Phil Robson/Unsplash
Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.
Nicolas Cage as Dracula in Renfield (2023).
Courtesy of Universal
Renfield attempts to remodel the vampire movie to 21st century specifications.
Alfonso Bresciani/AMC
Black vampires have existed for 200 years in literature.
An online audience is reading the vampire novel for the first time, en masse.
Diane Barros/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
A newsletter sends out chronological snippets from the 125-year-old novel ‘Dracula.’ Fans on the internet go wild.
Arthur Rackham’s illustration of the Victorian poem Goblin Market.
British Library
Everyone is going ‘goblin mode’, but does the trend unfairly malign goblins of folklore?
Keith Corrigan / Alamy
Many of Count Orlok’s characteristics have gone on to be canon in the lore of vampires.
Modern vampires like Dracula may be dashing, but they certainly weren’t in the original vampire myths.
Archive Photos/ Moviepix via Getty Images
The past century’s vampires have often been a bit dashing, even romantic. That’s not how the myth started out.
Medical volunteers have been a common sight in African countries like Zambia since the colonial era.
Engraving from The Illustrated London News, volume 96, No 2654, March 1, 1890/Getty Images
These medical volunteers have been closely associated with several kinds of non-human actors, whose behaviour is worth examining in more detail.
The Black Vampyre is an early literary example of an argument for emancipation of slaves.
Thomas Nast/Harper's Weekly/The Met
A tale of vampirism would have been shocking to readers at the time if was published, not because of its monsters, but its politics.
Bloody and unbowed: Claes Bang as Dracula.
BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/David Ellis
The latest version of the Gothic vampire chiller is brought to you with the trademark humour of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.
Looks can be deceiving.
Mendesbio/Shutterstock
Vampire bats form social bonds similar to human friendships – and they’re good friends to those in need.
A rabid dog’s bite can make a person seem to have animal characteristics.
Taras Verkhovynets/Shutterstock.com
Fear of a disease that seemed to turn people into beasts might have inspired belief in supernatural beings that live on in today’s creepy Halloween costumes.
The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli.
Detroit Institute of Arts
Written in the same house party as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s creature was based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron.
Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula in Tod Browning’s 1931 horror film is influenced by John Polidori’s tale of terror, ‘The Vampyre,’ first published — suggestively — on April Fools’ Day 1819.
Universal Pictures
One of the reasons the myth of vampires endures and captures the popular imagination is that vampires are a powerful metaphor for a wide range of cultural practices and social problems.
Darcy, played here by Colin Firth in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, has morphed from dreamboat to vampire in recent fiction.
BBC
A Mr Darcy Halloween costume anyone? How the brooding hero of Pride and Prejudice has been reinvented as a vampire.
Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana.
Schnorr von Carolsfeld
The story of how Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein is famous. Less well-known, however, is the reading material that inspired her to write.
The common vampire bat.
Shutterstock
From naked mole rats to the immortal jellyfish – the creatures that would make Dracula shudder.
The Premature Burial.
Antoine Wiertz (1854)
New research is uncovering medieval legends about the undead in Britain.
Zoey Deutch in the film Vampire Academy (2014).
Angry Films, Kintop Pictures, Preger Entertainment
Gothic fiction has become the ideal genre for exploring the grotesque, frightening aspects of coming of age. And disruptive girls with supernatural powers have replaced the passive heroines of old.
Sophia Forrest as Eli in Let the Right One In.
Photo credit Daniel J Grant
Based on the 2004 novel, Let the Right One is a bloody staging of a vampire romance. Except in this show, the predator is a teenage girl.