El Conde

El Conde is a 2023 Chilean black comedy horror film directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón. It is a satire that portrays Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire seeking death. The film stars Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, and Paula Luchsinger. El Conde premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on 31 August 2023 where it won the best Screenplay Award. It was released on Netflix on 15 September 2023, four days after the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup d'etat, in which Pinochet seized power. Plot In the 18th century, Claude Pinoche, a royalist French soldier, is discovered to be a vampire and survives an attempt to kill him. Witnessing the French Revolution and the execution of Marie Antoinette, he fakes his death and flees abroad, participating in the suppression of revolutionary upheavals over the next centuries. Eventually he ends up in Chile in 1935 and joins the Chilean Army under the name Augusto Pinochet. Rising to become a general, he overthrows the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and becomes the country's dictator, while demanding that he be addressed as "The Count" by his family. When authorities begin investigating his ill-gotten wealth and human rights abuses after he leaves office, he fakes his death again and retires to a remote farm. After 250 years of existence, he gradually loses his will to live, worrying his wife Lucia, and his long-time butler, Fyodor, a white Russian whom Pinochet bit and turned into a vampire. Fyodor takes up Augusto's military uniform and goes on a gruesome killing spree to find and consume human hearts in Santiago. Thinking that their father was responsible, and anxious to receive their inheritance, the Pinochet children hire a nun, Carmen, to exorcise and kill Augusto under the guise of auditing the family's wealth, and go to the farm, followed by Carmen. Carmen charms Augusto with her fluency in French, while he discovers that Fyodor is having an affair with Lucia but tolerates it as he has grown tired of her. Carmen extensively interviews the household over their legal troubles and finances, assembling a dossier which she hides in her room.