrasshad, demonstrating to them a loving mother. Unfortunately, the two children died for a serious illness, and Elizabeth, who was disturbed by the pain, and after having suffered another violence by Ferenc, who was guilty of their death, definitively denied God, swearing by revenge for the death of his beloved children. Elizabeth's first victim of fury was her husband. Decided to get rid of him once and for all, Elizabeth seized the opportunity to take it halfway when Ferenc was seriously injured by a prostitute who had refused to pay. While Ferenc was asleep, Elizabeth wiped the wound with the manure causing her to infect and bring it to a slow and painful death.

Finally, free from her husband's tyranny and the bonds of marriage, as well as convinced of being above the laws of God, Elizabeth could finally vent her tidiness by intertwining relationships with various local women, attracting the fear and distrust of the villagers, who first made distances from her, and then turned to the authorities, demanding them to be extradited and imprisoned for her dissolute conduct. The local authorities then addressed Elizebeth's family, who first tried to redeem them by sending priests to his castle and subsequently imprisoned them, fearing the dishonor of their name. In prison Elizebeth periodically received the visit of a mysterious man, who later revealed to be Dracula, who took her under his custody and bribe, inoculating in his body the poison that, by his death, would turn her into a vampire.

Three years later, at the age of forty, Elizabeth returned to Hungary, in her castle, deeply changed and ready to give way to her reign of terror; victims of his madness and his depravity were some members of the Bathory family and of the Nadasdy family as well as some rural village girls who disappeared without trace. Elizabeth demonstrated that he had completely denied God, and had declared war on Christians by experiencing an impressive number of rituals, blasphemy practices, and killing, panicking the population. In the end, the authorities arrested him after surprise in the midst of one of his ritual obscenities, and they sneered the horrible truth after finding numerous torture instruments in the basement of his castle as well as numerous girls of the village imprisoned after having suffered all sorts of violence, and many of them are now without life.

Elizabeth's servants, accomplices of her atrocities, paid their crimes with the condemnation of the rogue, and Elizabeth seemed destined to endure the same fate, but her family's intervention escaped her death sentence, which was switched to jail Lifetime. Elizabeth was so alive alive in her bedroom, with a single slit through which she received daily meals. It was through that pertugio that he received a letter from a mysterious man, a letter explaining that the poison that Dracula had inoculated into the body through the bite would have been effective when his body would cease to live and make it reborn in a being immortal from sovereign powers. Elizabeth stopped eating and left to starve, to re-emerge after death as a vampire and to continue undisturbed by frightening atrocities, with a single goal: to conquer the world and to turn it into a realm of terror and perversion.

You do not know the nature of the bond that united Elizabeth with Dracula, but you can say with certainty that it was not love, although it was in its own way a deep bond that broke when Dracula met Mina Harker after coming to England in ' year 1888. Dracula, now aware that his pupil had become a pure evil creature, went to England to find and kill her; Elizabeth, after becoming a vampire, had begun traveling around the world carrying out bloody killings for pure fun, and in 1888 he had killed several girls, including some prostitutes, in England, thus beginning the legendary fantasy and famous serial killer Jack the Ripper. At the end of the affair they saw involving Mina, Dr. Van Helsing and their friends in Dracula hunting (events told in Bram Stoker's historical novel), he found that to grab a grace in Dracula (seriously injured by Jonathan Harker's hits and Quincey Morris), it was Elizabeth; the countess was in fact jealous of the love relationship between Mina Harker and her mentor, for she knew Dracula had planned to escape with Mina. So in response to Dracula's supplications to help him, Elizabeth stabbed him with the knife that Quincey Morris had stuck in his heart, apparently killing him, then swore revenge on Van Helsing, Mina and the other members of the company of heroes.

Twenty-five years after the facts told in Bram Stoker's novel, Elizabeth Bathory arrived in Paris to permanently eliminate Dracula, who survived and under the false identity of the playwright Basarab, was in town for hunting. It was in the aforementioned city that old Jack Seward (obsessed with memories of the past and now fully dependent on morphine) saw her torture and barbarously kill a young girl with the complicity of two of her serve, vampire them too. Subsequently, Elizabeth and her staff robbed at the Theatre de l'Odéon to kill Dracula / Basarab, but were intercepted by Jack Seward, with whom they engaged a fierce confrontation and a pursuit at the end of which Seward was killed, overwhelmed by the carriage of Elizabeth.

The second victim of the avenging fury of Elizabeth Bathory (again in London) was Jonathan Harker; after an evening in a bar to get drunk, Harker came across one of Elizabeth's services, who, for a prostitute, invited him to follow him; the vampire attacked Harker, and then killed by Dracula, who urged Harker to flee. However, alcohol did not allow Harker to go far, and the man was reached and impaled alive by Elizabeth, dying after a long agony. Later, the Countess went to Mina Harker's home, seducing her, drinking her blood during a saffron kiss and allowing Mina to drink her, then transmitting her part of her strength and memories, then went to the Lyceum Theater where Dracula / Basarab was trying for a show, and challenged him in a duel in which Elizabeth had the best, causing a fire in which Dracula was involved and, apparently, killed. Determined to kill Mina, arrested by Inspector Cotford with the charge of murder (the woman had killed Elizabeth's second servant), Elizabeth attacked the policemen who had arrested him, assuming the monstrous appearance of a winged demon and killing them all, then pursued Mina who (on the exhortation of Inspector Cotford, who was sacrificed to give her time to escape) was forced to take refuge on a subway train, where he was reached by the diabolical vampire and began an unpopular struggle at the end of which Mina was put out of combat and almost killed.

Mina rescued Dracula, who survived the fire of the theater, who engaged a controversial fight that initially saw Elizabeth in the lead, but who thanks to Mina's intervention ended up in favor of the vampire while Elizabeth was kicked off the train running, staying horribly disfigured.

Resumed from the clash with Dracula, though disfigured, Elizabeth reached him and Mina at Whitby, finding a reinvigorated Dracula after drinking Mina's blood. The two vampires then began to fight again, bringing both serious injuries, but Dracula managed to finally defeat the countess, breaking his heart with bare hands. In a last resort of pride, not wanting to die at the foot of his enemy, Elizabeth dropped down the long staircase they had fought, letting the fall end to blot his already torn body.