The Countess

The Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival , Oct 1-12 2009, has an impressive female-directed lineup this year!

Sci-fi/comedy Cold Souls (Sophie Bartes), historical horror The Countess (Julie Delpy), creepy drama Ne te Retourne Pas (Marina de Van), action war movie The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), serial killer documentary Cropsey (Barbara Brancaccio with Joshua Zeman), surrealist horror Amer (Hélène Cattet with Bruno Forzani), and animated fantasy The Secret of Kells (Nora Twomey with Tomm Moore.)

The bloody crimes of Elizabeth Bathory are some of the most potent inspirations for modern vampire fiction, but her story is one that has been rarely, if ever, approached from a view less than sensational. In strong contrast, Julie Delpy has directed and stars in a new film, The Countess, which turns the tale towards tragic romance. A brand new teaser trailer has been made available, and is shown below for your viewing pleasures. However this project turns out, I already find the very idea of it very refreshing!

Head over to the Celluloid Dreams website to check out the trailer for Julie Delpy's new horror film, which she wrote, directed, and stars in, called The Countess.

When we talked to Julie Delpy last year ( read our interview) she mentioned she was getting ready to shoot her biopic of the 17th century Hungarian countess Erzebet Bathory, who has long been infamous for killing hundreds of young women and bathing in their blood  in the pursuit of eternal youth. She was said to be the inspiriation for the evil queen in the Snow White stories.

Expect the film in late 2008.

Julie Delpy is probably best-known in the horror world as the hot blond werewolf in An American Werewolf in Paris, the 1997 follow-up to An American Werewolf in London. She played a femme fatale who puts the bite on a dumb American tourist looking for true love in the streets of Paris. He deserved it, if you ask me, for being such a wuss. Delpy also starred in the cult comedy/thriller Killing Zoe as the title character and the lesbian-indie But I'm a Cheerleader. In between these films and dating Ethan Hawke, Adam Goldberg, and making more genre movies like Marcus Nispel's strange version of Frankenstein, The Legend of Lucy Keyes, Ghost Planet, and the futuristic King Lear, she wrote and received an academy award nomination for her script Before Sunset, a sequel to the Richard Linklater film Before Sunrise, which she also starred in. This past several years, Delpy has been working on her most recent movie 2 Days in Paris (which comes out in theaters today), which she wrote and directed. This October she'll begin production on The Countess, a film about the life of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a 17th century Hungarian noblewoman rumored to have murdered hundreds of young women to fulfill her crazed sexual deviant desires. Julie Delpy is French, born and raised in Paris to parents who are actors, with a lilting Frankish accent and long blond hair. She's also amazingly funny, which many people might not know.

I usually hate quoting other sites, but this is newsworthy. Variety reports that Julie Delpy will be starring in and directing a version of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory story called, appropriately, The Countess; one of brutal violence and sadism. It looks to be like an in-depth study about the woman herself. Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory has been blamed for acts of vampirism, witchcraft, lesbianism (golly!) and insane bloodlust for the past 400 years. The common myth is that Bathory thought that the blood of her virgin handmaidens could keep her eternally young, so she bathed in a bathtubfull whenever she could get it. She was walled up in her own castle as punishment for her crimes and died there in 1614.
Read below for excerpts from the Variety article and for interviews with Delpy herself...