Classic Halloween Monsters: The Vampire

The countdown to Halloween has begun, and we’re ready to get spooky! But which monster should you disguise yourself as this year? Corinne Pollard is delving into some classic Halloween monsters to help you make your final call.

Time to do the Monster Mash! Like the plot from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, I’ll be exploring the cultural origins of four classic halloween monsters that we have come to both love and fear. With each monster, I’ll recommend music, films, TV shows, and books to help you get into the mindset of the deadliest, most terrifying creatures that Hollywood and literature won’t ever let us forget.

For part one, we have the bloodsucking, immortal, pale-faced creature we have come to know as the Vampire.

Monstrous literary origins

It is widely assumed that Dracula by Bram Stoker is the most popular vampire in literature—but he was not, in fact, the first. On the southern shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, five people gathered at Villa Diodati in 1816, amongst them scandalous poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Indonesia’s volcanic Mount Tamboro erupted around this time, blocking out the sunlight all the way over in Europe, so 1816’s summer became an eternal darkness. Inspired by this event (and mostly out of boredom), Lord Byron set his guests the challenge of writing ghost stories. He had no idea what his competition would give birth to. 

After Polidori, another vampire rose from the grave and it lay the foundations for Dracula 25 years later. Published in 1872, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a gothic novella with the first literary female and sapphic vampire. Originally published in a magazine, Carmilla is about 19-year-old Laura, who lives in Austria and becomes friends with a mysterious young girl called Carmilla. The plot has classic Gothic tropes blended with vampire lore while challenging Victorian social norms on female roles, intimacy, and sexuality.  

Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu, born in Dublin 1814, was trained to be a lawyer but would instead become known as a great Gothic writer. He was most talented at crafting an atmosphere of creeping dread rather than cheap tactics of gore and shocking scenes. Even the great ghost story writer M.R. James championed Le Fanu’s work as “absolutely in the first rank” and openly acknowledged him as having an enormous influence on the ghost story genre. Le Fanu seemed to be a true horror writer, capable of tackling not just ghosts, but vampires too.

Out of the shadows

Stoker’s Dracula flapped his wings onto the literary scene in 1897 and the world then exploded with Hollywood films, book retellings, and even a ‘Dracula Experience’, a walk-in tour in Whitby that you can experience to this day. Such is the character’s influence that I don’t think I need to actually dive deep into why Dracula remains current. Bram Stoker uses a tactic of telling the narrative through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles which makes the events seem real even now. 

Dracula outshadowed other vampire characters until 1976, when Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire spawned a vampire revolution led by Lestat de Lioncourt. With her complex and romantic antihero (who seems at times insane), Rice made the gothic vampire a flawed, powerful immortal whom modern audiences could sympathise with. If you haven’t seen the recent TV adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, I assure you that you’re missing a treat.

Vampiric recommendations

Vampires are still terrifying, a law unto themselves, yet their stories are now thoroughly explained in detail even down to their toilet habits. 

I can’t wait to see who the next vampire icon will be and what they’ll bring to this iconic monster. If you love vampires as much as I do, here are my cultural recommendations. And do let me know if you decide to inhabit the vampire for your spooky season!