Overview
- The Blood Countess had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section on Feb. 16, followed by a press conference with the director and cast.
- Isabelle Huppert leads as Erzsebet Bathory in a darkly comic Vienna-set story about vampires and a fabled book said to end evil, complete with playful touches like a pet bat and a coffin-shaped purse.
- Huppert told reporters that playing a vampire was fun and praised Ulrike Ottinger as a visionary filmmaker.
- Ottinger said she wrote the screenplay in 1998, began discussing it with Huppert about two decades ago, and completed the €8 million shoot in Vienna over roughly 30 days.
- Lars Eidinger appears as the vampire’s psychotherapist rather than a vampire, Thomas Schubert plays a “vegetarian vampire,” and Ottinger spoke of the countess’s fluid desires.