by Matt Cardin
1970
El Conde Drácula (Spain/West Germany/Italy/Liechtenstein); Scars of Dracula (UK); Taste the Blood of Dracula (UK)
1971
The Electric Company (USA)—Television
1972
Blacula (USA)
Dracula A.D. 1972 (UK)
1973
Dracula (UK)—Television; Santo y Blue Demon contra Drácula y el Hombre Lobo (Mexico); The Satanic Rites of Dracula (UK); Scream, Blacula, Scream (USA)
1974
Blood for Dracula (Italy); The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Hong Kong/UK)
1975
Deafula (USA)
1977
Count Dracula (UK)—Television
1979
Dracula (USA/UK); Love at First Bite (USA); Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (West Germany)
1981
The Count (USA)—Video Game
1983
Gayracula (USA)—Adult; Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, “Transylvanian Connection” (USA)—Animation/Television
1985
Kyûketsuki hantâ D (Japan)—Animation
1990
Akumajo Dracula (Japan)—Video Game
1992
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (USA); Khooni Dracula (India)
2000
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy vs. Dracula” (USA)—Television; Dracula 2000 (USA)
2012
Hotel Transylvania (USA)—Animation
2013
Dracula (UK/USA)—Television
2014
Dracula Untold (USA); Penny Dreadful (USA/Ireland/UK)—Television
Short fiction featuring vampire characters continued to see print in the early part of the twentieth century, but with Dracula’s lucrative adaptation on the British and American stage from the mid- through late 1920s, and the subsequent film version by Universal in 1931, Count Dracula would continue to dominate the public’s image of the vampire. However, one notable exception came in 1954 with Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), a postapocalyptic zombie-vampire novel that is now considered a contemporary classic among horror fiction in general and vampire literature in particular. The story’s protagonist is Robert Neville, a resident of Los Angeles who has become the only survivor of a pandemic whose victims have returned from the dead, hide out by day, and venture about by night in search of human blood. Neville is immune to the disease as a result, he thinks, of being bitten by a vampire bat years earlier. While I Am Legend is revered for its vampiric storyline, of equal note is the way in which Matheson’s vampires break radically from the traditional literary archetype of the Romantic and Victorian periods by reverting back to the older, preliterary vampire that had ruled the “vampire hysteria” of the eighteenth century (though, in Matheson’s novel, vampire hunters may now add to their arsenal the use of garlic, stakes, and mirrors, tools deriving from folklore but popularized in Stoker’s Dracula).
Although the late twentieth century continued to see traditional works of vampire fiction, such as Stephen King’s immensely popular ’Salem’s Lot (1975), which reimagined Stoker’s Dracula story around modern-day small-town America (in Maine, to be precise), something thematically important happened in the late 1960s that was to have a lasting effect on vampire fiction, remaining visible even today. Barnabas Collins, the Dracula-type vampire in Dan Curtis’s television series Dark Shadows (1966–1971), firmly planted into the American consciousness the prospect of an incredibly sad, flawed, yet redeemable vampire with whom audiences could at last sympathize. This new character trait became immediately fashionable, surfacing again in Blacula (1972), Dan Curtis’s televised movie Dracula (1973), and in Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974). However, it was to have an equally profound effect on vampire literature, the mode that would prove to have the most lasting effect on subsequent vampire narratives—on screen and in print. Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976)—and, albeit to a lesser extent, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint-Germain series (1978–), beginning with Hôtel Transylvania (1978)—took the vampire mythos by storm.
Today, the current state of vampire literature and film is most immediately the result of the “vampire renaissance” that occurred roughly from the late 2000s through the early 2010s. This period heralded not only an explosion of vampire fictions, from Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series (2001–2013) and the subsequent televised adaptation True Blood (2008–2014) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) and the subsequent film adaptations (2008–2012), but the decisive and definitive proliferation of the sympathetic vampire, a theme that began in its earliest form in Varney the Vampire, before being reimagined and redeveloped over a century later in Dark Shadows and then perfected in Interview with the Vampire.
John Edgar Browning
See also: Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Part Three, Reference Entries: Carmilla; Dracula; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; Penny Dreadful; Rice, Anne; Stoker, Bram; Vampires; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.
Further Reading
Anderson, Douglas A. 2010. “A Note on M. R. James and Dracula.” Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 1(2): 189–194.
Barber, Paul. 2010. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Browning, John Edgar. 2010. “The Mysterious Stranger.” In The Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S. T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Browning, John Edgar, ed. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Critical Feast, An Annotated Reference of Early Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1913. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.
