And that’s a good thing, unless the writers of AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL are looking to rack up the highest body count in the history of television. (I say go for it, guys. You’ve already got the morality police and self-righteous censorship groups squealing like a herd of gutshot hogs—No, change that to bleating like a herd of gutshot SHEEP; it’s more appropriate—I say, go big or go home!) It should be obvious to any self-respecting vampire mark, or hell, anybody even remotely knowledgeable about vampires, that the name of Lady Gaga’s character on the show, the Countess, is directly inspired by Elizabeth (or Erzebet, in Hungarian) Bathory, the infamous “Blood Countess” who murdered hundreds of young women and took baths in their blood.
Gaga’s Countess has a thing for blood, too, though, it would seem, in far less copious amounts. And both Erzebet and Ms. Stefani Germanotta are/were reputed to have been beautiful women. Bathory was also, at a time when women were, generally speaking, relegated to secondary positions in society, quite a feminist (though not in a good way), as is the Countess character on AHS. The similarities would appear to stop there—unless later episodes of AHS show us a nude Gaga luxuriating in a bathtub of virgin’s blood. And wouldn’t the censors just LOVE that.