A Halloween Reading of "Varney the Vampire" by James Rymer and Thomas Prest

Описание: “I bid you… welcome.” So says Bela Lugosi to Dracula’s latest meal, in the classic film from 1931. Actors such as Sir Christopher Lee, Johnathan Frid, and Kieffer Sutherland, are all famous for playing vampires. For my money, Lugosi still tops them all. It was the Lugosi film that set the mold, and combined with the Frankenstein film before it, began Universal’s legendary horror cycle. The Mummy, the Wolf-man, the Invisible Man, even The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and their various sequels, still stand out among monster movies as the archetypes.

Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” on which the Lugosi film and play were based, introduced much of the vampire lore we know today, yet even so, Dracula was not the first vampire in literature. Some fifty years before Dracula was published, an even older archetype was printed in what were called “penny dreadful” magazines. So called because they were cheap to produce and only cost a penny. The writing was rather lurid and even a little salacious. You’ll see what I mean. “Varney the Vampire” made its debut in 1845. It ran 232 chapters, and was printed in installments that took over two years to complete. Obviously the publishers knew a good thing when they saw it. The story was very successful and it was printed in book form in 1847.

This story introduces many of the vampire elements we all know, such as the vampire’s power of hypnotism, his fangs, biting the neck of his victims for blood, and having superhuman strength. And, although Johnathan Frid as Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows gets the credit of being the first sympathetic vampire, Varney beat him to it by almost a century.

“Varney the Vampire” (1845) by James Rymer and Thomas Prest

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