Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The finale of In a Glass Darkly is also Le Fanu’s most influential work: the homoerotically charged vampire novella Carmilla. In contrast to the previous stories, Carmilla is undeniably fantastical. The vampire is real, and the young protagonist, Laura, is saved from danger by the insights of Baron Vordenburg’s occult scholarship. Several attributes of Carmilla were a direct influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), including the sexualizing of the vampire and the juxtaposition of ancient superstition with modern science. Dr. Martin Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg serve as models for Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing. Like Stoker’s more famous work, Carmilla draws attention to the moral and physical dangers of sexual and intellectual repression in civilized society. Only in facing challenges responsibly with knowledge and temperance may people find victory over that which haunts them. Removed from danger, Laura concludes her story, explaining that “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (Le Fanu 1993, 319). Whether real or imagined, the fears Le Fanu masterfully mirrors in In a Glass Darkly are clear reflections of the human psyche.

  Mark Wegley

  See also: Carmilla; Gothic Hero/Villain; “Green Tea”; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Harris, Sally. 2003. “Spiritual Warnings: The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Victorians Institute Journal 31: 9–39.

  Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1871–1872] 1993. Carmilla. In In a Glass Darkly, 243–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Melada, Ivan. 1987. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne.

  Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.

  Tracy, Robert. 1993. Introduction. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27, no. 2 (Fall): 59–77.

  INCUBI AND SUCCUBI

  Incubi and succubi are male and female demons that, according to folklore and legend, engage in sexual intercourse with human beings, draining their life force and, if allowed to continue, eventually destroying them. Beliefs about such demons have played an important role in the religious and folkloric belief of Western Christian culture for more than a thousand years. Incubi and succubi have also played a significant role in horror literature and cinema.

  The idea of sexual contact between humans and the ghost world seems to be a very old one. The Chaldeans, a Semitic people in the south of Mesopotamia (ca. first millennium BCE), had their “demons of nocturnal emission,” and the Israelites also knew a cult involving sexual contact with demonic goats, which was forbidden by the Bible (Leviticus 17:7). The Greeks had their fauns and sylvan spirits, and Middle Eastern peoples believed in djinn who lusted after women.

  The first mention of incubi (the male variety of these demons) can be found in the writings of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430 CE)—better known as Saint Augustine—especially in his monumental De Civitate Dei or The City of God (written between 413 and 426). He asserts that common folk call the dreaded fauns and sylvan ghosts “incubi,” but he is not sure whether these beings are capable of sexual intercourse with humans since they only have an “aerial” body (Augustinus 1841, book 15, chapter 23). It is worth remarking that Augustinus saw these pagan spirits as demons, so through him they became a part of the Christian religious system.

  From the eleventh century CE, incubi and succubi were treated as scientific fact in Western culture. Authors such as Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), Bonaventura (1221–1274), John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308), William Durandus (1230–1296), and Peter of Aquila (d. 1361) asserted that demons have a body that is apt to have intercourse with humans. The most important propagator of this opinion was the great Catholic scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). He affirmed in his highly influential Summa Theologica (written ca. 1265–1273) that sexual contact between demons in the form of incubi or succubi and humans cannot be denied. Aquinas thought it possible that children may be born of such a union. These children, he said, are not the children of demons but of humans, since demons are not able to produce semen. They collect it as succubi from male persons and pass it over to women after having changed their form into that of incubi (Thomas Aquinas 2012, p. I, qu. LI, art. III).

  This concept of incubi and succubi became an integral part of the later witch trials that began as a mass phenomenon throughout Europe in the late 1400s and reached their peak (having spread to America as well) in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The most notorious book on witches and witchcraft, the witch-hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), first published in 1487, has a lot to say about incubi and succubi. The author of this book, the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer, was of the same opinion as Aquinas concerning procreation by demons, teaching that they can beget children by stealing semen. They feel no lust, says Kramer; their only purpose is to lead humanity into sin. The witch, on the other hand, lusts after the incubus and embraces him willingly, so she sins of her own free will.

  Nicholas Rémy (ca. 1530–1612), a provost (judge) of Nancy (a city in Lorraine, a territory on the border between France and Germany, eventually annexed by France in 1766), wrote an important book on witchcraft, Daemonolatreia (1595), in which he treats incubi and succubi among many other subjects. He writes that the demons assume bodily form, “but I think that body will be either the corpse of a dead man, or else some concretion and condensation of vapours” (Rémy 2008, 12). Following Aquinas’s theory, Rémy maintains that the incubus injects the semen he previously collected as a succubus, and he adds that “if the Demon emits any semen, it is so cold that they [the witches] recoil with horror on receiving it” (12–13). In contrast to Thomas Aquinas and the Malleus Maleficarum, Rémy does not believe that children can be born from the borrowed semen.

