Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  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 St. 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 dyed 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.

  COUNTESS:

  No. No, and don’t ask again. It is my home. Let Thurzó’s men come. I will show them nothing. I will let them see nothing.

  DARVULIA:

  It isn’t so simple, my sweet Erzsébet. Ferenc is gone, and without a husband to protect you…you must consider the greed of relatives who covet your estates, and consider, also, debts owed to you by a king who has no intention of ever settling them. Many have much to gain from your fall.

  COUNTESS (stubbornly):

  There will be no fall.

  You sit up straight in your reclining theatre seat. You’ve needed to urinate for the last half hour, but you’re not about to miss however much of the film you’d miss during a quick trip to the restroom. You try not to think about it; you concentrate on the screen and not your aching bladder.

  INT. COUNTESS’ BEDCHAMBER. NIGHT.

  The Countess sits in her lion-footed chair, facing the open balcony doors. There are no candles burning, but we can see the silhouette of the gypsy girl outlined in the winter moonlight pouring into the room. She is all but naked. The wind blows loudly, howling about the walls of the castle.

  COUNTESS (distressed):

  No, you’re not mine. I can’t recall ever having seen you before. You are nothing of mine. You are some demon sent by the moon to harry me.

  GIRL (calmly):

  It is true I serve the moon, Mother, as do you. She is mistress to us both. We have both run naked while she watched on. We have both enjoyed her favors. We are each the moon’s bitch.

  COUNTESS (turning away):

  Lies. Every word you say is a wicked lie. And I’ll not hear any more of it. Begone, strigoi. Go back to whatever stinking hole was dug to cradle your filthy gypsy bones.

  GIRL (suddenly near tears):

  Please do no not say such things, Mother.

  COUNTESS (through clenched teeth):

  You are not my daughter! This is the price of my sins, to be visited by phantoms, to be haunted.

  GIRL:

  I only want to be held, Mother. I only want to be held, as any daughter would. I want to be kissed.

  Slowly, the Countess looks back at the girl. Snow blows in through the draperies, swirling about the child. The girl’s eyes flash red-gold. She takes a step nearer the Countess.

  GIRL (contd.):

  I can protect you, Mother.

  COUNTESS:

  From what? From whom?

  GIRL:

  You know from what, and you know from whom. You would know, even if Anna hadn’t told you. You are not a stupid woman.

  COUNTESS:

  You do not come to protect me, but to damn me.

  GIRL (kind):

  I only want to be held, and sung to sleep.

  COUNTESS (shuddering):

  My damnation.

  GIRL (smiling sadly):

  No, Mother. You’ve tended well enough to that on your own. You’ve no need of anyone to hurry you along to the pit.

  CLOSE UP – THE COUNTESS:

  The Countess’ face is filled with a mixture of dread and defeat, exhaustion and horror. She shuts her eyes a moment, muttering silently, then opens them again.

  COUNTESS (resigned):

  Come, child.

  MEDIUM SHOT – THE COUNTESS:

  The Countess sits in her chair, head bowed now, seemingly too exhausted to continue arguing with the girl. From the foreground, the gypsy girl approaches her. Strange shadows seem to loom behind the Countess’ chair. The child begins to sing in a sweet, sad, lilting voice, a song that might be a hymn or a dirge.

  FADE TO BLACK.

  This scene will stay with you. You will find yourself thinking, That’s where it should have ended. That would have made a better ending. The child’s song – only two lines of which are intelligible – will remain with you long after many of the grimmer, more graphic details are forgotten. Two eerie, poignant lines: Stay with me and together we will live forever./Death is the road to awe. Later, you’ll come across an article in American Cinematographer (April 2006), and discover that the screenwriter originally intended this to be the final scene, but was overruled by the director, who insisted it was too anticlimactic.

  Which isn’t to imply that the remaining twenty minutes are without merit, but only that they steer the film in a different and less subtle, less dreamlike direction. Like so many of the films you most admire – Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Herzog’s Herz aus Glas, David Lynch’s Lost Highway – this one is speaking to you in the language of dreams, and after the child’s song, you have the distinct sense that the film has awakened, jolted from the subconscious to the conscious, the self-aware. It’s ironic, therefore, that the next scene is a dream sequence. And it is a dream sequence that has left critics divided over the movie’s conclusion and what the director intended to convey. There is a disjointed, tumbling series of images, and it is usually assumed that this is simply a nightmare delivered to the Countess by the child. However, one critic, writing for Slovenska Kinoteka (June 2005), has proposed it represents a literal divergence of two timelines, dividing the historical Báthory’s fate from that of the fictional Báthory portrayed in the film. She notes the obvious, that the dream closely parallels the events of December 29, 1610, the day of the Countess’ arrest. A few have argued the series of scenes was never meant to be perceived
as a dream (neither the director nor the screenwriter have revealed their intent). The sequence may be ordered as follows:

  The Arrival: A retinue on horseback – Thurzó, Imre Megyery, the Countess’ sons-in-law, Counts Drugeth de Homonnay and Zrínyi, together with an armed escort. The party reaches the Csejte, and the iron gates swing open to admit them.

  The Descent: The Palatine’s men following a narrow, spiraling stairwell into the depth of the castle. They cover their mouths and noses against some horrible stench.

  The Discovery: A dungeon cell strewn with corpses, in various stages of dismemberment and decay. Two women, still living, though clearly mad, their bodies naked and beaten and streaked with filth, are manacled to the stone walls. They scream at the sight of the men.

  The Trial: Theodosious Syrmiensis de Szulo of the Royal Supreme Court pronounces a sentence of perpetuis carceribus, sparing the Countess from execution, but condemning her to lifelong confinement at Csejte.

  The Execution/Pardon of the Accomplices: Three women and one man. Two of the women, Jó Ilona and Dorottya Szentes, are found guilty, publicly tortured, and burned alive. The man, Ujváry János (portrayed as a deformed dwarf), is beheaded before being thrown onto the bonfire with Jó and Dorottya. The third woman, Katarína Beniezky, is spared (this is not explained, and none of the four are named in the film).

  The Imprisonment: The Countess sits on her bed as stonemasons brick up the chamber’s windows and the door leading out onto the balcony. Then the door is sealed. Close ups of trowels, mortar, callused hands, Elizabeth’s eyes, a Bible in her lap. Last shot from Elizabeth’s POV, her head turned away from the camera, as the final few bricks are set in place. She is alone. Fade to black.