‘The Blood Countess’ Lost Up to 20 Minutes Against Its Director’s Wishes: What Ulrike Ottinger Said and Why It Matters
Ulrike Ottinger first sketched her vampire movie in 1998. It took her 28 years, one Nobel laureate and an Isabelle Huppert who kept saying yes to get The Blood Countess onto a screen. Now, with a U.S. release still ahead, the 84-year-old director says she lost as much as 20 minutes of it along the way, and not by choice.
She said so in Tokyo, and Variety reported it on Nov. 2. Here's what she actually said, what the movie is, what it cost her to make, and why those missing minutes could end up mattering to the small American distributor that bought it.
Watch the Teaser, Trailer and Berlinale Press Conference
The teaser below is the one embedded on the film pages of both Strand Releasing and Ottinger's official site; the trailer and the Berlinale press conference also come from her site.
What Ottinger Said in Tokyo
The remarks came at a German cinema evening tied to the Tokyo International Film Festival, which is running a retrospective of her work that includes Ticket of No Return and Under Snow. According to Variety, her preferred cut ran 15 to 20 minutes longer than the finished film. "The film originally had a wonderful rhythm, exactly as it was," she told the audience.
She named no one. iHorror's write-up notes she described the pressure as coming from everybody around her, which is a very director way of saying it without starting a fight. Producers, financiers and sales agents all have reasons to want a tighter movie, but nothing she said pins this on any of them, so we won't either.
The part that gets lost in the headlines: she isn't calling the release version ruined. As Dread Central reported, she says the film is perfect now, after a heavy job of re-editing the whole thing to make the shorter length work. That's a filmmaker who lost the argument, did the labor and stands behind the result. It's also a filmmaker who still wanted you to know there was an argument. No longer cut has been announced.
The Details: What's Confirmed
- The premise: Huppert plays Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman of bloody legend, here an undead aristocrat in present-day Vienna. She reunites with her maid Hermine to hunt down a book that could wipe out vampires, with a vegetarian vampire nephew, his therapist and a police inspector all tangled in the chase.
- Cast: Birgit Minichmayr as Hermine, Thomas Schubert as nephew Rudi Bubi, Lars Eidinger as therapist Theobald Tandem, Karl Markovics as the inspector, plus André Jung, Marco Lorenzini, Burghart Klaußner and Tom Neuwirth, better known as Conchita Wurst, as the master of ceremonies.
- Runtime: 119 minutes on the Berlinale press kit and Ottinger's site, 118 on Strand's page, and an unexplained 100 on the Luxembourg Film Fund's catalog listing, which looks like an outlier.
- Rating and language: Strand lists it as Not Rated, in German, French and Russian with English subtitles.
- U.S. release: Strand plans a theatrical run in spring 2027, with no exact date yet. Its page also lists early screenings at The Loft Cinema in Tucson on Nov. 11 and AFI Silver in Maryland on Dec. 2.
- Europe: Ottinger's site names Neue Visionen and Filmladen as German and Austrian distributors and advertises a cinema run from Oct. 29.
Who's Behind It
Photo: Ulrike Ottinger via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
Ottinger, born in Konstanz in 1942, is a giant of queer German art cinema and an unusual person to be making a vampire comedy at this scale. Ticket of No Return (1979) opened her Berlin Trilogy, and Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) followed. Screen Daily notes this is her first film in six years, after the 2020 documentary Paris Calligrammes.
Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 and wrote the novel behind The Piano Teacher , has been billed as a co-writer in most coverage. Ottinger draws the line more finely: the press kit credits dialogues with Jelinek's participation, and she told 032c that she wrote the screenplay herself and her friend added the wordplay. Horror fans should note the cinematographer: Martin Gschlacht, who shot The Devil's Bath. Wolfgang Mitterer's score takes apart Johann Strauss waltzes, and Wurst sings "Rise Like a Phoenix," the song that won her Eurovision.
Huppert is the film's sales pitch. The Film Stage counts this as her 158th credit, and she revealed there that Ottinger originally imagined her as the maid, not the Countess. Minichmayr, who ended up with that part, brings a résumé including Downfall and The White Ribbon.
