BLOOD CEREMONY, Spain's gritty alternative take to Hammer's COUNTESS DRACULA, comes to Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

The Central European district of Cajlice in the nineteenth century is still ruled by superstition, with the local marquis Karl Ziemmer (Espartaco Santoni, LISA AND THE DEVIL) wryly looking on as the village priest and the town quire exhume the corpse of a recently-dead village doctor suspected of vampirism. In spite of his disbelief in local superstitions, he has more interest in the bureaucratic duties of putting a corpse to trial than paying attention to his wife Erzebeth (Lucia Bose, SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK) who fears her youth is slipping away. When she slaps a chatty maid with her comb and a drop of blood seems to rejuvenate her skin, her old wet nurse (Ana Farra, CURSE OF THE DEVIL) recollects Erzebeth's infamous ancestress Countess Bathory who bathed in the blood of virgins and inducts her into black magic. Haughty but tempted by the lure of the dark arts, Ziemmer boasts of proving that the doctor's vampirism is pure superstition by wearing the doctor's medallion given to him by local healer Carmilla (Lola Gaos, PANIC BEATS) who warned of its malefic qualities. When Ziemmler apparently dies, he rises as a vampire to prowl the village and supply Erzebeth with blood to preserve her youth. Disappearing girls and sightings of the dead Ziemmer in the village at night threaten to expose Erzebeth's grisly deeds, but Ziemmer's loyaltis are start to shift when he meets innkeeper's daughter Marina (Ewa Aulin, DEATH LAID AN EGG) who cast a love spell on him.

Unlike the staid Hammer film COUNTESS DRACULA or Walerian Borowczyk's sketch for IMMORAL TALES, or even the masterfully-ambiguous DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, BLOOD CEREMONY gets closer to the much-debated and embellished historical record of Bathory's crimes while focusing on a supposed descendent with the temporal remove of a nineteenth century setting in which Enlightenment could easily devolve into medieval savagery from very human causes such as Ziemmer's boredom, Erzebeth's vanity, and a possible incestuous relationship (the dead doctor's daughter claims that he came to her and kissed her in a non-familial way but Ziemmer observes the real cause of the marks on her neck from the twisted metal of her crucifix fastening). Although the theme of the rich bleeding the poor is quite blatant – especially for a Franco-era Spanish horror film – there is also something to be said of the film's recurring occurrences of characters of lesser social status using superstition to control and manipulate, from the nurse dropping hints about Erzebeth's ancestress and exerting her authority in folk magic over the maids to Carmilla supplying Marina with love potions and the squire rallying the locals into a mob through superstition. The supernatural elements could very well be explained away by logic and psychology in spite of some more overt fantastical elements – Ziemmer could just be a sexual sadist while Erzebeth's physical changes are not noticeable – but much of the film's exploitation content is downplayed in favor of drama in contrast to Grau's more overtly horrific THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE. The supporting cast includes Italian co-production quota actor Silvano Tranquilli (THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK) as the new village doctor who argues for rationality and Loreta Tovar (RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD, NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS) as a skinny-dipping victim of Ziemmer. Carlo Savina (FANGS OF THE LIVING DEAD) eschews his lounge tastes for a more traditionally gothic orchestral score, and the cinematography of Fernando Arribas is every bit as elegant as his work on THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE.

BLOOD CEREMONY was released theatrically in the United States by Film Ventures International in an R-rated version under the titles THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE and THE FEMALE BUTCHER, the former title used for the VHS edition from Consolidated Video Corporation. Viewers looking for the uncut version had to contend with a much-bootlegged, poor-quality Finnish VHS. The film first turned up in Spain in a non-anamorphic letterboxed DVD of good quality; however, it was derived from the clothed Spanish version. This master was also the source for MYA Communication's unauthorized DVD which added the English track but featured the uncovered scenes in the extras (a composite of the two masters turned up on the bootleg circuit). When Mondo Macabro first looked into releasing the film on Blu-ray, it appeared that the rights holders only had the Spanish cut (from which a new HD master was struck and had premiered in France on Blu-ray from Artus Films); however, the materials for the export version were found, necessitating a delay in the Mondo release.

Mondo Macabro's Blu-ray features separate 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfers of the Spanish version (88:55) and the export version (90:05) stripping away the print damage and video haze of the earlier releases and revealing a film of higher production values seemingly on a similar budget to its Spanish horror contemporaries with both the rustic textures of the locations and some studio sets that hold up well, as do the film's make-up effects and the textures of set dressings, costumes, hair, and skin (Bose's countess only looks older next to Aulin's unblemished youth). The grading seems to be identical on both, and it may be possible that the international materials were restricted to the specific scenes and shots rather than an entire separate element being transferred. While the Spanish cut can only be viewed with the Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track and English subtitles, the export version can be watched either in English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 or with the Spanish track resynched to it with English subtitles.

The export version is accompanied by two separate commentary tracks. On the first, film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson discuss the Bathory "legend" and the popularity at the time by way of both the books "The Bloody Countess" by Valentine Penrose and the profile in Radu Florescu's and Raymond T. McNally's "In Search of Dracula" – the book that first made the datable claim that Stoker's Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler – with McNally's "Dracula Was a Woman" coming out a decade later. In discussing the Spanish/Italian co-production aspect of the film, Howarth suggests that Italian screenwriter Sandro Continenza (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) was a quota credit on this and THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE, but elsewhere on the disc we hear from Grau himself that Italian producer Edmondo Amati (THE TEMPTER) when approached about BLOOD CEREMONY wanted something more like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and sent Continenza to meet with Grau (Bathory's hallucinations of her persecuting victims as worm-eaten corpses might be a survival of an attempt), and Grau also revealed that it was Continenza's script for THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE that attracted him to doing a zombie film before he made his own changes. The second track features film historians Robert Monell of the El Franconomicon blog and Rod Barnett of The Naschycast who cover some of the same ground of the Bathory legend, cinematic forbears, Spanish horror production of the period and Grau's contemporaries, but Monell also muses on the historical setting in between the American and French revolutions and the coming industrial revolution and how such superstitions in the film become part of the bureaucracy.