Since the recent reveal of the game’s mesmerising and almost impossibly proportioned villainness, the internet has become obsessed with Resident Evil Village’s Lady Alcina Dimitrescu. But who is she? Or, perhaps more significantly, what is she? I have a theory.
The Dimitrescu’s family home is one of the major locations of the game and featured in the “Maiden” demo out now on PS5. Although Capcom hasn’t confirmed it, the use of “lei” as in-game currency (as shown in one of the previous developer videos) suggests that Castle Dimitrescu is probably in Romania or a fictional Eastern European country based on Romania.
Romania has historical and cultural links to vampires, traced back to the 1400s’ Wallachian voivode or local governor Vlad Țepeș, son of Vlad Dracul, who is perhaps most remembered for his unconventional hobby and subsequent reinvention as Bram Stoker’s notorious bloodsucker. This has prompted speculation that Alcina Dimitrescu is also a vampire – and not without reason. The Dimitrescu family business, for example, is in the production of a, uh, unique red wine, “Sanguis Virginis”, a name that translates from Latin to “maiden’s blood”. That’s not exactly subtle, and neither is the château’s frequent turnover of female employees.
But in last week’s trailer, Lady Dimitrescu is pictured in front of a mirror, and has a reflection. Vampires don’t have reflections, everybody knows that. It’s totally conceivable that Resident Evil vampires are different, but this scene feels, I dunno, too deliberate.
So, let me tell you about Erzsébet Báthory, the Hungarian “Blood Countess” serial killer, who was accused with several collaborators of torturing, murdering, and even cannibalising between 300 and 650 victims (depending on your source) from 1590 to 1610. It’s also alleged that she bathed in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth, because why not. Saved from an ignominious public execution by her political status, Báthory was instead imprisoned in her castle until she died in 1614.
Inevitably, Báthory has since been associated with vampires in literature and movies, but I think a sadistic aristocrat who was able to commit those atrocities because who was going to stop her is a much more compelling narrative than some sort of magical curse.
Maybe Lady Dimitrescu is a vampire. Or maybe, she’s entirely human but without humanity, a narcissistic noble whose boredom is relieved through cruelty and whim. That’s real horror.