  The Franciscan theologian Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701) produced a whole book on the subject of incubi and succubi under the title De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis, written around 1700 but not published until 1875. Sinistrari details all the theories here described, plus many stories of the workings of the demonic incubi and succubi, but he introduces a new element that might explain why his book was not printed during his lifetime. In contrast to the teachings of the church authorities, he sees the incubi and succubi not only as spiritual beings but also as corporeal beings: “ those creatures would be made from the most subtile part of all elements. . . . God Himself, through the medium of Angels, made their body as He did man’s body, to which an immortal spirit was to be united” (Sinistrari 1927, 35, 36). Sinistrari calls these beings animals, and he is of the opinion that they have a soul and are capable of salvation. So for him they lose a great part of their demonic nature and return to what they initially were: fauns and sylvan beings.

  This deep history of theological speculation and, as it may seem to modern sensibilities, supernatural obsession lies behind the long-lived substream of horror stories about sexual demons (or sometimes, if not specifically demons, then supernatural sexual predators), even in those instances when the incubus and succubus are not explicitly named, and/or when the basic idea of them has been abstracted away from overtly theological concerns as such and placed in the service of fictional works more generally concerned with evoking a thrill of horror. A notable early example is Matthew Lewis’s classic novel The Monk (1796), in which the succubus-like character of Mathilda, empowered by the Devil himself, seduces the saintly priest Ambrosio with her sexual wiles, leading him inexorably to his eventual doom and spiritual damnation. Additional examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. J. K. Huysmans deals with incubi and succubi along with many other supernatural and occult
matters in his 1891 novel The Damned. F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is the Life” (1905) relates the tale of a murdered woman’s vampiric spirit that drains the vitality of the young man she loved from afar in life. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Short Trip Home” (1927), published in The Saturday Evening Post, tells of a young female college student being seduced by an incubus, in this case the ghost of a dead young man. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967) Ira Levin has the Devil himself, aided by a modern-day coven of witches, play an incubus-like role by impregnating a woman. In Ray Russell’s The Incubus (1976), a series of rapes and murders in a California coastal town are the work of a demonic incubus that is trying to impregnate human women. In Frank De Felitta’s The Entity (1978)—a fictionalized account of a real-life paranormal assault case in 1974—two parapsychology graduate students investigate the case of a California woman who has been repeatedly raped and assaulted in her home by an invisible presence.

  Rosemary’s Baby, The Incubus, and The Entity were all adapted to film (the first in 1968, the latter two in 1982), and the results represent just three entries—the first a classic horror film directed by Roman Polanski, the second something considerably lesser, the third a notorious and increasingly valorized entry in modern horror cinema—in the onscreen careers of demonic sexual spirits. As with the literary incarnations of incubi and succubi, additional examples in cinema are plentiful. But of more significance in establishing the import of incubi and succubi for horror fiction is the fact that near the end of the eighteenth century, the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) produced what has sometimes been characterized as the master image of the entire Gothic horror movement, and this took the form of an explicit representation of the incubus. Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which he painted in 1781 and then went on to reproduce in several alternate versions when it proved extremely popular, depicts a woman fallen backward across a bed in a swoon while a spectral horse peers out from behind a curtain. On the woman’s stomach squats a leering, apelike gargoyle or demon. The specific meaning is unclear, but the painting’s subject is plainly that of a woman being assaulted and oppressed in her sleep by an imp or demon, whether real or the product of a nightmare. London’s Tate Britain museum, in notes written for a 2006 exhibition of works by Fuseli and William Blake, describes the painting as “an enduring image of sexual terror” (“Gothic Nightmares” 2006).

  Fuseli apparently suffered from what would now be called sleep paralysis—an experience of coming to consciousness from sleep and finding oneself paralyzed with a sense of suffocating weight on one’s chest, often accompanied by terrifying perceptions of a threatening supernatural presence—and his painting is often interpreted today as a depiction of that experience. Not insignificantly, this same experience was the original referent of the English word “nightmare,” which has since devolved to mean simply a bad dream. Also not insignificantly, it has often been invoked in the modern world as an explanation for the many firsthand reports throughout history of apparent attacks by incubi and succubi. Whatever the case, Fuseli’s painting caused a sensation when it was first displayed in 1782 at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London, and it went on to exert a profound influence over Gothic and horror fiction, being used as a model, for instance, by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein for her description of the scene in which the monster kills Elizabeth, and then again by director James Whale for the analogous scene in the classic 1931 Universal Studios adaptation of Shelley’s novel. Echoes of it, and thus of the basic incubus/succubus dynamic, have also been discerned in much vampire fiction and film, where the basic idea of the vampire, which drains people’s life blood—a trope that is obviously and easily relatable to the sexual drainings of the victims of incubi and succubi—is often presented in scenes of a sleeping man or woman being assaulted by a creature that leans or hovers over them.

