Accused of killing hundreds of women and bathing in their blood, a Hungarian countess has inspired two movies. Daniel McLaughlinvisits the Slovak town that is hoping to cash in.

The ruined bedrooms are thick with brambles, and rosehip and wild blackberries hang heavy in the banqueting hall, but something is stirring in the castle where Elizabeth Bathory is said to have tortured and killed hundreds of girls in her search for eternal youth.

Two forthcoming films starring Britain's Anna Friel and French actress Julie Delpy will re-examine the legend of the 16th-century Hungarian countess, who allegedly bathed in the blood of slain virgins during a spree that secured her reputation as the world's most prolific murderess.

And for the sleepy villages spread out beneath Cachtice castle in Slovakia, from which Bathory plucked beautiful peasant girls to be her victims, the surge of interest in the "Bloody Countess" has spawned hope of a lucrative tourist boom.

"We already have a few foreign visitors but we expect lots more after these films," says Jarmila, who runs Cachtice's little museum, where portraits of Bathory and her warlord husband, Ferenc Nadasdy, gaze down upon a display of medieval instruments of torture.

"We hope the tourists will bring in the money we need to preserve the castle and refurbish this museum," she said. "We intend to dedicate a whole new room to Bathory - though we don't plan to build a replica blood bath." In the glass case beside Jarmila, the countess's dark eyes stare out dolefully from above a long, slender nose and rosebud mouth. Her pale body is swathed in a crimson bodice, rings glimmer on her fingers, and her slender neck is clasped by what appear to be pearls and sapphires.

It is a copy of a 1585 portrait of Bathory aged 25, when she had already been married for a decade to the "Black Knight" Nadasdy, a warrior five years her senior who won a reputation for valour and viciousness fighting the Ottoman armies that swarmed over 16th-century central Europe.

With her husband away at war, the young countess was left to run the estate at Cachtice, which comprised the imposing castle, a mansion and more than a dozen villages surrounded by farmland and the thickly-forested foothills of the Carpathian mountains.

In the aristocratic houses of Hungary and the region, this was a time of harsh discipline towards servants and casual cruelty towards serfs. But events at Cachtice, so the case against Bathory goes, appalled even the most callous of her contemporaries.

The sadistic Nadasdy gifted her a plaything when he went to war, a silver claw on a whip that would tear off chunks of its victim's flesh; this she is said to have used to reprimand servants and while away long weeks of lonely boredom in the castle.

Taking the lead from her husband, reputedly an expert torturer of captured Turkish soldiers, Bathory is accused of indulging in year-round atrocities - in winter placing servant girls in the courtyard and dousing them with cold water until they froze to death, in summer stripping and smearing them with honey to be attacked by insects, and at every opportunity searing the breasts and genitals of recalcitrant staff with red hot pokers.

WHEN NADASDY DIED in 1604, the countess and her estates became a target for covetous noblemen and the Habsburg rulers of Hungary, who resented her protestantism and feared the Bathorys as a powerful rival family which had already produced a celebrated king of Poland and several palatines of Hungary and princes of Transylvania.

Now 44 years old and reputedly terrified of ageing, Elizabeth one day struck a servant who had pulled her hair while combing it. A splash of the maid's blood landed on her arm and, when she wiped it off, the skin beneath appeared to glow with youthful vitality.

This event is said to have inspired her most depraved acts, which included hanging virgin girls upside down and slitting their throats, or placing them in an iron maiden that pierced their bodies with scores of spikes, allowing the blood to drain off into a pool in which she bathed, somewhere in the bowels of Cachtice castle.

Amid growing complaints against the countess - whether from victims' relatives or rival aristocrats is not clear - the Habsburgs moved decisively against her in 1610, ordering the palatine of Hungary to raid Cachtice, where he reportedly discovered several dead, dying and imprisoned girls, and a list of more than 650 women killed by Bathory.

Elizabeth's status and friendship with the palatine saved her from trial and execution, but two servant girls were tortured and burned alive, and a crippled dwarf beheaded, for the macabre crimes they supposedly committed on the orders of their mistress.

Bathory was confined to house arrest in Cachtice castle and died there in 1614, leaving her legend to darken over centuries of lurid embellishment, creating an iconic figure replete with material for historians, gender-studies professors, writers and film-makers.

"She could have done the things she was accused of, but there is no doubt she was also plotted against and, to some extent, framed," says Tony Thorne, the author of a book on Bathory called Countess Dracula.

"She was an intelligent, arrogant, charismatic woman in a time and place when you couldn't play that role. It was also a very dangerous time with the Ottomans at the door, and a very cruel time - and if she was cruel, she was probably cruel in an imaginative way."

Katalin Peter, a Hungarian expert on the reputedly bisexual Bathory, is less equivocal. "Basically, the stories about her are true," she says, citing a letter written in 1602 by a Lutheran pastor on the Cachtice estate, that discusses admonishing Bathory and her husband for their cruelty - a grave step to take against such a powerful couple - and mentions a servant who was to be denied communion for participating in torture at the castle.

"She was neither beautiful not intelligent, but was ill, probably with a sexual disorder," says Peter.

"Bathory seems to have been a very sexual person, educated by a very pious mother and mother-in-law, who taught her that sexual things were evil. She couldn't enjoy sex in the way she would have done if she had been left alone. Today, we'd say she was mentally ill."

Mystery still shrouds the figure of Bathory - no one knows where she was buried and many letters and records about her were lost or destroyed during the upheaval of war with the Turks and sporadic fighting between Protestant nobles and the Habsburgs.

"Many of the things ascribed to Bathory could have come from myth and folklore, and the ultimate evidence to convict her is just not out there at the moment," says Thorne.

"I suspect that in a lost archive somewhere in Hungary, Slovakia or Ukraine, someone, some time will discover a letter to shed light on all these stories." The forthcoming films about Bathory seek to strip away centuries of bad press, to reveal what their creators see as a woman persecuted for her strength and independence.

In Bathory, Anna Friel's porcelain-pale countess seeks to remedy acute anaemia by immersing herself in herbs that turn her bathwater an incriminating shade of red; Julie Delpy, meanwhile, has said that The Countess will depict a woman who was "very powerful, running affairs of state, controlling armies. Not a woman to mess with." Both films are due for release next year and are likely to re-ignite international interest in Bathory - and lure foreign tourists to her sinister stronghold at Cachtice.

"The films will be good for our village," says Jozef, who runs the little pharmacy next to the Pizzeria Bathory.

"More people will learn about Cachtice and its association with the countess. Bathory may have done some bad things, but maybe now she'll help us make a bit of money."