The Vampire Project

Bram Stoker's lost story unearthed after 134 years

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:51:00 +0000

An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, published just seven years before his legendary gothic novel Dracula. Brian Cleary stumbled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while browsing the archives of the National Library of Ireland.

Gibbet Hill was originally published in a Dublin newspaper in 1890 - when the Irishman started working on Dracula - but has been undocumented ever since. Stoker biographer Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his development as an author and was a significant “station on his route to publishing Dracula”. The ghostly story tells the tale of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies were strung up on a hanging gallows as a warning to passing travellers.

It is set in Gibbet Hill in Surrey, a location also referenced in Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby. Mr Cleary made the discovery after taking time off work following a sudden onset of hearing loss in 2021 - during which period he would pass the time at the national library in Stoker's native Dublin.
In October 2023, the Stoker fan came across an unfamiliar title in an 1890 Christmas supplement of the Daily Express Dublin Edition.

Mr Clearly told the AFP news agency: "I read the words Gibbet Hill and I knew that wasn't a Bram Stoker story that I had ever heard of in any of the biographies or bibliographies."

“And I was just astounded, flabbergasted. I sat looking at the screen wondering, am I the only living person who had read it?” He said of the moment he made the discovery: “What on earth do I do with it?”

The library's director Audrey Whitty said Mr Cleary called her and said: "I’ve found something extraordinary in your newspaper archives - you won’t believe it." She added that his "astonishing amateur detective work" was a testament to the library's archives. "There are truly world-important discoveries waiting to be found", she said.

After his initial sleuthing, Mr Cleary contacted biographer Paul Murray - who confirmed there had been no trace of the story for over a century. He said 1890 was when he was a young writer and made his first notes for Dracula. "It's a classic Stoker story, the struggle between good and evil, evil which crops up in exotic and unexplained ways," he added.

Gibbet Hill is being published alongside artwork by the Irish artist Paul McKinley by the Rotunda Foundation - the fundraising arm of Dublin's Rotunda Hospital for which Mr Cleary worked. All proceeds will go to the newly formed Charlotte Stoker Fund - named after Bram Stoker’s mother who was a hearing loss campaigner - to fund research on infant hearing loss.

The discovery is also being highlighted in the city's Bram Stoker festival later this month.

Written by: Maia Davies, for BBC

The Evolution of The Vampire From A Gruesome Gothic Creature To A Superstar Of Popular Culture With Reference To The Vampire Diaries Tv Series

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 19:10:00 +0000

Abstract: "A vampire is a mythological-folkloric creature that is said to feed on the blood of the living. It is a Gothic uncanny figure. So judging by the outlook, a vampire is not a figure with whom we should fall in love with. But judging by the current trends in popular culture, it is not true so. Though vampires were once portrayed as gruesome and horrible, with the passage of time, change in trends and paradigm shift in popular culture, they have been naturalized as normal. They have even attained celebrity status. The evolution of the vampire from a gruesome Gothic figure to a superstar of popular culture goes through a process of three stages- 1) Accepting the Vampire as Normal and Natural, 2) "Celebritizing" the Vampire and Making a Star out of Him, 3) Narrative Technique or Storytelling of Vampire Texts.

Kunal Debnath, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
MA, NET
Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University
Cooch Behar
West Bengal
India

September 2019SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 7(9):11
DOI:10.24113/ijellh.v7i9.9792

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342323146

Grave containing 'VAMPIRE' with a sickle around its neck found at Polish church

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 18:54:00 +0000

Grave containing 'VAMPIRE' with a sickle around its neck to stop it 'returning from the dead' is found under stone with skull engraving at Polish church

Medieval belief in vampires became so widespread that it caused mass hysteria

Archaeologists researching a church in northern Poland have discovered a 'vampire tomb' buried underneath the floor in what they say is a first-of-its-kind discovery.

The skeletal remains of a man dating from the 17th century were found in the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the small village of Pączewo after archaeologists discovered a stone slab decorated with an engraving of a skull.

Buried around six-feet below the slab, they found three skeletons, one of which had a sickle around its neck, a medieval practice which - it was believed - was designed to stop vampires returning from the dead.

Anthropologist Justyna Kargus said the skeleton's skull showed signs that the man who is thought to have been around 50 years old when he died had suffered from some form of trauma before his death.

She said: 'His skull had numerous injuries indicating that he probably had many deep scars on his face.

Putting a sickle around a dead person's neck was a medieval practice used to stop people believed to be vampires from returning from the dead

'During one of the blows he also lost some of his teeth. He would've looked different to average people and that can be scary.

She added that the discovery of a vampire burial in a church is especially rare, saying 'no one expects to find a vampire in a church.

'This is the first known case of an anti-vampire burial in a church.'

'People suspected of being vampires were normally buried away from local communities or in cemeteries.

'Inside the church, clergy, benefactors of the church, dignified and particularly deserving people were buried.

'Perhaps it was someone of merit in the local community, and something caused them to be afraid of him.'

Records of myths about the dead date back as far as the 11th century in Central and Eastern Europe. People feared that some who were buried would claw their way back up to the surface as blood-sucking monsters and terrorise the living.

It is not uncommon in the region to find burial sites where a metal rod - or a stake - have been hammered through the skull of the deceased. People at the time believed this was one way to ensure the person stayed dead.

In some parts of the continent - particularly among Slavic people - belief in the legends of vampires became so widespread that it caused mass hysteria

In some parts of the continent - particularly among Slavic people - belief in the legends of vampires became so widespread that it caused mass hysteria, and even led to executions of people thought to be vampires.

People who died in untimely ways - such as through suicide - would also often have been suspected of vampirism, and their bodies would have been mutilated to prevent them from rising from the dead.

Various procedures were used to prevent them returning from the dead. Some placed sickle around the neck, others saw the corpse tied up, padlocks placed on the body, coins placed over the eyes, the body wrapped in fishing nets or the bodies crushed with stones or bricks.

The most recent discovery is the latest in a number of vampire findings in Poland. Earlier this month, the decapitated remains of a 'vampire child' buried face-down was discovered over 370 miles away in the southeast of the country.

In 2023 a mass grave containing over 400 decapitated suspect vampires with their skulls placed between their legs and a coin in their mouths was uncovered in Poland's northeast during roadworks.

The skeletal remains of another 'vampire child' were found later that year lying face down with a triangular padlock attached to its foot in the village of Pień where archaeologists previously found the remains of a 'female vampire' pinned to the ground by a sickle across her throat and a padlocked toe.

By: Ed Wight, DailyMail UK

The House of the Devil - First Vampire Film?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:38:00 +0000

Courtesy of WikiMedia and the Internet Archive, this is one of the earliest known vampire movies. (IMDB)

The House of the Devil (in French, Le Manoir du diable, lit. The Devil's manor), released in the United States as The Haunted Castle and in Britain as The Devil's Castle, is an 1896 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. The film, which depicts a brief pantomimed sketch in the style of a theatrical comic fantasy, tells the story of an encounter with the Devil and various attendant phantoms. It is intended to evoke amusement and wonder from its audiences, rather than fear.

However, because of its themes and characters, the film has been considered to technically be the first horror film. Such a classification can also be attributed to the film's depiction of a human transforming into a bat, a plot element which has led some observers to label the work the first vampire film. The film is also innovative in length; its running time of over three minutes was ambitious for its era.

A single remake, also by Méliès, was produced one year later under the title Le Château hanté (The Haunted Castle), which is often confused with this film.

The film was presumed lost until 1988, when a copy was found in the New Zealand Film Archive.

Margery of Quether by Sabine Baring-Gould

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:36:00 +0000

‘Margery of Quether’ is a vampire story by Sabine Baring-Gould, published in 1891. It tells the story of a romance that blossoms between a young Dartmoor squire and a 17th-century witch cursed with eternal life.

This book is available online below courtesy of HathiTrust and Cornell University.

400-Year-Old ‘Vampire Child’ Was Buried with Their Foot Padlocked so They Wouldn’t Rise from the Grave

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 19:25:00 +0000

This child was buried 400 years ago in what is now Poland, face-down and with an iron padlock on their foot.

The child was buried face-down in the grave in the 17th century, with an iron padlock probably around one of its toes. Credit: Wojciech Milek/Institute of Archaeology/Nicholaus Copernicus University, Torun/TSE "Ewolucja."

Archaeologists in Poland have unearthed the 400-year-old skeleton of a young child buried face-down with an iron padlock on its foot – seemingly to stop its rising from the dead.

The child was buried in the 17th century in the village of Pień near Poland’s northern city of Bydgoszcz, in what seems to have been a graveyard for "abandoned souls" and the poor who could not afford to be buried in a churchyard.

The archaeologists estimate the child was between 5 and 7 years old at death. The remains were found just a few feet away from the skeleton of a "vampire" woman discovered last year, who was buried at about the same time with a sickle placed over her neck and a similar padlock on her foot.

According to the traditions of the time, such padlocks were intended to secure a corpse in its grave.
"The padlock shows people were afraid of this child after its death," Dariusz Poliński, an archaeologist at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, told Live Science.

A third padlock was unearthed in the same graveyard, though only scattered bones were found nearby. No other child skeletons buried like this have been found at the site, and it is likely this is the only known example of such a burial in Europe, Poliński said.

Village graveyard

Poliński has led excavations at Pień for several years, and his team has discovered about 100 graves there. Another 13 graves were unearthed during the latest excavations. The graveyard was not the regular burial place in the village, which would have been within the sacred boundaries of a church, Poliński said — though its location is not known.

Being buried in the church graveyard would have been expensive, so those who could not afford it were buried elsewhere.

This lesser graveyard also seems to have been the place where "abandoned souls" were buried away from the church, even if they could afford a better funeral, Poliński said. For example, the "vampire" woman discovered last year with a sickle placed over her neck was obviously wealthy: The archaeologists found gold threads in her garments and flecks of gold on the palette of her skull, which indicated she had drunk a medicine containing gold.

