Vampires and other beasties that go bump in the night

Vampirism became a popular theme during the Romantic period and has inspired numerous works of fiction and films ever since.  The main theme of most vampire tales is that of power and illicit love and sexuality.  Vampires flourish from China to Peru and there are numerous books on them ranging from guidebooks to scientific studies offering a taxonomic method for classifying their differing types.

John Polidori (secretary and, ahem, companion to Lord Byron) was one of the first to write a fictional vampire story in the 19th centure.  His work was entitled The Vampyre (1818) and it was published the same year as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  While there isn't a lot of bloodsucking in Polidori's work, there is a lot of sex; but this is the case with many vampire stories both then and now.  Polidori's tale is important because his protagonist, Lord Ruthven, became the model for the dashing English gentleman vampire of fiction.

By this time the vampire was becoming a potent symbol among Romatic writers.  For example:  Geraldine in Coleridge's Christabel (1797); the spectral bloodsucker in Byron's The Giaour (1813); the figure of Misery in Shelley's Invocation to Misery (1818); and Keats' beautiful and merciless dame who sucked the blood from the knight. 

In due course the vampire became a standby for writers of horror stories and for playwrights who wrote melodrama.  There was already a flourishing 'horror drama' begun with the dramatization of Gothic novels and the vampire was a good fit.

In fiction, early examples of the vampire tale are Charles Nodier's Le Vampire (1820) and Gogol's Viy (1835).  In 1835 Poe published Berenice, which has implications of vampirism; being a necrophile and a thanatophile, Poe could hardly fail to be interested in the subject.

There are some horror stories in which a creature (akin to a lamia or a succubus) haunts characters and feeds off them emotionally and psychologically.  A kind of ghost parasite, Maupassant's Le Horla (1887) is a notable example.  In English literature outstanding instances include How love Came to Professor Guildea (1900) by Robert Hichens and the Beckoning Fair One (1911) by Oliver Onions.

The Werewolf theme became of interest early in the 19th century and has since been a fruitful source of horror stories.  Many languages have a word for lycanthropes and belief in them is ancient.  Perhaps the best known tale is the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.

The ghost and, in general terms, the preternatural agency or agent (often evil), have also been an inspiration to writers of horro.  The advent of the ghost story at the very beginning of the 19th century was to profoundly affect the development of the horror story.  As it happened, the ghost story and the horror story as a short story arrived more or less at the same time.