Photo: Birgit Minichmayr at the 2025 Austrian Film Awards via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
The Backstory: A 28-Year Road to Vienna
The idea began with a 1998 car trip from Berlin to Vienna, where the Narrenturm, the old Fools' Tower, and other strange locations lodged in Ottinger's head. She started the script in the early 2000s and approached Huppert in the late 2000s. "I think there are 28 versions of the script," she told Austrian Films in January. Money only came together in the last five years or so, and she says in the press kit that showing and selling her paintings at exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern was part of what made that possible.
Variety's casting report landed in February 2025. The world premiere followed on Feb. 16, 2026, in the Berlinale Special Gala at the Zoo Palast, and the film then toured Luxembourg, Sydney, Bucheon, Melbourne and Fantastic Fest. Strand's acquisition was reported on Aug. 31, the same day we first wrote about it.
The Báthory legend itself is well-worn screen territory, from Hammer's Countess Dracula with Ingrid Pitt and Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness , both 1971, to Julie Delpy's The Countess in 2009. Ottinger has said she cares less about the historical woman than about the fantasies that grew around her, and it shows in a movie more interested in Vienna than in biography.
By the Numbers
No budget has been published, so treat anything you see as a guess. But Ottinger gave Variety the useful outlines: it is the most expensive film she has made, she asked for 40 shooting days and got 30, and the crew passed 100 people. Her self-produced films cost €2.5 million to €3 million, she said, while meeting today's requirements takes €7 million to €8 million, which is why she has stopped producing alone. (She's still credited as a co-producer here.) That squeeze is the context for any argument about length: ten fewer days and more partners at the table.
Critically it's healthy but not unanimous. Rotten Tomatoes shows 84% from just 19 reviews, with no audience score yet. Guy Lodge at Variety was delighted and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian gave it three stars out of five. Screen Daily called it slight but marketable, while Dread Central's Fantastic Fest review found it gorgeous and disappointing.
Analysis: Why 20 Minutes Could Be a Selling Point
Here's my read. Horror fans have been trained to treat missing minutes as a promise. The clearest example is Midsommar : A24 asked Ari Aster to trim his 171-minute cut for wide release, then turned the long version into an event, with a brief theatrical run, an Apple TV exclusive, a boutique disc and a one-night IMAX showing in 2024. A movie that cost about $9 million and grossed about $48 million got a second life out of its own deleted footage.
The conversation is live right now, too. Curry Barker told Rolling Stone he'd love to release a version of Obsession about 20 minutes longer, while insisting the theatrical cut already is his director's cut, Dread Central reports. That film hits Netflix on Nov. 17. Same number, opposite situation: Barker chose his cut and wants more, while Ottinger says hers was forced and has made peace with it.
Scale matters. Nosferatu turned $50 million into $182 million with Focus behind it, and even its extended home video edition only added about four minutes. The Blood Countess lives in a different neighborhood, closer to Only Lovers Left Alive , Jim Jarmusch's arty vampire picture that made $8.2 million on a $7 million budget. Strand doesn't need a phenomenon. It needs Huppert fans, queer cinema audiences and the midnight crowd to all show up, and a story about a legendary director's lost footage is the kind of thing that travels in those circles for free.
The risk runs the other way as well. A black comedy this loopy can be sunk by length, and several of the cooler reviews already found it more dazzling than filling. An extra 20 minutes wouldn't automatically help. If the 119-minute version is what she reworked to make sing, then the honest pitch may be that it's already her film, just not the one she first cut.
What We Still Don't Know
- Who pushed for the cuts, and exactly when they happened. The 119-minute running time was listed at Berlinale, which suggests they came before the premiere, though Ottinger hasn't said so.
- Whether the longer version still exists in finished form, and whether anyone has the rights or appetite to release it.
- The exact U.S. date, and whether Strand plans anything beyond a limited rollout.
- Which version, if any, ever reaches home video.
Bottom Line
An 84-year-old who waited 28 years for this movie gets to say what she lost, and she did it without trashing the result. That's a better story than most director's-cut drama, and it makes spring 2027 more interesting. The film sounds like a Viennese fever dream with Isabelle Huppert at the center of it, which is reason enough to go.
So tell us: when a director says the longer cut was better, do you want to see it, or do you trust the version that had to fight its way to the screen?
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Header photo: Isabelle Huppert at Cannes in 2017 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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