Poliński and his team are waiting for the results of an analysis of the DNA in the woman's bones, which could tell them more about her. But their findings suggest she was severely ill.

Undead child

The team also hopes to analyze the DNA of the newfound remains. It’s not yet known if the child was male or female, Poliński said. Dead children were especially feared by living people, who supposed they might return as ghosts — and even more so if the child had suffered a sudden or unusual death, he said. Although the woman found last year and now the child have been widely labeled "vampires," Poliński said the modern conception of vampires originated later, and the term was not used at this time.

The bones of several other children have been found at the site, but their remains seem to have been disturbed, and no other complete child skeletons have been found, he said. One jaw fragment from a child is stained green, and the archaeologists think it was buried with a copper coin in its mouth — a common burial tradition at the time.

Poliński and his team are now analyzing the remains found in this year’s excavations, and they hope to return to the site next year to see what else can be found.

Source: Tom Metcalfe, LiveScience

Did Vlad the Impaler, Inspiration for Dracula, Shed Tears of Blood?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:10:00 +0000

The 15th century prince who inspired the literary vampire Dracula may have had medical issues that caused him to cry tears of blood, according to researchers unearthing this ancient mystery.

The prince, who was also a military leader, was known as Vlad III, Voivode of Wallachia and as Vlad the Impaler. He was also called Vlad Drăculea, translating to “the son of the dragon," and may be the inspiration for the character Count Dracula.

The theories about Vlad's medical issues come from scientific examination of his letters by a team that included Vincenzo Cunsolo, an associate professor of organic chemistry at the University of Catania in Italy.

Vlad III lived during the 1400s in the south of Romania.

He’s blamed for killing more than 80,000 people, many by impalement. Though he was known to be ruthless, there’s no evidence he was actually a vampire.

Among the artifacts remaining from his lifetime were several letters written at different points, relics from which scientists can glean information because of the molecules and proteins present on them.

For this study, researchers used a specialized plastic film called EVA, or ethylene-vinyl acetate, to extract any proteins or small molecules from the paper without damaging it.

They then used mass spectrometry to analyze these extracts.

Of thousands of different peptides found, researchers focused on those with a form of protein degradation that occurs with age, called advanced deamidation.

They knew that the most degraded proteins were likely the oldest, and thus most likely to have come from Vlad III, rather than from those who handled the letters later on.

Researchers found 16 proteins of human origin, relating to skin, breathing and blood.

They said the data they found suggests Vlad could have suffered from respiratory issues, and perhaps even a condition called hemolacria, which would have caused him to shed tears of blood.

Other proteins found indicate he could have been exposed to certain plague-related bacteria or fruit flies.

The findings were recently published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Analytical Chemistry.

More information

The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology has more on the science of analytical techniques used in archaeology.

SOURCE: American Chemical Society, news release, Aug. 15, 2023

By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter

Grave containing 450 'VAMPIRES' is discovered during roadworks in Poland

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 22:01:00 +0000

The grim discovery in the village of Luzino in the northeast of the country found that some of the 450 skeletons had been beheaded and their skulls placed between their legs and a coin placed in their mouths.

The practice which was common in the region during the 19th century was believed to remove the ‘vampire curse’.

Archaeologist Maciej Stromski said: ‘We discovered examples of belief in the dead returning from the grave, which could only be stopped by decapitation.

‘It was believed that if a member of the deceased's family died shortly after the funeral, then he or she could be a vampire.

‘Therefore, after burial, the grave was dug up and the deceased's head was cut off, which was then placed in the legs.

‘We also discovered an example of a woman after decapitation.

‘The skull of a child was laid on her bosom.’

He added that in around 30 percent of the graves uncovered, researchers had also found bricks placed next to the skeletons’ legs, arms and heads.

In September last year, the remains of a 'female vampire' pinned to the ground by a sickle across her throat and a padlocked toe to 'prevent her returning from the dead' were also found in Poland.

Discovered during archaeological work at a 17th century cemetery in the village of Pien, researchers also found the skeletal remains had a silk cap on its head, indicating she had held a high social status.

Records of myths about the undead date back as far as the 11th century in Central Europe.

People feared that some who were buried would claw their way back up to the surface as blood-sucking monsters, and terrorise the living.

It is not uncommon the region to find burial sites where a metal rod - or a stake - have been hammered through the skull of the deceased.

People at the time believed this was one way to ensuring the person stayed dead.

By: Ed Wight, The Daily Mail

Cinema's obsession with Dracula

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 15:30:00 +0000

Since its publication in 1897, Dracula has been adapted on screen hundreds of times. Bram Stoker's novel, which tells the story of the villainous blood-sucking Count's journey to Victoria Britain, has an enduring appeal that shows no sign of waning.

The latest Dracula film, Renfield, which stars Nicolas Cage as the vampire, comes more than 100 years after the first, albeit unofficial, depiction of the Count on screen.

Since 1922's Nosferatu, there have been a string of hugely popular iterations, including Bela Lugosi's outing in 1931 and Christopher Lee's portrayal in ten separate productions. Also a hit was Gary Oldman's Count in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, as was Klaus Kinski's inhabiting of the role in 1979 production Nosferatu the Vampyre.

Nosferatu, which was released in 1922, remains an enduring classic. It was an unofficial Dracula adaptation, but still attracted the fury of Bram Stoker's widow, prompting a court to order its destruction.

In Stoker's novel, Dracula attempts to move from his home in Transylvania to England so that he can find new victims. He plagues Whitby before he is hunted down by a group led by Abraham Van Helsing. The novel also stars English solicitor Jonathan Harker, who falls prey to Dracula when he stays at his home.

Speaking of Dracula's enduring appeal, Dr Lindsay Hallam, a film lecturer at the University of East London, hinted at the semi-sexual element of the character. She told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: 'When you think about Dracula and vampires, they seduce and they kill. 'The idea that he brings his victims to him, the biting is almost like kissing.

'Over time it went from being a monstrous figure to this romantic figure. And then certainly, the 1990s version, Bram Stoker's Dracula with Gary Oldman, that really leans in to the almost tragic romantic aspect of Dracula.'

The first film adaptation of Dracula came in 1922 with German silent film Nosferatu, which was directed by F.W. Murnau. In what was a loose adaptation of Stoker's novel, lead character Count Orlock - played by Max Schreck - was seen in Nosferatu preying on the wife of his estate agent. However, because Nosferatu was an unofficial re-telling of the story, Stoker's heirs sued and a court ruled that all copies should be destroyed.

Nosferatu's bald head, pointed ears, hooked nose and hunched shoulders - a figure described by one critic as the 'strangest and most hideous leading man of all cinema' - remains instantly recognisable.

The character provided the inspiration for several other on-screen creations, including the blood-suckers in Guillermo del Toro's Blade 2, as well as the Pale Man in the director's 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth. There has been much speculation about what inspired the creation.

Producer Albin Grau, a lover of the occult, claimed that, during the First World War, a Serbian peasant had told him of encounters with real vampires. The man allegedly said: 'You can laugh about this superstition, but I swear on the mother of God, that I myself knew that horrible thing of seeing an undead... or Nosferatu, as vampires are called over there.'

The next Dracula adaption that stood the test of time was the 1931 American version, starring Bela Lugosi as the Count. Lugosi's performance - complete with black slicked back hair and sinister cape - is still regarded by many critics as the best, even though it different sharply from the cadaverous white-haired old man of Stoker's novel.

Lugosi, who had already portrayed Dracula on stage, was in fact second choice for the role. The first, Lon Chaney, died as the film was going into production. The choice of Lugosi proved to be a masterstroke, thanks in part because he heralded from Hungary and his halting English fitted the character perfectly. Some of his most famous lines in the film entered into folklore, such as: 'I never drink... wine.'

His portrayal also established the character in popular culture and helped to inspire successive adaptations, including Christopher Lee's portrayals. Lee's first outing as the Count ultimately kicked off a stint in the role that spanned a total of ten films. The 1958 version helped to establish producing studio Hammer Films as the leading maker of horror cinema. The film starred Peter Cushing as Dracula's nemesis, Dr Van Helsing, whilst John Van Eyssen played stricken solicitor Jonathan Harker.

Lee's Dracula is seen after biting Melissa Stribling's Mina Holmwood in the 1958 production of Dracula. US publication Harrison's Reports said it was 'so great that it may well be considered one of the best horror films ever made. Six further Dracula films starring Lee were to follow before he made Dracula A.D. 1972, which, although harshly reviewed by critics, had a big impact on the genre.

The production brought Lee's Count to in swinging 1970s London, marking the first real time that Dracula had been taken out of his Victorian setting and put into modern life. Cushing also made a return as Van Helsing, his first appearance in a Dracula film since The Brides of Dracula in 1960. The pair had not starred together in a film about the Count since the original 1958 production.

But this time, Dracula had a hippie disciple - no so cunningly named Johnny Alucard - who made it his mission to bring the vampire back after he had been killed off by Van Helsing at the start of the film. A Satanic rite performed in a churchyard - alongside Dynasty star Stephanie Beacham - duly brought the Count back.

Famed critic Roger Ebert wrote of the film at the time: 'This isn't a terrific rationale for another horror flick but, given Miss Beacham's ability to heave, and her bosom to heave with, it will have to do.'

However, other contemporary critics were far more scathing, pointing out that the quality of Lee's outings had been declining steadily with each new production. But Mark Gattiss, the co-creator of the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series, admitted that he has 'always loved' the film, because it is 'so wrong'.

Speaking to the BBC, he added that it has a 'wonderful naffness' to it. In the decades since its release, it has acquired a cult following among ordinary viewers.

The film also provided an opening for successive filmmakers to bring Dracula into the modern setting, or to create other modern-day vampire stories. Lee would star in just one more Dracula film - the Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973 - before calling it a day as the blood-sucker.

