![]() Whether or not any of it is remembered, vampire fiction of this period nonetheless provides an insight into how the genre was adapting to the glare of the cinema projector… If we look at the vampire novels published during the ‘30s and ‘40s, on the other hand, we find a lot of lurid titles - Michael Waugh’s Fangs of the Vampire (1934) John A Kolbe’s Vampires of Vengeance (1935) Cromwell Gibbons’ The Bat Woman (1938) Gerald Verner’s The Vampire Man (1941) – but little lasting hold on the public imagination. Universal’s 1931 film version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, is regarded as a classic of horror, and its sequels Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943) and House of Dracula (1945) remain widely-watched by fans of the genre. ![]() With the arrival of vampire films, however, the balance shifted. But the vampires of the nineteenth-century stage were ephemeral, and today largely forgotten while the prose works of Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker live on. Admittedly, dramatised vampires were not a new phenomenon: after all, the 1819 publication of Polidori’s “The Vampyre” had been swiftly followed by a string of adaptations, imitations and parodies for the theatre. As noted in the previous post of this series, the biggest change faced by vampire fiction of the 1930s and ‘40s was that authors in the genre were now competing with films. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |