Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) arrives in a vintage Bristol driven by her 'secretary' Ilona (Andrea Rau). The middle-aged concierge at the hotel swears that he saw the Countess at the same hotel when he was a little boy. The countess quickly becomes obsessed with the newlyweds, and the resulting interaction of the four people leads to sadism and murder. Ilona,
Stefan, then the Countess all die, leaving Valerie, now transformed into a creature similar to the Countess, stalking new victims.Camille Paglia writes that, "A classy genre of vampire film follows a style I call psychological high Gothic. It begins in Coleridge's medieval Christabel and its descendants, Poe's Ligeia and James's The Turn of the Screw. A good example is Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant lesbian vampire. High gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history
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