Nosferatu made his own comeback in 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, which was directed by acclaimed German director Werner Herzog. Starring Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula and Bruno Ganz as Johnathan Harker the film is a re-make of the 1922 Nosferatu.

Like its predecessor, Nosferatu the Vampyre was a success with both viewers and critics. Ebert, praising the appearance of Dracula, wrote: 'Here is a film that does honor to the seriousness of vampires. 'No, I don't believe in them. But if they were real, here is how they must look.'

The BBC's Mark Kermode added that Kinski was 'unsurpassable' in his portrayal of Dracula.

The dramatic make-up returned in 1992 with Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, which starred Gary Oldman as the Count. Featuring alongside him was Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Keanu Reaves as Jonathan Harker and Winona Ryder as Harker's wife Mina. Unlike most previous iterations, the film brought an element of romance into Dracula's life, as he and Mina fell in love.

In one scene, he told her: 'You are the love of my life. Yes, you are the one I lost. I have crossed oceans of time to find you.'

Coppola said at the time of the film's release: 'We've tried to depict feelings so strong they survive across the centuries.

'Feelings like Dracula's love for Mina, or the idea that love can conquer death, or worse than death - that she can actually give the vampire back his lost soul.'

Certainly, the twinning of gore with romance proved a hit with audiences, as the film raked in millions of dollars in its first week. In total, it grossed nearly $216million at the box office and sparked a series of novel spin-offs, a comic book and collectible cards.

Giving his view, Ebert wrote: 'Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.'

This month, viewers were treated to Cage's more lighthearted depiction of Dracula with the release of Renfield, which focuses on his servant, played by Nicholas Hoult. Hoult is seen alongside Cage's flamboyant Dracula in the incredibly gory Renfield.

Giving the film three stars, the Daily Mail's Brian Viner said: 'To say that Cage sinks his teeth into the part would be an understatement. He consumes it completely, just as it consumes him.

'Cage has built a fine career out of over-acting, and has generally had the nous to choose characters that fit his heroically unsubtle style. That was never truer than it is of Dracula.

'Apparently, Cage even agreed to have his teeth shaved down so that his alarming set of vampire dentures would fit properly.

'It is an extravagantly full-blooded performance in every sense, a campy sinister hoot, and on its own worth the price of admission.'

Written by: Harry Howard, The Daily Mail

Cutting his teeth: how Bram Stoker found his inner Dracula in Scotland

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 21:51:00 +0000

Author’s method acting approach to writing terrified local people in Aberdeenshire as he perched on the rocks like a bat.

In August 1894, at the end of a month-long stay to research his embryonic novel, Bram Stoker wrote in the visitors’ book at the Kilmarnock Arms on the Aberdeenshire coast that he had been “delighted with everything and everybody” and hoped to return soon.

According to new research, though, the feeling was not entirely mutual. Stoker, a genial Irishman usually known for his cheeriness, was experimenting with what would become known as “method acting” to get under the skin of his new character, one Count Dracula. Local historian Mike Shepherd, who has spent seven years researching Stoker, says the author’s links with the London theatre inspired Stoker to try inhabiting his character in a different way.

According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of him. He “seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,” she later said. He “would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out”.

Now Shepherd hopes his discoveries will make more people aware of the influence of Aberdeenshire in Dracula’s development which, he says, has never been widely appreciated. And later this month the area’s first-ever Festival of Darkness gets under way, focusing on how this remote corner of Scotland helped shape the world’s most famous vampire story.

Shepherd, who has used hotel registers, letters, press cuttings, telegrams and interviews with local people whose parents and grandparents remember Stoker’s visits to piece together the story, believes the author deliberately pinpointed Cruden Bay, north of Aberdeen – then called Port Erroll, a small fishing village with a sandy beach and a windswept cliff-top fort named Slains Castle – as a retreat where he could concentrate on his writing.

“Writing was a part-time job for him: his main work was at the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he worked with the leading actor of his day, Henry Irving,” says Shepherd. “The theatre closed in August, and Stoker decided to find somewhere far away from London where he could concentrate on his writing projects. He knew he wanted somewhere with bracing air, on the east coast: in 1892 he got the train to Peterhead and searched along the coast, and found exactly the place he’d been looking for.”

Across many summers thereafter, Stoker returned with Florence and their son, Noel. Sometimes they took a cottage, but several times they stayed at the oak-panelled Kilmarnock Arms in the centre of the village. Earlier this year, those visits were commemorated with a wall plaque unveiled by Dacre Stoker, great-great-nephew of Bram. Stoker started writing his most famous novel while staying in the village in the summer of 1895.

Shepherd has discovered that Stoker’s approach to getting inside the character of the Count owes much to a form of method acting tried by Irving. In 1906, in a book entitled Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker wrote about the importance Irving – and he – had attached to “passing a character through one’s own mind”, and also reported that Irving had been complimentary of Stoker’s own use of the method of inhabiting a character. “This was an early form of method acting, and Stoker used it to get under the skin of Dracula,” says Shepherd.

Most people associate Stoker’s vampire with two places: the Yorkshire town of Whitby, and the central Romanian region of Transylvania. But though in the book Dracula is from Transylvania, Stoker never visited there; and while three chapters of the book are set in Whitby, the author is only known to have gone there once or twice.

Meanwhile, says Shepherd, Stoker made 12 or 13 visits to Aberdeenshire, staying up to a month at a time. The book is infused with the spirit of the area. “For Stoker, Aberdeenshire stood in for Transylvania,” he says. The festival will put the spotlight on how the area inspired Stoker, with screenings of movies based on the story taking place in buildings associated with Stoker’s trips.

“There have been hundreds of movies made about the Dracula story, and we’ve chosen eight that connect particularly to this area,” says the festival’s director, Marie Archer. “One of the screenings – of the first Dracula talkie, made in 1931 – will be in the village hall at Cruden Bay where Stoker once gave a lecture.”

In Aberdeenshire, Stoker found a community that connected with pagan as well as Christian beliefs. “This was part of the Dracula story, and it was very real to the fishermen of Cruden Bay. They held on to ancient pagan traditions as well as fervent Christianity, and they still do,” says Shepherd.

He believes Stoker found, in Scotland, people who connected with folklore in a similar way to the Transylvanian communities he was researching. “Aberdeenshire felt a lot more real than his other life in Chelsea – that was all about socialising and soirées. Florence loved it but I think it bored Bram – he preferred the rugged reality and wilderness of Scotland.”

Other links in Dracula to the area include mentions of the local Doric dialect. In chapter six, Stoker has an old fisherman tell Mina he wouldn’t “fash masel” about a local superstition, meaning that he wouldn’t worry about it. And Slains Castle, a 20-minute walk from the village, features an octagonal room like the one described by Stoker in Dracula’s castle – an internal room “without a window of any sort”, lit by a single lamp. Today Slains is a ruin, but it was inhabited in Stoker’s day, and Shepherd has a photograph of the room at the time.

Bram Stoker died in 1912, but his death didn’t end his widow’s association with Cruden Bay. A few months later she contributed two recipes to a book compiled by parishioners at the village church. One featured slices of ripe tomatoes interleaved with slices of ripe plums, dressed with oil and vinegar. Its name: Dracula Salad.

The Festival of Darkness runs 21-30 October, see neatshows.co.uk/festivalofdarkness

Written by: Joanna Moorhead, for The Guardian

Remains of Polish vampire found

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 21:12:00 +0000

Remains of a female 'VAMPIRE' pinned to the ground with a sickle across her throat to prevent her returning from the dead are found in Poland

The remains were found during archaeological work at a 17th century cemetery in the village of Pien, Poland
Professor Dariusz Poliński said sickle was placed over the neck to 'protect against the return of the dead'
In addition to the sickle, the skeleton was found with a padlocked toe as another precautionary measure
Researchers also found a silk cap on its head, indicating she had held a high social status
Poliński said other measures used at the time would have involved cutting off the head and legs

The remains of a 'female vampire' pinned to the ground by a sickle across her throat and a padlocked toe to 'prevent her returning from the dead' have been found in a village in Poland.

Discovered during archaeological work at a 17th century cemetery in the village of Pien, researchers also found the skeletal remains had a silk cap on its head, indicating she had held a high social status, and a protruding tooth.

Team leader Professor Dariusz Poliński from the Nicholas Copernicus University in the nearby city Torun said the form of burial was unusual.

He said: 'Ways to protect against the return of the dead include cutting off the head or legs, placing the deceased face down to bite into the ground, burning them, and smashing them with a stone.

'The sickle was not laid flat but placed on the neck in such a way that if the deceased had tried to get up most likely the head would have been cut off or injured.'

He added that the padlocked big toe on the skeleton's left foot likely symbolised 'the closing of a stage and the impossibility of returning.'

Records of myths about the undead date back as far as the 11th century in Easter Europe. People feared that some who were buried would claw their way back up to the surface as blood-sucking monsters, and terrorise the living.

It is not uncommon the region to find burial sites where a metal rod - or a steak - have been hammered through the skull of the deceased. People at the time believed this was one way to ensuring the person stayed dead.

In some parts of the continent - particularly among Slavic people - belief in the legends of vampires became so wide-spread that it caused mass hysteria, and even led to executions of people thought to be vampires.

People who died in untimely ways - such as through suicide - would also often have been suspected of vampirism, and their bodies would have been mutilated to prevent them from rising from the dead.

In 2015, archaeologists in the village of Drewsko 130 miles away found five skeletons buried in a similar manner at a 400-year-old cemetery.

Sickles were found pressed against the throats of an adult man, who was between 35 to 44 years old, and an adult woman around 35 to 39 years old.

An older woman, who was 50 to 60 years old when she died, was buried with a sickle laying across her hips, and a medium sized stone at her throat.

Two more graves, both with sickles placed at the throats of the skeletons, revealed an adult woman between 30 and 39 years old, and a young girl who was just 14 to 19.