Carter, Margaret L., ed. 1988. Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
Carter, Margaret L. 1989. The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography (Studies in Speculative Fiction). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
Crawford, Heide. 2016. The Origins of the Literary Vampire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Eighteen-Bisang, Robert, and Elizabeth Miller, eds. 2008. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Frayling, Christopher. 1991. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber and Faber.
Matheson, Richard. 1954. I Am Legend. New York: Gold Medal Books/Fawcett Publications.
Miller, Elizabeth, ed. 2005. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 304). Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.
Polidori, John William. 1819. The Vampyre: A Tale. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones.
Wachsmann, Karl Adolf von. 1844. Erzählungen und Novellen 21. Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Focke.
WEIRD AND COSMIC HORROR FICTION
While they have applications beyond his conceptions, the terms “weird fiction” and “cosmic horror” are both widely associated with the critical and fictional writings of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), whose influential study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) helped to popularize and to some degree define them. However, Lovecraft’s essay does not consistently distinguish between them, nor does it serve as the final authority on their meaning. Later writers have understood both “weird” and “cosmic” horror in different but closely related ways. Cosmic and weird horror are closely intertwined, but at the same time they are potentially distinct literary modes that intersect in multiple ways with horror. Though there are many important writers of the weird and cosmic whose work is not generally understood as horror, it is also true that many of the writers who have had the greatest influence on the history of horror literature have done so largely because of their work in cosmic and weird fiction.
In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft defined a weird tale as one involving supernatural elements, but which nonetheless did not conform to the conventions of the Gothic novel as established initially by
eighteenth-century British writers including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis and carried on in the nineteenth century by writers from Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker, or to those of the ghost story, which had been formalized particularly by Victorian writers including M. R. James and Rudyard Kipling. Lovecraft claims that the sine qua non (the irreducible element) of the weird tale is the creation of a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” and the suspension, if not violation, of “fixed laws of Nature” (Lovecraft 2012, 28).
Lovecraft presents Edgar Allan Poe as the most important figure in the development of weird fiction, claiming: “Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions” (Lovecraft 2012, 55). Lovecraft provides an alternative definition of weird fiction in a 1926 letter that also emphasizes Poe’s centrality: “As to what is meant by ‘weird’—and of course weirdness is by no means confined to horror—I should say that the real criterion is a strong impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of unseen worlds or forces close at hand,” going on to claim that “perhaps the supreme weird tale of all the ages—is to me The Fall of the House of Usher” (Lovecraft 1997, 2.69–70).
Here, too, the central idea behind Lovecraft’s definition of the weird is “the suspension of natural laws,” and this characteristic is one way of formulating a distinction between cosmic horror and weird fiction. In its narrowest and most identifiable sense, cosmic horror is an approach that fuses the affect and tone of horror with science fictional premises while following naturalistic principles, remaining to some degree compatible with contemporaneous scientific thought. In this sense, it is a literary mode closely related to the cosmic irony beloved of American naturalist writers (ca. 1890–1925) including Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane (both of whom were admired by Lovecraft), and to Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmic indifferentism, which emphasizes the insignificance of humanity in the unknown vastness of the universe. This breed of cosmic horror uses verisimilar writing techniques (i.e., techniques that make fictional stories appear true) to undermine the human presumption of knowledge, displaying the abyssal contrast between delusions of human exceptionalism and the reality that we are but one species of animal among thousands, struggling for survival on one planet among millions, in a universe whose virtually infinite reaches are beyond our meager ability to grasp or understand. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and At the Mountains of Madness (1936) are his greatest achievements in this mode, and important later examples include John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” (1940), Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Dry Salvages (2004), Peter Watt’s Blindsight (2006), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), as well as films including Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982, itself based loosely on Campbell’s 1938 story).
However, as Lovecraft’s privileging of Poe’s “Usher” (a story whose occult themes and baroque style make it far removed from these examples) suggests, what he calls “weird” and in other instances “cosmic” is often markedly different from this narrow conception. In its broader sense, cosmic horror need not be tied to either realism or science fiction. It can draw on a wide variety of techniques, approaches, and literary modes to suspend or erode presumptions about the nature of reality, and this broader sense of the term becomes more nebulous, difficult to classify, and impossible to disentangle from weird fiction generally.
