Nepenthe

From The NY Times   A new book by Shelley Puhak dismantles the legend of Hungary’s infamous “blood countess,” separating fact from myth. There once was an aging Hungarian noblewoman so desperate to cling to her beauty that she had young maidens tortured and murdered in order to bathe in their virgin blood. After her servant-executioners testified against her, she was walled up in the tower of her castle, visible only as a spectral figure in the barred window. So unforgettably lurid are the details of this story that its subject, Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614), became an enduring object of fascination. In the 1960s, the Guinness Book of World Records named her the “most prolific murderer,” responsible for 610 deaths. But as Shelley Puhak argues in “The Blood Countess,” her new account of Bathory’s life and times, there’s ample reason to believe that the legend of her depravity was concocted by her enemies in order to shred her reputation and remove her from publ...

 

After having one of the best experiences of my life translating Zoraida Córdova , I had to look her up and, lo and behold, she's both author and editor of this anthology: Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite. Highly recommended – five coffins!  

    Rivka Galchen for The New Yorker . In 1250, King Eric IV of Denmark was murdered while visiting his brother, Abel Valdemarsen. Although Abel was suspected of arranging the killing, he swore that it wasn’t so and became king himself. Less than two years later, when he set out to attack some peasants who weren’t paying taxes, he himself was killed by a wheelwright. He was initially buried at the cathedral. But monks there complained that the slain king was walking around at night, frightening them with strange sounds. The royal corpse was removed from the church and sunk in a bog, and a stake was run through its chest. In “ Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World ,” John Blair, a professor emeritus of medieval history and archeology at the University of Oxford, examines the many historical accounts of such corpse-killings, in which the already dead, perceived to be causing trouble, are “killed” again. Today, we typically associate su...

 

 Mark Parisi at Off the Mark   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 From The Independent   In the summer of 1921, the German filmmaker FW Murnau began shooting his film Nosferatu on location in northern Germany and at Jofa Film Studios in Berlin. This was the first important vampire movie in cinema history and it was entirely fitting that it was a rip-off. Author Bram Stoker ’s estate had refused Murnau permission to make a film adaptation of his 1897 novel Dracula . The director and his screenwriter Henrik Galeen dealt with the inconvenience by calling the main character Count Orlok rather than Count Dracula and renaming all the other main characters too. Even so, the production company Prana Film, which was soon to go bankrupt anyway, was sued by Stoker’s widow. Nosferatu was the perfect prototype for all the other vampire films that have followed it in such profusion over the last 100 years. To its detractors, Stoker’s widow among them, it was a scandalous affair: an exercise in tacky plagiarism. To its admirers, it still rank...

 With Tom Gauld