The researchers who made the discovery said at the time: 'When placed in burials they were a guarantee that the deceased remained in their graves and therefore could not harm the living, but they may also have served to protect the dead from evil forces.

'According to folk wisdom, a sickle protected women in labour, children and the dead against evil spirits.

'It also had a role in rituals designed to counter black magic and witchcraft.'

The latest discovery has now been sent to Torun where archaeologists will carry out further research.

Written by: Ed Wight

Alnwick Castle vampire

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 16:30:00 +0000

Some 800 years before the publication of Dracula, and long before the term "vampire" was popularized, an English historian, William of Newburgh, recorded a tale recounted to him by a devout and reputable priest. He told of a most dishonest sinner who escaped the law by retreating to Alnwick Castle.

There he married, but was soon confronted with rumors his wife was unfaithful. He climbed atop the castle's roof to spy on her, and discovered the rumors were true. Shocked, the man fell from the roof and died. However, it was soon apparent the man was not dead at all, but rather a wandering undead revenant, spreading plague wherever he traveled.

It was decided to dig up the man to inspect his corpse, and upon doing so, it was discovered to be bloated with fresh, warm blood. The body was immediately burned on a pyre, cleansing the air and releasing the land from the clutches of the man's plague.

See also: The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters By Rosemary Guiley

Witten Bloodsuckers: Daniel and Manuela Ruda

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Due to early associations of blood-drinking with revenant spirits or demons, there has emerged a modern-day confluence of Satanism and vampirism, though the two are more often than not exclusive to one another (i.e., real vampires are not necessarily Satanists, nor are Satanists vampires).

Despite this, people who adopt a more proactively "evil" lifestyle have melded the two concepts and, in doing so, committed atrocious crimes. Take for instance Daniel and Manuela Ruda, a man-and-wife team of bloodsuckers from Witten, Germany, who also claimed to worship Satan and follow his commands. Such was the case in July 2001 when the Rudas killed a former coworker of Daniel's, bludgeoning him 66 times with a hammer, drinking his blood and carving a pentagram in his chest.

The courts ultimately ruled the Rudas were mentally unfit and suffering "severe narcissistic personality disturbances." Daniel and Manuela were sentenced to confinement in separate maximum security mental facilities.

Source: Telegraph

Video submission: Vampires Make it Into Academia

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:32:00 +0000

A group of academics met at the University of Hertfordshire in England to discuss the "Americanization" of the vampire genre. WSJ's Javier Espinoza reports.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The Legend Of Jure Grando, The First Person Described As A Vampire

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:25:00 +0000

Jure Grando was a peasant who lived in the small village of Kringa, just outside of Tinjan, Croatia. He died in 1656, leaving behind a widow and a wake of terror that haunted Kringa for the next 16 years.

Every night for those 16 years, the good people of Kringa would hear knocks throughout the city in the middle of the night. The knocks were warnings, a promise that someone who lived in a house that had its door knocked had little time left on this world.

Giorgio, the village priest who had buried Jure, soon put it all together. Inexplicably, Jure Grande had returned from the dead to haunt and terrorize the people in his town. That wasn’t all he did.

Every night, Jure would visit his widow. His rancid corpse and ghastly face, which looked like he was smiling and gasping for breath at the same time, would terrorize and rape her every night, forcing what he thought was her marital duties on her well after his death.

16 years later, the villagers began growing tired of living in a constant state of fear every night. Giorgio eventually confronted Jure, wielding his cross and yelling “Behold Jesus Christ, you strigon (vampire)! Stop tormenting us!” And at that moment, tears began falling from his eyes as he retreated.

A couple nights later a brave prefect named Miho Radetic assembled a group of villages to confront and kill Jure. They found and chased him, and Miho stabbed Jure in the chest with a hawthorn stick.

It failed, with the stick bouncing off his chest as Jure retreated once again.

The next night, a group of nine villagers snuck into the graveyard with crosses, lamps and a hawthorn stick. They tip toed their way to the grave of Jure Grando and dug up his coffin. They opened it, shocked to find the perfectly preserved corpse of Jure with a smile on his dead face.

Giorgio then looked upon the corpse and said “Look, strigon, there is Jesus Christ who saved us from hell and died for us. And you, strigon, you cannot have peace!” Giorgio took the hawthorn stick and slammed it into the heart of Jure, but it would not pierce his flesh!

They quickly tried to exorcise the corpse of Jure Grande, but it didn’t work. One villager named Stipan Milasic decided to take things into his own hands. He quickly found a saw and tried to saw off Jure’s head. As soon as the saw cut his skin, Jure’s popped open and a blood-curdling scream escaped his mouth. Blood flowed from his wound and began flooding the graveyard, as the blood of his victims returned to the earth.

Finally, peace had been returned to Kringa.

This was the legend of Jure Grando, the first human to ever be called a vampire. The story was heard by Johann Weikhard von Valvasor while visiting Kringa on his travels. He researched and recorded the story in his anthology The Glory of the Duchy of Cariola in 1689, though the story was forgotten in until the Croation version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula arrived in the area. They’ve now fully embraced the legend, creating a vampire bar to draw in tourism.

Jure Grande’s story preceded Vlad the Impaler, which is widely believed to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It also has many tenets of a vampire story: murder, death, sexual activity. It’s a piece of folklore that precedes our understanding of a monster we almost take for granted nowadays. It is the legend of Jure Grando.

Sources: Medium, Swiftfilm

The Terrifying Story of Bela Kiss, Hungary’s Most Murderous Bachelor

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 21:43:00 +0000

For centuries, the vampire has captured imaginations and inspired nightmares in communities around the world. And while Romania’s Transylvania region has long dominated the vampire-related conversation, for a few decades in the early 20th century the most feared blood-drainer in the world was not Dracula, but a person from Romania’s neighbor to the west: Hungary.

A GHOUL IN DISGUISE

Bela Kiss seemed to have it all. By 1914, the handsome 37-year-old tinsmith was running a successful business, was well-liked by his neighbors in the town of Cinkota (outside Budapest), and never seemed to be without a girl on his arm. True, it was always a different girl, and none of them were local, and no one, not even his elderly housekeeper Mrs. Jakubec, knew their names. But he'd earned the loyalty of Mrs. Jakubec nonetheless, and she kept faithful watch over his home on Kossuth Street for two years after he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian military to fight in World War I.

Still, handsome or not, well-liked or otherwise, when there’s a war on, no one can wait long to make a buck. In July 1916, after rumors began circulating that Kiss had been captured and possibly killed in Serbia, his landlord began preparing to lease the house on Kossuth Street again. Upon arriving at the property, he noticed seven large metal drums that had been left outside the house. It was widely assumed that these were storing oil or gas in the face of hostilities (though some neighbors thought it was more likely he was storing liquor). The landlord decided to open one of the drums, which had been soldered shut.

As soon as he punctured the lid, the landlord was hit with the putrid odor of death. A neighbor, who happened to be a chemist, confirmed that it was the scent of rotting flesh.

Kiss's landlord quickly informed the police in Budapest, who sent Dr. Charles Nagy, detective chief of the Budapest Police, out to investigate. When Nagy and two of his men arrived on the property, they immediately opened the first drum.

Submerged in a brine of methanol was the relatively well-preserved body of a young woman with long brown hair, along with the rope that had strangled her. The six other drums bore the same grisly contents: naked or partially clothed corpses of young women and the same murder weapon—a length of rope. The methanol, also known as wood alcohol, acted as a preservative, keeping decomposition to a minimum.

The seven drums were only the beginning. Nagy and his men continued to search the property at Kossuth Street, and soon discovered an entire cache of drums buried around the property. Each opened lid revealed another young corpse, until somewhere between 24 and 30 were logged into the police file (accounts differ). All the victims had been strangled. Some reportedly had dual puncture marks on their neck, as though Kiss had drained them of their blood. It's not clear whether he did so, but theorizing around the wounds has led some to dub Bela Kiss "the Vampire of Cinkota."

If the sight of two dozen pickled bodies was horrifying, what Nagy found inside Kiss’s home was downright bizarre. Most rooms yielded no clues that linked the former occupant to the brutal murder and meticulous preservation of so many young people. A distraught Mrs. Jakubec denied any knowledge of the bodies or their identities, and was adamant in her defense of Kiss, going so far as to describe a time when he tended to the injuries of one of the neighborhood dogs.

Then Nagy arrived at a locked door. Mrs. Jakubec explained that though she was in possession of the key, Kiss had instructed her to never enter—or let anyone else enter—the room. There was a good reason for that: When Nagy went inside, he found a room stuffed with evidence of Kiss’s misdeeds. Bookshelves filled with volumes on poisoning and strangulation lined the little office. A desk and chair stood in the center. It was inside that desk that Nagy hit the evidentiary jackpot.

JUST A LONELY MAN

Documents within the desk revealed that Kiss had spent more than a decade corresponding with dozens of women. He advertised in Budapest newspapers under the name Hofmann, claiming to be a lonely man in search of a wife—preferably one of no small fortune. When such a woman responded, as many did, he’d apparently visit her in the city, give her gifts, and generally romance her, all the while probing for information on whether or not she had close relatives nearby. Those who were more or less alone he continued to woo in letters, convincing them to send him large sums of money or, in some cases, their entire savings, in order to start a life together. One woman, Katherine Varga, sold her profitable dressmaking business and was last seen leaving her house in Budapest to join Kiss in Cinkota.

Kiss reportedly received a whopping 174 proposals of marriage through his advertising, and accepted marriage from no less than 74 women. At least 20 who came to Cinkota met their end—perhaps because they realized their error and threatened to reveal Kiss for what he was, or perhaps because he simply enjoyed gross acts of violence.

Each of the 74 had their own packet of correspondence in Kiss’s desk, and Nagy reached out to local police to trace the women. Several of the bodies were identified, though it is unclear just how many Nagy was able to put a name to. One woman, whose name was found stitched into clothing in Kiss’s house, was later identified as Julianne Paschak; her name appeared in court records in Budapest. She had sued Kiss for defrauding her of money on the promise of marriage. Her case was thrown out when she failed to show up to the hearing.