The word “weird,” originally associated with fate, predestination, prophecies, and related phenomena, has a venerable lineage in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first adjectival uses in Middle English near the turn of the fifteenth century, where it was often used attributively to describe the Fates and the three witches of British and European folklore that are descended from them. This usage appeared in Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1587, which would become the primary inspiration for the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The term’s use in delineating a particular kind of fiction, however, dates to the early twentieth century. While clear links exist between the weird and literary modes of earlier epochs, most commentators agree that it is very much a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon. Central to the shift in meaning that led to “weird fiction” becoming a distinct literary concept and marketing category in the early twentieth century was the magazine Weird Tales, founded in 1923 by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger as a companion publication to Henneberger’s pulp crime magazine Detective Tales that would be devoted exclusively to horror fiction. Over the first two decades of its existence, Weird Tales became associated with fiction that moved away from the folkloric supernaturalism associated with earlier Gothic horror. Writers including H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, and Francis Stevens contributed stories in which science fictional concepts produced the combination of awe and terror that had once been the provenance of the supernatural beings of traditional folklore.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft was critical of Weird Tales’ tendency to publish more readily classifiable works of Gothic horror and action-oriented pulp science fiction, often to the exclusion of the more interstitial and challenging work that he considered “true” weird and cosmic fiction. His development of a germinal theory of weird fiction, which began in earnest two to three years after the magazine’s appearance, is partially informed by this critical reaction.
As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s compendious anthology The Weird (2012) demonstrates, the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition of weird fiction, with its close ties to American naturalism on the one hand and pulp fiction on the other, drew upon and existed parallel to numerous other threads of weird fiction. These threads run through the work of writers from different cultural and linguistic traditions, with the canon that Lovecraft’s influential essay helped to establish being but one cluster in a much larger constellation.
Nevertheless, The Weird’s conception of weirdness shares the central epistemological emphasis of Lovecraft’s: it “strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012, xv). In S. T. Joshi’s words, “the weird tale is an inherently philosophical mode in that it frequently compels us to address directly such fundamental issues as the nature of the universe and our place in it” (Joshi 1990, 11).
Rather than a fixed literary form or genre, weird fiction is best understood as a series of mutations and hybridizations of other literary forms. According to the VanderMeers, “As a twentieth and twenty-first century art form the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012, xv–xvi). Similarly, influential writer and scholar of weird fiction Michael Cisco (1970–), who describes his own work as “de-genred,” maintains that its transgeneric state is the most identifiable quality of weird fiction.
This makes weird fiction closely related to other modern and contemporary interstitial fictional modes, including New Wave science fiction, slipstream fiction, and bizarro fiction. Indeed, British writer Anna Kavan’s (1901–1968) 1967 novel Ice, which Christopher Priest identifies as a quintessential work of slipstream, could, with its menacing strangeness, ghastly beauty, and gradual creation of an atmosphere of anxious dread, be as productively read as an important mid-century example of weird horror.
This interstitial relationship between weird fiction and different precedent or contemporaneous literary movements can best be illustrated with a brief list of selected examples. The weird fictions of British writer Arthur Machen (1863–1947), one
of the greatest influences on Lovecraft and his circle, bear many similarities to the Victorian Gothic novels of Bram Stoker or Richard Marsh. Like Stoker’s Dracula and Marsh’s The Beetle (both 1897), Machen’s novella The Great God Pan (1894) and novel The Three Impostors (1895, as much short story cycle as novel) are ultimately invasion narratives. Rooted in cultural anxieties linked to a particular moment in British colonial history and industrial globalization, they also share in common modernized approaches to the epistolary novel form.
Contrarily, the weird fictions of early twentieth-century Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) and the Poe-inspired Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) are closely tied to the Edo-era popular movement Ero-Guro-Nansensu (Erotic-Grotesque Nonsense), which emphasized eroticism, decadence, and aestheticism. Those of Polish fine artist, playwright, and novelist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), who produced an important body of weird work including the story collection The Street of Crocodiles (1934) and the delirious autobiographical novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), like those of Austrian writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924), share more in common with literary modernism, while anticipating in many ways the existentialist and absurdist movements of the mid-twentieth century. Notably, both these writers continue to exert a powerful influence over many contemporary weird fiction writers, including Thomas Ligotti (1953–) and Michael Cisco.
Some of the most important mid- to late twentieth-century English-language works of weird horror, including fictions by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), Harlan Ellison (1934–), James Tiptree Jr. (1915–1987), Joanna Russ (1937–2011), Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), and Angela Carter (1940–1992), are closely linked to the New Wave movement(s) in speculative fiction. Coalescing first in the United Kingdom and then in North America in the second half of the twentieth century, New Wave writers fused genre tropes with avant-garde literary techniques and an adversarial stance toward received social and literary conventions. Similarly, a number of the most important weird writers of the 1990s, including Clive Barker (1952–), Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), Kathe Koja (1960–), and Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964–), became known for sexually transgressive work that both drew upon and subverted the literary techniques of mainstream horror boom icons including Stephen King and Peter Straub.
