With Halloween around the corner, I’ve been bingeing horror flicks, especially ones with vampires, because I’m obsessed with vampires. So… of course, I wanted to research the origins of horror stories, both literary and cinematic. Vampire stories have evolved over the years, with more recent works portraying vamps as sexy and, on occasion, noble, with more human tendencies and emotions that lead to love, justice, and compassion. However, the genre is certainly much broader than vampires. Anyhoo…here’s what I learned:

Horror can be traced back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is based on a play written by Euripides, who tells the story of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and an Amazon, brought back to life by Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. A Roman author, Pliny the Younger, in a letter to a friend, told a ghost story about a haunted house in Athens. At the beginning of the second century, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which was a collection of 48 biographies, tells the story of Cimon, who talks about the spirit of a murderer named Damon, who was murdered in a bathhouse in Chaeronea.
Moving forward, in Medieval times, there was the Witch of Berkeley by William of Malmesbury, who was an English historian in the 12th century. Medieval France was a popular location for Werewolf stories. One in particular, titled Bisclavret, was written by Marie de France and also dates to the 12th century. And of course, Dracula is based on a real-life historical figure in the 1400s named Vlad III, the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula, the Prince of Wallachia, known for his cruelty in battle, rumored to drink the blood of his enemies, and to impale them for all to see.
Many believe the horror genre began with the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764. It was first marketed as a romance!
What about movies? Most believe the 1896 French silent film, Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), was the first horror movie. It was a brief three-minute film by French director Georges Méliès featuring supernatural and gothic imagery like demons, skeletons, and bats.
As far as television series go, the first known horror series dates back to the 1930s with The Television Ghost, a 1931 anthology series that aired on W2XAB.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of evolution for vampires, portraying them as more complex and not simply evil. This started with one of my all-time favorite television shows, Dark Shadows, which was a campy soap opera about Barnabus Collins, a tormented vampire. The TV show got a reboot in 1991, and I’m still pissed that they didn’t renew it and left us all hanging. Damn networks! Then came the infamous books by Anne Rice that started with Interview with a Vampire. Other notable TV series were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries. Finally, the makeover for vampires certainly is not complete without the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer.
Regarding sapphic vampire stories, the first and most notable is Carmilla written in 1872 by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Since then, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sisters of the Night written in 1979 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. So many great sapphic paranormal novels have been written since this novel, some with shapeshifters or werewolves and others with vampires, that I can’t possibly only mention a few, so I’ll leave you to your own research on this. However, I would like to note that my good pal, Ali Spooner, has several that are really good, click here to go to her page: https://ghostwhite-pelican-359984.hostingersite.com/ali-spooner/

I’ve only written one paranormal novel with vampires and shapeshifters, my debut novel, Love Forever, Live Forever (https://annettemoriauthor.com/love-forever-live-forever/), but I have written two short stories based on the characters in this novel, and they are all free on my website: https://annettemoriauthor.com/free-short-stories/, so feel free to check the free stories out and if you enjoyed them, perhaps you will be interested in my debut novel, which is on Kindle Unlimited. Don’t forget my most recent novel, it isn’t Halloween themed, but it’s just as good because it’s about ass-kicking superheroes! Click the links above or below to check out my books!