Another victim was Margaret Toth, who was killed in 1906, but not before Kiss forced her to write a bogus letter stating she was heading for America. Other women brought forth lawsuits, but the legal matters were never resolved because the women disappeared. They were among the dead.

Upon discovering the first seven bodies, Nagy had notified the Hungarian army to arrest Bela Kiss, if he was still alive, and had frozen any postal or telegraphic correspondence that might be headed Kiss’s way. But in the summer of 1916, the Hungarian army was in the middle of a war—and to compound the difficulty, the names “Bela” and “Kiss” were very common among Hungarians.

Still, when word came in October that a man named Bela Kiss was hospitalized in Serbia, Nagy took off right away. While military authorities at the hospital believed they had the right man, Nagy would never find out for certain. Kiss or not, whoever the slippery soldier was, he found a way to escape before Nagy could arrive, throwing off hospital staff by placing a dead man in his bed.

A FACE IN THE CROWD

The hospital encounter would be the closest anyone would come to catching Hungary’s lonely-hearts slayer, although over the decades several people would claim to spot him—especially as news of his crimes spread throughout the world. One witness saw him in Budapest in 1919; another claimed Kiss was with the French Foreign Legion as “Hoffman” in 1920. Others put him in Romania and Turkey. Every time a sighting was investigated, the mysterious target would vanish. In 1932, a New York City detective with a famous memory for faces was sure he’d spotted Kiss exiting a subway station in Times Square, but lost him in the crowd. The last reported investigation into a sighting was in 1936, when rumors circulated that Kiss was working as a janitor at a New York City apartment building. When police stopped by to check it out, however, they found he’d disappeared.

We may never know how or when Kiss met his end, or whether he limited his killing to the brined bodies found at his home. What is for certain is that this prolific murderer cast a long, dark shadow across the early 20th century in the west—and somehow, whether through cunning, luck or accident, evaded the justice he deserved.

Written by: Deanna Cioppa for Mental Floss

Additional Sources: "The Crimes of Bela Kiss"; The Lonely Hearts Vampire: The Bizarre and Horrifying True Account of Serial Killer Bela Kiss; The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers; "Probing the Soul-Secrets and Weird Methods of the World's Recent Mass-Murders," The Miami News, August 31, 1930.

[Images courtesy of NY Daily News]

Video submission: In Search of the Highgate Vampire

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 18:22:00 +0000

David Farrant, one of the world's leading psychic investigators, takes you on a strange and terrifying journey into the realms of the undead. This program deals with the true life events surrounding the sightings of the ghostly apparition known as the Highgate Vampire.

Shot in 1997, this film represents the first foray of the BPOS into independent film making. Directed and produced by BPOS stalwart Dave Milner in association with his then film company Darkhouse Productions, it rapidly became an underground cult classic through its distribution at 'outsider' outlets such as Forbidden Planet.

Conceived during an era when the Highgate Vampire Society was at full flourish, and attracting the creative talents of goth icons such as Dee Monique, it is unashamedly infused with the camp-gothic sensibility of the decade.

Part of its enduring appeal may be that underneath the sound and special effects is an intensely personal (and highly detailed) first hand account of the real life events which inspired the media frenzy which became known as the Highgate Vampire. This account is, of course, presented by Mr David Farrant, President of the British Psychic and Occult Society and the Highgate Vampire Society, and a central figure in the genuine psychic investigation into the malignant entity which seemed hell bent on causing psychic -- and physical - harm to so many residents of Highgate Village in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

With footage shot on location in Highgate Cemetery, Highgate Village and Swains Lane -- the epicentres of the outbreak of malevolent psychic activity all those years ago, a witness speaking of his personal encounter with the entity, and dramatic reconstructions, this film is really the first authentic video adaptation of this highly strange and unusual case. Followers of the case will be particularly fascinated by the plethora of original witness statements recounted, and the focus upon the original investigations and findings of the BPOS -- some of which are beyond unsettling.

www.davidfarrant.org

The Bohemian Blow Vampire - A Blood-Sucking Ghost

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 16:34:00 +0000

Superstitious Bohemians Rid Themselves of a Vampire.

The people of Bohemia (the most superstitious of all Europe), were formerly great believers in muroniea vampires and other uncanny apparitions. The most terrible vampire, and perhaps, the most popular one in the annals of that country. Made its appearance in the year 1706. In that year Hans Blow, a herdsman, died and was buried.

Says the St. Louis Republic. For years before his death Blow was suspected of being a murony, or living vampire. He was buried near Kadam, Bohemia, and within a short time after several deaths had occurred within the immediate vicinity, each victim being left with the characteristic vampire marks upon the neck, which consisted of a blueish raised wound directly over the left jugular vein. Having been suspected of being a murony during life, the deceased herdsman was of course, given the credit of causing all this mischief; the flocks were beginning to die off at a rapid rate - a misfortune also accorded to the agency of Blow’s vampire. When the grave of the dead herdsman was opened, preparatory to exercising the vampire, although he had lain in the ground nine weeks, he sat bolt up right in the coffin, and with a placid smile confessed that he was a vampire and that he was keeping himself alive on the blood of those with whose murder he was charged: he cursed the villagers for disturbing him, and openly defied them to prevent him from making his midnight raids.

A large stake was then driven through the coffin and the body of the herdsman far into the solid earth. This being done the vampire thanked them ironically and then closed his eyes as if in sleep. The grave was then refilled and several tons of stones piled upon it and a guard set to wait developments. That very night Blow’s vampire was again abroad in the village, and besides killing three of his tormentors, sadly depleted the herds near the graveyard. The following day the grave was again opened, the body dismembered and burned in plain sight of all the villagers and people of the surrounding country. Blood is said to have gushed from the corpse, and frightful cries and curses to have issued from the lips of the vampire while these superstitious barbarians were separating the limbs from the body.

Source:

The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo - Sedalia, Missouri

22 Mar 1892, Tue
VOLUME 22 NUMBER 38
Page 9
via newspapers.com

Why we are living in 'Gothic times'?

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 15:46:00 +0000

There is a surge in goth-lit that channels our fears and anxieties. Hephzibah Anderson explores how the genre's past and new stories delve deep into disorder and darkness.

"We live in Gothic times," declared Angela Carter back in 1974. It's a theme Carlos Ruiz Zafón took up several decades later: "Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque", he wrote in 2010. Both authors had good reason. The Gothic has always been about far more than heroines in Victorian nightgowns, trapped in labyrinthine ancestral homes, and along with the supernatural, its imaginings probe power dynamics and boundaries, delving deep into disorder and duality.

If the 1970s (think the oil crisis, Watergate, a spike in "skyjackings") primed readers to be receptive to such elements, it was a decade destined to be far outdone by the start of the 21st Century in terms of horror and upheaval (9/11, the global financial crisis, an intensified fear of climate apocalypse). The world seems to have grown only more uncertain in the years since, and it's certainly tough to rival the age of Covid for gothic motifs made manifest. Claustrophobia? Try successive lockdowns spent working, learning, and socialising from home. Isolation? Ditto. Fear of a past that can't be exorcised? Sounds a lot like "long Covid".

Gothic literature is as long-lived as any curse or fanged anti-hero. Two-and-a-half centuries have passed since it was born into a Britain on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution's wrenching change, and while the genre has never really left Western culture, there's no doubting that this is boomtime for narratives that dare to peer into the darkest corners. As Stephen King puts it, in words crying out for a gothic font, "We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." So, no, that sound you hear isn't some heavy-footed ghoul advancing up the stairs, it's the thud of new Gothic-inflected tomes hitting the shelves by the dozen, and if most were written pre-pandemic, their themes and imagery nevertheless speak to us with eerie clarity in the present moment.

In coming months, fans can visit a castle-turned-girls' boarding school that harbours tenebrous secrets in Phoebe Wynne's Madam (Quercus), reimagine the life of Pride and Prejudice's Miss Anne de Bourgh in Molly Greeley's The Heiress (Hodder & Stoughton), and learn about the true story of an engineer and a medium in Big Brother finalist AJ West's debut, The Spirit Engineer (Duckworth). The past oozes into the present in AJ Elwood's The Cottingley Cuckoo (Titan), based around the famous Cottingley fairy photograph hoax, while Lizzie Fry's The Coven (Sphere) imagines a world in which witchcraft is real, and a demagogue US president is out to hunt down its practitioners.

Feeling pre-apocalyptic? Sue Rainsford describes the lives of twins holed up on an abandoned commune in Redder Days (Doubleday). Want a horror hybrid? Catriona Ward's twisty The Last House on Needless Street (Viper) features a missing child and a woman out for revenge. Meanwhile, in The Deception of Harriet Fleet, Helen Scarlett (Quercus) adds feminist riffs to a Victorian narrative, Karen Coles' The Asylum (Wellbeck) draws on family history to explore mental health mistreatment, and Edwardian West Yorkshire provides a tantalisingly lonely setting for Mrs England (Manilla Press), Stacey Halls's account of control and deception.

All these titles and more are pitched by their publishers as "gothic", or even "Gothic", but if the choice of an upper or lowercase "G" seems neither here nor there, the vast elasticity of the term is amply instructive. It's applied to crime and thrillers, to romance, fantasy, historical adventure and sci-fi. It doesn't describe only novels and stories, either: films, fashion, videogames, music – all crowd under the same umbrella (or should that be lacy black parasol?). It's no wonder that literary subgenres like Southern Gothic and Gothic Romance have emerged to counter the generality of a word that often seems to have become a catch-all for "dark".

In some respects, it's simpler to define what gothic isn’t than what it is – it isn't, for example, horror, which is visceral rather than psychological. At the same time, gothic's very adaptability heightens its menace – just try to contain this beast. The Gothic is not a genre, insisted novelist Sarah Perry, writing in The Paris Review in 2018. "The gothic is, rather, a sensation, like hunger or desire; and, like hunger or desire, you may be hard-pressed to describe it, but you'll know it when you feel it." Most readers will agree with that last statement (and what a feeling it is, too – silliness and sublime terror blended with thrills and chills, seduction and revulsion), but whether or not it's a genre, a mode or, indeed, a sensation, it does have a clear lineage. Trace that back through history, and you'll find that some of the traits that seem the most contemporary are in fact constants, there from the beginning and still every bit as versatile.

As a stylistic descriptor, Gothic was first applied to architecture, and it was not a compliment. Coined by Italian artists during the Renaissance, it denoted a medieval aesthetic that they deemed barbaric (picture flying buttresses and pointy arches) and channelled, they felt, the spirit of the Goth tribes responsible for vandalising the Roman Empire's classical art in the early centuries of the Christian era. Its literary application dates back to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, a short, daft novel in which the fabric of a castle comes malevolently to life.

The novel was published in 1764 bearing the subtitle "A gothic story". The word's barbarous meaning was then fully intact, and so, too, were its intimations of medieval vintage. A preface purporting to be written by a translator duly explains how the tale, found in an old library, was published in Italian in 1529 but predates that by three or four centuries. It's a knowing ruse and, for all that gothic writing sends shivers down the spine, knowingness is an integral part of its appeal – just look at Northanger Abbey (1817), in which Jane Austen's heroine, addled by the fiction of early Gothic doyenne Ann Radcliffe, finds spectres of the genre popping up all over the place.

Gothic romp

"Northanger Abbey is the perfect reminder that readers of Gothic fiction were plenty aware of (and all-too-happy to wink at) its excesses decades (and more) before writers penned many of the more straightforward (or at least less-satirical) works of Gothic fiction we now regard as classics of the genre," explains author Emily M Danforth. Her own forthcoming Plain Bad Heroines (Borough Press), billed as a Sapphic Gothic romp of a novel, at once celebrates and sends up the mode. Because it offers a story within a story and uses two timeframes, Danforth relied for scaffolding on gothic details like a decaying manor house and creepy tower, a cursed object and oppressive, fog-shrouded landscape. "I knew readers would not only recognise these tropes and ascribe more than 200 years of literary meaning to them, but also that they'd feel like familiar ground in a novel that's sometimes fairly chaotic in its many competing and colliding storylines," she says. "If anything, I think Gothic's staying power (and somewhat recent boom) has a lot to do with our desire to slip under the spell of stories with familiar terrain, to indulge in those recognisable excesses because they're familiar (and dreadful)."

While Gothic literature maintains a healthy sense of its own melodramatic excesses, it's also giddy with potency: often, these narratives conjure up stories that cannot, for whatever reason, be laid to rest, exerting devastating power over reality, with the disquiet lingering even when rational explanations are found. Through haunted houses, the gothic invades the realm of the domestic. Through its use of the uncanny, it leaves us feeling as if we’re merely reacquainting ourselves with threats already known (in his noted 1919 essay on "The Uncanny", Freud described "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar"). And through dangers only half-glimpsed, it slyly bids us collaborate in creating customised terrors, all the better to keep us up at night.

As Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, explains: "You see something in the shadows – that's more disturbing, in a way, than someone with an axe. There's a sense of the threat of the unknown, or the threat of the unquantifiable, and that's what's really unsettling and worrying." For her, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is hard to beat as a quintessential Gothic text. "It works really, really well because it has within it a central character who is rarely glimpsed but pops up at the margins. The novel holds so much – issues around national identity, around women and sexuality – but it's like a doughnut, there's a hole in the narrative," she says.

The Gothic is an intensely psychological form. In the hands of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, its crumbling architectural features become props in an exploration of fear and other intense mental states. It was the psychological aspects of the gothic that appealed to the writer Sarah Hilary as a student. "I never equated gothic with lace veils and old houses, or coffins and grave-robbers," she recalls. "The books I studied were about the awful things human beings do to one another, and the terrible price we pay for vanity, or greed, or lust."

As a novelist, she's put its tropes to good use. Her forthcoming psychological thriller, a modern twist on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca entitled Fragile (Pan Macmillan), begins with a description of a London house that rivals any remote monastery or dense forest for sheer creepiness. There's a spiral staircase, a scent of neglect, "the stifled chill of a museum". It even seems to shiver as the novel's narrator steps inside. Yet all of this, like the ghost in Never Be Broken, the most recent installment of her award-winning Marnie Rome crime series, is a manifestation of psychological forces.

"As humans, we're hardwired to be curious, and there are never enough answers in the real world, especially at times like these. So we look into the dark corners, in the hope of surviving the scare but also in the hope of finding answers," Hilary says. Reading gothic fiction is, she suggests, "a safe, and far more satisfying, form of doomscrolling". If we tend to think of it as a historical genre, it's worth remembering that many of gothic literature's foundational texts are every bit as preoccupied with the then present and bleeding-edge technology as with the past. Just look at Frankenstein, which features typewriters, recording devices, and of course the doctor's "Electro-chemical Mechanisms of Animation". For novelist Amanda Craig, it was Gothic ingredients that enabled her to add gritty state-of-the-nation commentary to The Golden Rule (Little, Brown), a literary thriller whose breezy Cornish backdrop and stirring romance might otherwise seem purely escapist.

"I think the Gothic is fundamentally about duality," Craig explains. "If you think about many of those Gothic classics like Dracula or The Woman in White, you always have two people representing things in opposition to each other." That same duality allowed her to frame vital commentary on wealth and poverty; the haves and have-nots. Duality is also, she believes, why the genre has been enjoying such a revival. "My theory is that it's a reflection of what's been going on in the world that we are living in, whether it's people moving to political extremes, or reason and unreason, truth and fake news. It just seems that we're bifurcating."

From the queer desire of Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) to the unnerving instability of identity in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Gothic literature has always excelled at being disruptive and transgressive, its anarchic properties leaving it well-placed to spotlight truths about our societies that other genres might turn away from. This 18th-Century invention thrived as much in the 20th Century as it did in the 19th, shaping modern classics by authors from Mervyn Peake to Shirley Jackson and, of course, Angela Carter.

In the decades since Carter declared her own times "Gothic", the Goth scene has emerged as one of youth culture's most enduring tribes, filling cities and suburbs around the world with coal-eyed, jet-haired teens. Meanwhile, gothic literature has continued to evolve, tailoring its classic monster narratives to shape our 21st-Century imaginings of a posthuman future, for instance, or using tech to augment our reading experience. Teams supported by the CreativeXR acceleration programme, an Arts-Council-funded project that is currently developing ideas that combine Gothic storytelling, pop-up books and immersive technology.

As the genre illustrates, the past has a way of foreshadowing the future. Today might feel like peak gothic, but it seems safe to say that we'll still be needing its shivery delights and pernicious unease, its comfort and its provocations, to help us navigate tomorrow.

Source: Hephzibah Anderson, for the BBC

Monsters of Gothic Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 15:34:00 +0000

During the 1700s, as the world became better known through exploration and scientific experimentation, mythical monsters disappeared from studies of nature and medicine. But they became increasingly popular in the Gothic fiction that arose in the late 1700s and persisted as an important genre through the 1800s. Monsters of this literature personified the fears of society: fear of what happens when science is allowed to go too far; fear of the encroachment of contagious disease; and fear of the demons within ourselves.

Frankenstein's Monster

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains one of the most popular literary works of all time. Written in 1817, it focuses on a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and his creation of a hideous monster through scientific experimentation. Drawing on knowledge derived from ancient alchemists such as Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create life through Galvanism, or animal electricity, using body parts that he acquired through the criminal practice of grave-digging. Formulated by Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, Galvanism is the stimulation of muscle by an electric current. Though the original intent of Galvani to create life via reanimation was never achieved, the use of electricity in medical practice is still common today. This gothic tale explores the supposed “imaginary” line between life and death and the potentially “monstrous” results that could ensue.

Dracula

Another Gothic tale, Dracula, written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897, focuses on one of the most popular literary monsters, the vampire Count Dracula. Based on folklore dating back centuries, vampires were known as undead creatures, or demons, that fed on the blood of the living to survive. While many folklore stories became recognized as more fictitious over the centuries, the belief in vampires gained momentum during the 18th century as several “vampire sightings” were reported and caused a mass hysteria throughout Eastern Europe, creating a rise in staking accounts and grave diggings to hunt the potential monsters. The hysteria subsided with later generations, but the association between vampires of folklore and sufferers from the infectious disease, tuberculosis, lingered in the public consciousness. Also known as consumption, this contagious lung infection causes its victims to cough up blood and become pale, thin, and generally waste away toward death. As the disease had reached epidemic proportions during the Victorian era, Stoker's Dracula met with a receptive audience.

The Evil Mr. Hyde

“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil…”

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (originally published in 1886), emphasizes the eternal struggle between good and evil and the ever-present existence of man’s inner demons. While Dr. Jekyll is seen as a morally good man with pure intentions, he secretly struggles with an inner evil personified in the emergence of literary monster, Mr. Hyde. Though the behaviors and actions of the two greatly contrast, their fate is equally shared, revealing that man is capable of both good and evil, and oftentimes, both can dually exist. This Gothic tale remains one of the most influential literary works of its time and the antagonistic monster, Mr. Hyde, remains a popular villain.

Source: Sampled from University of Alabama at Birmingham's Monsters, Marvels, and Mythical Beasts exhibit - An online guide to the exhibit titled "Monsters, Marvels, and Mythical Beasts," on display at Sterne Library, Spring semester 2020.

Legend of the "Hunderprest" Vampire of Melrose Abbey

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 18:42:00 +0000

Melrose, Scotland

In the heart of the Scottish Borders, Melrose is the perfect holiday destination for, walking, cycling and rugby. Melrose also boasts some of the best salmon and trout fishing in Scotland. Visitors to Melrose are drawn by a range of attractions. Best known is the ruins of the Melrose Abbey, which lies on the north east side of the centre of the town and, off course the ‘Hunderprest’ vampire that roams the ruins at the dark of night.

