The horror genre has been a mainstay of the entertainment world from the beginning. In terms of motion pictures it has ebbed and flowed in cycles, striking a chord of terror with the movie-going public, inspiring hordes of imitators until the cycle burns itself out, and retreating until the time is right again.
“One of the things that intrigues me about horror is the longevity of the genre,” offers film historian and University of Southern California professor Leo Braudy. “In film, all of the other genres — from Westerns to musicals — come and go, but horror seems to have a perpetual life despite, or perhaps because of, its focus on the dead. Somehow the images of horror, the motifs, the characters and the plot structures have a greater metamorphic variety than some of the other genres. They can be refitted to new historical situations.”
One aspect of the genre that has rarely needed “refitting”, however, is the concept of the vampire. The legends predate Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although that novel is considered the one that first brought the notion to a mainstream audience. Hollywood was quick to jump on the bandwagon, beginning with the original Nosferatu (a blatant rip-off of the Stoker novel, though a well produced one) and moving on to Universal’s production of Dracula, which introduced the world to Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi and launched the big-screen vampire in a major way.
