Erzsebet Báthory is a character inCastlevania: Nocturne who considers herself the ultimate leader of thevampires. She’s incredibly powerful, has ambitions to bring about a major, world-changing event, and even has the resources to make it happen. That’s something even the famousvampire Dracula of the Castlevaniafranchise couldn’t do.

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This makes Báthory a really significant character in Nocturne. The creators of the show made this decision, and it’s a unique one. While they borrowed some ideas from the world-building of Castlevania video games, they also looked back to real-life history from the 1600s for inspiration.

Annette Castlevania: Nocturne in golden sunset filter

Erzsebet Bathory & Her Goals

Erzsabet Bathory is a figure of intrigue and power, a self-proclaimed Vampire Messiah with ambitions as grand as they are dark. As a vampire countess, she has drawn power from the blood of the Egyptian war goddess Sekhmet.

Her story emerges in the backdrop of the French Revolution, a period of immense societal upheaval that threatens the established order of the aristocracy.Bathory and her kind – the vampires – have long benefited from this old order, maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the aristocrats and exploiting the lower classes together.But now, this partnership is at risk because of the revolution.

Erzsebet Bathory & Her Goals Explained

This is why Bathory wants to stop the revolution – to keep the chaos going. But Bathory’s ambitions go beyond preserving the status quo. She seeks a future where vampires are not merely allies of the ruling class, but the ruling class themselves. Moreover, Bathory plans to shroud the world in eternal darkness. It’s a strategic step to eliminate their key weakness – sunlight.

Personality

Erzsebet Bathory is a psychopath with a god complex. She is a master of manipulation and cruelty, operating on a different level of malevolence altogether. In her human days, she was already a sadist. She’d find joy in causing pain, especially to teenagers. When she became a vampire, her capacity for evil only escalated.

She didn’t just feed on her victims like most vampires do; she kept them alive, drawing out their pain and suffering for as long as she could.She had a particular method of torture where she’d hang people up by their arms using hooks through their bones, ensuring they were seeing the whole process. Some victims, particularly young women, might have another chance to live if they had something that charmed her.

Erzsebet Bathory the vampire messiah from castlevania nocturne

Erzsebet positioned herself as a messiah, twisting the minds of both vampires and humans to see her as their savior. Her vision of salvation wasn’t about freedom or peace; it was about maintaining the oppressive system of slavery and supremacy that the aristocracies enjoyed.She aimed to crush the French Revolution and then extend her reign of terror to America and possibly the entire world.

Sources Of Inspiration For The Character

Given that the franchise often includes charactersbased on historical figuresor legends, it’s no surprise Castlevania: Nocturne also inserts similar references. Erzsebet’s name is a reference to the 16th-century Elizabeth Báthory, who was a Hungarian noblewoman who has been labeled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer. She was accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1590 and 1610.

The stories of her sadistic serial murders are verified by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and survivors. Of course there was also physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying, and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest.Stories describing her vampire-like tendencies (most famously the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth) were generally recorded years after her death and are considered unreliable. Her story quickly became part of national folklore, and her infamy persists to this day.

Erzsebet Bathory from Castlevania: Nocturne historical inspiration

She is often compared with Vlad III the Impaler of Wallachia, on whom the fictional Count Dracula is partly based, and has been nicknamed “The Blood Countess” and “Countess Dracula.” Moreover, Erzsebet’s character draws on a fascinating mix of sources, like Elizabeth Bartley, the main antagonist of Castlevania: Bloodlines, and Carmilla from Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her character’s inspiration is tied to real history.

Who Is The Voice Actor?

Franka Potente is a German actress and singer who gained international recognition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was born on July 01, 2025, in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.Potente first garnered attention for her role in the German film Run Lola Run (1998), where she played the titular character, Lola. The film was a commercial success and put Potente on the map as a prominent actress in the international cinema scene. However, she is perhaps best known to international audiences for her role in The Bourne Identity (2002) and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), where she starred alongside Matt Damon.

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Erzsebet Bathory voiced by Franka Potente