Melrose Abbey was founded by a colony of Cistercian monks in c.1136. Although this was one of Scotland’s wealthiest monasteries, it suffered badly in the wars that ravaged much of the Scottish Borders in the medieval period. The magnificent rebuilding of church in the late 14th and early 15th centuries was a result of damage caused by the English in 1385. The 16th century Commendator’s House is now a museum and the Chapter House contains the burial casket of a heart, thought to be that of King Robert I “The Bruce”. A considerable portion of the abbey is now in ruins. These lichen-covered ruins, among the most beautiful in Europe, are all that’s left of the ecclesiastical community.

There is an eerie story that tells how the monks of Melrose Abbey saved the town from dark specter that had been plaguing the inhabitants for some time. The Vampire of Melrose was, during his lifetime, a chaplain to a lady who lived nearby. The chaplain was fond of all manners of sin and vice. He was then nicknamed ‘Hundeprest’ meaning ‘Dog Priest’. This appellation was given to him because of his favorite sport of hunting on horseback followed by a small pack of howling hounds. In Stories of the Border Marches, John Lang says: “Other things he also loved that made not for sanctity, and when, at last, he died, his death was no more holy that his selfish, sensual life had been.”

When the chaplain died, he paid the price for his wrong doing as his soul could not find peace. His ghastly form stalked the streets at night in search of blood, terrifying the locals. The town’s people turned to the church for a solution to their plight and the monks sought to answer their pleas. They prayed, fasted and challenged the ghoul, eventually defeating it. The monster’s corpse was thrust into a fire, reducing it to ashes that were then carried by the wind over the Lammermuir Hills to the north along the Scottish borders.

Sometime after his death, it was said that he tried to enter the Melrose Abbey at the dark of night in the form of a winged bat and turning into dark vampire creature. Through prayer and rituals against the devil the monks of the abbey were able to drive him away. After denied access to the abbey, he roamed through the grounds and cottage of a woman who in times past when he was among the living was in his employ. It was reported by the near neighbors that the vampire roamed about the dwelling where he moaned and screeched at her and causing much alarm; thus she had no choice to summon an elder monk from the Abbey to investigate this disturbance and perform the rites of exorcism.

The elder monk whom was summoned brought along a fellow monk and two other men, both novices and began the investigation. They decided to watch the former priest grave when, in rustic places, the last glimmer of daylight died away. During the monk’s watch, the priest arrived in the guise of a vampire and appeared to levitate out of the deep grave, pushing gravestone asunder. The frightening phantom began to approach the trembling monk at an alarming rate. The priest retreated, as he composed himself from the shock. He then lifted up staff and smote the figure again and again. Then the elder monk retreated back to the grave. Then the grave suddenly opened with terrible sound and the ‘Hunderprest’ was swallowed in its deep pit. After the grave had opened and enveloped the priest in the warm earth, it had returned to normal as nothing had ever happened.

The elder monk knew then that he was dealing with a true vampire. Immediately he took action. He told his three companions of what occurred and to open the grave on the first light of the coming morn, which they agreed. They waited through the dark of night, only to dispatch one of the novices to bring digging tools from the abbey, which was used upon the cock of a crow. Upon the opening of the grave the vampire priest was lying in his coffin dead to the world grinning with bloody lips, the blood of his victims. Then elder monk ordered his companions to remove the body, and place it on the ground; then to burn it and scatter the ashes in the gusty winds.

Today there are those of the town that vow they can still hear a muted scream through the ruins at the dark of night of a man in a different form who in life had seemingly walked a godly life.

Written by Norman A. Rubin

Political Vampires

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 01:20:00 +0000

Taken from The London Magazine, May 1732, courtesy of University of Michigan and Google

'Mr. D'Anvers tells of a Conversation he had about a certain Prodigy, mention'd in the News Papers of March last, viz. that in the Village of Medreyga in Hungary, certain dead Bodies (call'd there Vampyres) had kill'd several Persons by sucking out all their Blood: That Arnold Paul, an Heyduke, having kill'd four Persons after he was dead, his Body was taken up 40 Days after, which bled at the Nose, Mouth and Ears: That, according to Custom, they drove a Stake thro' his Heart, at which he gave a horrid Groan, and lost a great deal of Blood. And that all such as have been tormented or kill'd by Vampyres, become Vampyres when they are dead.

The Dispute was chiefly between a Doctor of Physick and a young Lady, the former ridiculing the Account, and the other believing it to be true. At last Mr. D'Anvers deliver'd his Opinion as follows.

The Eastern Parts (from whence this Account comes) are much us'd to the allegorical Style; and besides the States of Hungary are govern'd by the Turks and Germans with a pretty hard Rein; which makes them couch all their Complaints under Types and Parables.

These Vampyres are said to suck the Blood of the Living; and what is a more common Phrase for a ravenous Minister, even in this Part of the World, than a Leech, or a Blood-sucker? And a plundering Minister carries his Oppressions beyond the Grave, and continues to torment those he leaves behind him, by anticipating the publick Revenues, and entailing a Perpetuity of Taxes and Gabels upon the People. Those also who groan under the Burthen of such a Minister, are often forc'd to sell or mortgage their Estates; and so may be properly laid to torment their Posterity in the same Manner.

Several other Instances of Similitude are given between the Story of the Vampyres and the political Vampyres; whence he gathers that the whole Story is nothing but a Fable or Fiction, made use of to convey a satyrical Invective against some living Oppressors in Hungary.

And we have had many such, says he, among us. In former Times, the Gavestons, Spencers, and De la Pules, Empson and Dudley. Wolsey, Buckingham, and an hundred more, were Vampyres of the first Magnitude.

Private persons may also be Vampyres in some Degree. I look upon all Sharpers, Usurers and Stock-jobbers in this Light, as well as fraudulent Guardians, unjust Stewards, and the dry Nurses of great Estates. And I doubt not that a noble Colonel, lately deceas'd, has already convinced several families that he is a Vampyre.

Many of the late South-Sea Directors were Tormentors of this Sort; and I wish the present Managers of that Company many not furnish us with some Instances of the same Nature. The Charitable Corporation has also produc'd a plentiful Crop of these Blood-suckers. But nothing but the Power of a T_______y can raise up a compleat Vampyre.

Mezeray tells us of a Treasurer in France (Girard de Possi) who being troubled in Conscience for having robb'd his Master of a great Sum, refunded it into the Exchequer of his own Accord; but he addsm that he believes this Example will always remain singular. I leave it therefore to be considered, whether instead or driving a Stake thro' the Body of a corrupt Treasurer when he is dead, it would not be a better Way to administer a certain Parliamentary Emetick, which will make him disgorge all his ill-gotten Wealth, whilst he is alive.'

Submission: The Creepy Truth About Chupacabras

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 23:30:00 +0000

The Americas have many legendary creatures in their folklore like Bigfoot and the Mothman, but arguably its most terrifying legend is the Chupacabra. The name for the creature literally means “goat sucker,” and is derived from reported vampirism of livestock like goats.

Its first sightings were reported in Puerto Rico in 1995, and it's often described as either dog-like or lizard-like in appearance. The chupacabra is also said to be the size of a small bear with a row of spines that goes from its neck to its tail. It’s definitely not a creature you want to encounter in the middle of the night. If that’s not enough, we’ve made a video that looks into more creepy truths about the Chupacabra.

Taking this a step further, Texas A&M published this PDF summarizing the facts outlined in the video above:

Anne Rice, Author and Screenwriter of ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ Dies at 80

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 22:21:00 +0000

Her nearly 40 novels published over a half-century sold some 135 million copies, placing her among the most popular fantasy writers of all time.

By Lisa de los Reyes for The Hollywood Reporter, December 12, 2021

Anne Rice, the famed New Orleans author whose sensational debut novel, Interview With the Vampire, sent her down a supernatural path writing about blood-suckers, witches and werewolves, died of complications from a stroke on Saturday. She was 80.

Rice’s son, Christopher Rice, announced the news on social media. “She left us almost 19 years to the day my father, her husband Stan, died,” he wrote. “The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated.”

The author, who resided in Rancho Mirage, California, was surrounded by her family. “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage, awash in memories of a life that took us from the fog laced hills of the San Francisco Bay Area to the magical streets of New Orleans to the twinkling vistas of Southern California,” he added. “As she kissed Anne goodbye, her younger sister Karen said, ‘What a ride you took us on, kid.’ I think we can all agree.”

Rice’s nearly 40 novels published over a half-century sold some 135 million copies, placing her among the most popular fantasy writers of all time.

Rice adapted her first book into the 1994 Warner Bros. movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and six of her other novels, including Exit to Eden and Queen of the Damned, were turned into movies and/or telefilms as well.

She considered the struggles of outsiders a throughline in her work, which in addition to her Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches novels included the erotic Sleeping Beauty series (written under the nom de plume A.N. Roquelaure) and, on the other end of the spectrum, her deeply religious Christ the Lord books.

Rice also used the pen name Anne Rampling for 1985’s Exit to Eden and 1986’s Belinda. That was in tribute to British actress Charlotte Rampling, whose performance she loved in the erotic 1974 film The Night Porter.

Interview With the Vampire, first published in 1976, tells the life story of the vampires Louis (Pitt in the movie) and his sire Lestat (Cruise), hopping on a 200-year journey through history that begins in a Louisiana slave plantation and moves to Rice’s native New Orleans, France and Eastern Europe.

With the plot including two male vampires raising a vampire child, the book subtly raises themes that were ahead of their time in mainstream literature. Rice credited the mythical quality of the book with allowing her to see deeper truths about life: “For some reason, when I work with these comic-book vampire characters, these fantasy characters, I can see reality. I can touch reality,” she said.

