I encountered the Vampire tale first through the movies, staying up late Friday and Saturday nights watching Bela Lugosi, John Carradine and then Christopher Lee portray Dracula. The Count was the epitome of evil, his whole existence on this Earth one purpose, to feed and create more of his kind. Vampirism was like a plague,…
Tag: John Carradine
Search For a Cure
Way back in the 1840s, the penny dreadful (rightfully named–each chapter cost a penny and most had all the literary merit of an insurance company’s internal memo) Varney The Vampyre introduced a brand new idea in vampire fiction. Given the youth of the genre, that doesn’t sound quite so impressive. On the other hand, it…
Vampires – An Avatar of Sin
When vampires first drifted, shadow-like, into popular literature in the early 1800s, this denizen of ancient folklore became an incarnation of the Nightmare Stranger–the alien ‘other’ who presented a threat to civilization itself. It was death reaching out to infect the living. The foreigner who defiled virtuous women. A pagan invader thriving where the light…