  The upshot for the world of horror literature is that the incubus and the succubus are not just two monstrous figures existing on a level with many others (such as the zombie, the werewolf, and the mummy), but are somehow implicated in the roots of literary horror as a whole. Originally conceived in Western Christian culture as sexually predatory demons that try to destroy people’s bodies and souls, and given paradigmatic treatment by such towering figures as Augustine and Aquinas, the incubus and succubus were incorporated into horror literature on a veritably genetic level right from the start.

  Michael Siefener and Matt Cardin

  See also: The Damned; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; The Monk; Rosemary’s Baby; Russell, Ray; “A Short Trip Home”; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Andriano, Joseph. 1993. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

  “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination: Room 8.” 2006. Tate. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/gothic-nightmares-fuseli-blake-and-romantic-imagination/gothic-6.

  Moffitt, John F. 2002. “A Pictorial Counterpart to ‘Gothick’ Literature: Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35, no. 1: 173–196.

  Rémy, Nicolas. [1595, 1930] 2008. Demonolatry: An Account of the Historical Practice of Witchcraft. Translated by E. Allen Ashwin. Introduction and notes by Montague Summers. Mineola, NY: Dover.

  Sinistrari, Ludovico Maria. [ca. 1700, 1927] 2014. Demoniality. Translated by Montague Summers. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.

  Stephens, Walter. 2002. Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

  Stewart, Charles. 2002. “Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 2 (June): 279–309.

  INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION

  The International Gothic Association (IGA) is the organization that brings together critics and scholars of the Gothic from around the world. It does so in various ways: through its website, through its biennial conferences, and through its journal, Gothic Studies. It also acts as an informal network, which has had tremendous benefits in terms of joint publication, multiauthored books, and research projects. It was founded in 1991 at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

  The IGA’s website, www.iga.stir.ac.uk, is currently hosted by the University of Stirling and provides information about current and future events, including conferences, publications, and contact details, as well as a Postgraduate Forum and a Directory that offers links to other Gothic-related resources.

  The biennial conferences have been held over the years at the universities of East Anglia, Stirling, Liverpool Hope, Lancaster, Surrey, and at St. Mary’s College Twickenham in the United Kingdom; at Mount Saint Vincent, Simon Fraser, and Montréal/Wilfrid Laurier universities in Canada; at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France; and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The 2017 conference was held in Mexico.

  Gothic Studies was first published in 1999 and is a fully refereed journal appearing twice a year. Its founding editor, William Hughes, remains in that post; at present the journal alternates between “general issues” and issues devoted to a special theme in the Gothic. A particularly impressive spin-off from the journal is the new series of books, International Gothic, published by Manchester University Press.

  The IGA elects a president for a two-year period, although this has often been extended to four years by mutual agreement. Past presidents include the late Allan Lloyd Smith; Robert Miles; Jerrold E. Hogle; Steven Bruhm; Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik; and, currently, Catherine Spooner and Angela Wright. It operates through an Executive Committee, consisting of the president(s), the executive officer, the chair of the IGA Advisory Committee, and the editor of Gothic Studies. The Advisory Committee, a larger body, has an additional number of members, between fifteen and twenty; its chair is David Punter. There is an Annual General Meeting of the IGA each year, in person during conference year and electr
onically in the other years.

  The IGA is committed to furthering and promoting the study of the Gothic in all its forms, from traditional Gothic fiction through contemporary Goth culture, including arts ranging from literature to the visual arts and music. It seeks to capture and discuss Gothic as it has manifested itself historically, from the medieval to the modern, and to ensure that scholars of the field are able to access resources—human and technological—that will aid them in their research.

  The IGA has proved resilient in its approach to changing practices in research, as well as in contemporary developments in the meaning of Gothic, which continue to evolve as Gothic finds new modes of expression in cultures worldwide. The IGA has proved itself, and continues to do so, an organization responsive to new trends, even as it endeavors to keep alive the memory of past cultural traditions.

  David Punter

  See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Criticism.

  Further Reading

  International Gothic Association. Accessed June 27, 2016. http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk.

  INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARD

  The International Horror Guild (IHG) (originally the International Horror Critics Guild) was created in 1995 as a means of recognizing the achievements of creators in the field of horror and dark fantasy, supplementing other similar genre awards such as the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. The last awards (for works from 2007) were announced in 2008.