There was a time when vampires were easy to define: monsters lurking in the shadows, feeding off the living, heartless, soulless and terrifying. But over the years—particularly across television and film—that picture has changed. A lot. Somewhere along the way, the creatures of the night started showing signs of something deeper. Not just bloodlust, but […]
Sir Francis Varney—the verbose, brooding, and strangely sympathetic vampire at the heart of the Victorian penny dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847)—was there before Dracula or Barnabas Collins. Published in serialized form and attributed to James Malcolm Rymer (and possibly Thomas Peckett Prest), the story spans hundreds of chapters and over […]
Before Dracula, before Carmilla, there was Lord Ruthven—the smooth-talking, soul-sucking aristocrat at the heart of The Vampyre, a short story written in 1819 by John Polidori. It’s often considered the first English-language vampire tale, and Ruthven set the mold for nearly every dark, brooding bloodsucker who followed. The story begins in high society London, where […]
Carmilla, or Countess Mircalla Karnstein, is one of the most influential and enduring sympathetic vampires in all of fiction. First published in serialized form in The Dark Blue magazine in 1871–72, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella precedes Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than two decades. Yet its legacy continues to echo through literature, film, television […]
The name Dracula brings with it a long and varied history, and fans/scholars of the king of the vampires are well aware of the the historic precedent to the character in the form of Vlad the Impaler. But back in the pages of Castle of Frankenstein magazine (which is actually in the public domain), writer […]
One of the foremost experts on the vampire genre is scholar J. Gordon Melton, author of The Vampire Book, which is currently being revised and expanded as this October’s The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History. Melton is also featured on the current episode of the Vampires & Slayers podcast, during which he discusses his own […]
Actor William Marshall may have left us in 2003, but of his many roles the one that continues to live on all these years later is that of the vampire Blacula, as featured in the 1972 film of the same name and its 1973 sequel, Scream Blacula Scream. Now the character is returning in a […]