New Orleans’ Gothic architecture — in particular her antebellum Garden District home — and vibrant culture served as an inspiration, with her hometown also the setting for her other major series, The Mayfair Witches.

Its first book, 1990’s The Witching Hour, centers on a neurosurgeon named Rowan Mayfair who discovers her clan’s Southern roots and the magical legacy of her female ancestors. The trilogy spans the family’s 400-year history and examines the supernatural nemesis that plagues them.

Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in New Orleans on Oct. 4, 1941. She was named for her father, it was said, because her mother, Katherine, thought that the unusual name would help a girl get ahead in life.

Rice grew up bashful of her first name, however, and when asked to introduce herself to a teacher on the first day of school, she replied on impulse that she was Anne. The name stuck, and she would make it legal.

She was the second of four girls (older sister Alice Borchardt also became a novelist known for her Legends of the Wolves trilogy, and sister Tamara Tinker became a poet). Rice’s dad was a World War II Navy veteran who worked for the Postal Service; her mom died as a result of alcoholism when Rice was still a teenager.

“My mother believed we could accomplish great things,” she told Alice Cooper in a 2016 interview in Billboard. “She told us stories of the Brontës and how they’d written under male names in order to be accepted by the literati; she filled my head with tales of Dickens and all he achieved in terms of social justice through his novels. My mother totally believed in me, and though she died when I was 14, I took her confidence and faith in me to heart and have all of my life.”

Rice’s father remarried in 1957 and moved the family to a suburb of Dallas, where Rice graduated from Richardson High School. She attended Texas Woman’s University for a year and then North Texas State College before dropping out and moving to San Francisco, where she worked as an insurance claims adjuster.

From California, she reconnected with high school sweetheart Stan Rice, who proposed to her by letter. They married in 1961 and settled in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. After several false starts, she completed her bachelor’s degree in political science in 1964, then earned a master’s in creative writing from San Francisco State.

The couple had a daughter, Michele, in 1966, but she was diagnosed with leukemia and died at age 5. In the painful aftermath, Rice spent much of her time drinking and writing and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Michele’s passing “had a devastating effect,” she told Playboy in 1993. “There’s a period after a death like that when you don’t think the lights will ever go back on. I remember even in the immediate weeks after her death it was hard for me to swallow food.”

It was then that she turned a short story she’d written into the novel Interview With the Vampire. “I was just a drunk, hysterical person with no job, no identity, no nothing,” she said. “There was a two-year period after her death when I just drank a lot and wrote a lot, like crazy. Then I sort of came out of it and wrote Interview With the Vampire. My husband had told me, ‘I really believe in your writing.’ … I’ve always felt that was one of the greatest things he ever did for me, other than being his wonderful self.”

Although the novel features a 6-year-old who is killed and turned into an immortal, Rice said she never consciously connected Vampire‘s plot to Michele’s death (neither did Stan, a poet and painter). “When I look back on it, I think, ‘How in the world could I have been so detached?’ But I really didn’t think of that as being about my life.”

After being rejected by numerous publishers, Rice met agent Phyllis Seidel at a writers’ conference, and she helped her connect with Alfred K. Knopf. The firm paid an unusually high advance for a new writer at the time — $12,000 — and the novel was published in 1976. The investment paid off, with the first book selling some 8 million copies and the 12-book series eventually topping 80 million in sales.

Rice personally adapted the story into the screenplay for the film; a critical and commercial success, it grossed $223.7 million worldwide (nearly $400 million today).

Controversy during the making of the Neil Jordan-directed movie centered on Rice’s disapproval of the casting of Cruise as the archetypal vampire Lestat, but she later told Billboard, “I thought [Cruise] did a magnificent job. As soon as I finished watching the movie on videotape in my home [before its release], I called the great producer David Geffen at home in California and told him I loved the movie, loved what Tom had achieved, loved all of it. All my early fears were meaningless in light of Tom’s passionate portrayal.”

In addition to Pitt and Cruise, the film features Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, the child vampire; Antonio Banderas as Armand, a 400-year-old vampire; Thandiwe Newton as Yvette, a slave; and Christian Slater as the journalist interviewing Louis. (River Phoenix was originally cast in that role but died before he began filming; Slater donated his salary to charity in Phoenix’s honor.)

That same year, Rice’s 1985 novel Exit to Eden was made into a sexual fantasy comedy starring Dana Delany as a seductress and Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as undercover cops.

Queen of the Damned, the third novel in the Vampire Chronicles series, also received the movie treatment with a 2002 film starring Aaliyah in her final role before her death in an August 2001 plane crash. The singer-actress portrayed Akasha, the 6,000-year-old mother of all vampires, with Stuart Townsend as Lestat, who becomes a rock star in the modern-day storyline. The film grossed $45.5 million worldwide.

In 1978, the Rices had a second child, Christopher, who eventually followed in his mother’s footsteps as an author of supernatural thrillers and erotic romance. Rice swore off drinking when her son was born.

After her first book, Rice wrote a pair of historical novels — 1979’s The Feast of All Saints and 1982’s Cry to Heaven — which were popular but not at the level of Interview. She then authored the first three of her erotic novels (a feminist and a strong opponent of censorship, she told Playboy, “I’m fascinated by sadomasochism”) before returning to her original success with 1985’s The Vampire Lestat.

Stan retired as chair of the creative writing department at San Francisco State, and in 1988 the family moved to New Orleans, purchasing a mansion in the Garden District that served as the setting for The Witching Hour. The couple went on to buy and renovate numerous properties in the city, including St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage and Rice’s childhood home.

While Vampire Chronicles paved the way for later popular vampire fiction, Rice disparaged Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, saying, “Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town — any more than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged.” Amid backlash, she later clarified that the statement was a joke.

Rice fell into a diabetic coma in 1998, among the several health setbacks she experienced in the late 1990s and 2000s. Afterward, she lost about 100 pounds and had gastric bypass surgery.

Rice’s husband died in 2002 after complications from a brain tumor. In the following years, she sold her New Orleans properties and decamped to California.

She publicly announced her return to the Roman Catholicism of her youth and wrote religious novels including 2005’s Christ Our Lord: Out of Egypt. It was adapted into film as The Young Messiah (2016), which earned only $7 million at the box office.

She wrote in THR at the time of the film’s release, “My deep devotion to Jesus prompted me to try to contribute to the responsible fiction tradition with regard to Him. I admired Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur but sought to do something completely original.”

In 2010, Rice announced that she was leaving all organized religion, citing disagreements with church doctrines and social teachings. She returned to writing about the supernatural, notably 2012’s The Wolf Gift and 2013’s The Wolves of Midwinter, whose protagonist, Reuben, becomes a werewolf.

Rice will be interred in the family’s mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans in a private ceremony. A public celebration of life will take place next year in New Orleans.

Rice is survived by Christopher and by three of her sisters.

The Vjesci: A Canadian Vampire

noreply@blogger.com (Nicki) — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 13:00:00 +0000

The Vjesci, also known as the Vjeszczi or Vjescey, is a Vampire from Polish folklore. Much like the European Vampire, The Vjesci retained their mortal characteristics and blended well within society. Legends indicate that humans were destined to become Vjesci at birth if born with teeth or a more common condition, ‘cradle cap”. If the child was born with a cap, the mother could protect the child by drying the cradle cap, grinding it into a fine dust and retaining it until the child’s 7th birthday; when she would feed it to him to ward off curse.

The Vjesci have many common ties with Vampire legends from other cultures; They are undead, they awaken at midnight and they feed on humans. It is said that in order to detain the Vjesci, Villagers would throw a net into his coffin as he could not rise until untying all of the knots. Another simple method was to scatter pebbles or seeds around the coffin and the ground surrounding the grave, as the vampire would have to count each individual seed or pebble before moving away from his grave site. Some families would bury their loved ones face down within their coffin in hopes that if they were to turn that they would dig their way further into the ground in an attempt to rise again. One other similarity, death by decapitation. The more pesky of the “arisen” were exhumed and decapitated, their heads being placed face down between their feet to prevent the beast from rising again.

The majority of Vampire legend in Canada hales from the oldest Polish Settlement in the country. Wilno, settled in 1869 is in the heart of Ottawa Valley and is rich in folklore and legend, so rich in fact that in 1969 Jan Perkowski was employed by the Canadian Centre for Folklore studies to research the legends that originated within the area. A few years later Perkowski would release an 85 page report with findings so scandalous that his report was denounce on the floor of the House of Commons.

One of the more disturbing occurrences within his writings was an old photo of a small grave enclosed by a white picket fence. The photo was captioned that “If a vampire is not destroyed before he is buried, he will rise again and carry off his relatives.” He writes further to explain that this had happened in Wilno adding that the family had to dig the body up and cut it’s head off as it sat up in the coffin.

Within Perkowski’s writings were written statements from over a dozen victims that described their experiences with the Vjesci in great detail. Such sensationalism was created by Perkowski’s report that it was republished in several well known media outlets such as; Psychology Today, The Canadian Magazine and of course The National Enquirer.

Publications:

1969: A Kashubian Idiolect in the United States
1972: Vampires, Dwarves and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada : 1972
1976: Vampires of the Slavs. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA : Slavica, 1976. ISBN 0-89357-026-5
1978: Gusle and Ganga Among the Hercegovinians of Toronto. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA : University Microfilms International, 1978. ISBN 0-8357-0321-5
1982: "The Romanian Folkloric Vampire". East Europe Quarterly, September 1982. Reprinted in The Vampire: A Casebook, Alan Dundes, ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) ISBN 0-299-15924-8
1989: The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism. Columbus, Ohio, USA : Slavica, 1989. ISBN 0-89357-200-4 [1]
2000: Linguistic History Engraved in Gold and Silver: Legends on the Coins of St. Vladimir.
2006: Vampire Lore: From the Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski. Slavica, 2006. ISBN 0-89357-331-0

Source: Lyn Gibson