Clive Barker once said that horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion. It’s a curious thing to say, but it makes you wonder. Where did the need to scare come from? What caused the birth of horror literature? What would induce someone to wake up one day and concoct a milieu of elements designed to do nothing but inspire the existence of fear within the imagination of those who cross paths with it?
It is singlehandedly a testament and proof of the brain’s ability to be magnificently brilliant and twisted all at the same time. And something worth tipping our hats to, so to speak, is the last horror literature-inspired penning of my thoughts for the month of Halloween.
Traveling through the cobbled paths of history, we can find the birth of horror literature somewhere around 1235. This is when the Vatican developed an obsession of sorts with eliminating witchcraft and establishing the orthodox version of faith. This craze with the existence, fear and hunt for witches would then bleed over all the way on to the 17th century. But it was enough to pique the literary curious minds of many. Come 1307, and people were introduced to Dante’s “Inferno” full of tales of Satan and his own journey through Hell. This resulted in horror literature being heavily influenced by religion for a very long time.
However, enter the 1580s and the fixation of horror as it pertained to witchcraft and religion saw the addition of gruesome plays written in that era. From William Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” to “The Spanish Tragedy” by Thomas Kyd to John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi,” all these literary masterpieces were rife with death and murder and splattered with blood from beginning to end. These plays successfully left the first marks of the terror death and murder can cause within the realms of horror literature, seen through the tapestry of this genre’s history.
Moving forward to 1714, we saw the emergence of the Graveyard Poets or the Churchyard poets, with a predilection toward death and mortality that later contributed to the birth of the Gothic novel. Notables names here included those such as Thomas Parnell (with his classic poem “A Night-Piece on Death”), Oliver Goldsmith and Robert Blair, among others.
Although their efforts are eclipsed by the emergence of the Gothic novel, they nevertheless still paved a path for its birth. However, it was 16 years later that an incident of mass hysteria in an Australian village gave life to the chronicling of vampires and mankind’s (sometimes unhealthy) obsession with our favorite blood-sucking leeches.
The first iteration of the Gothic novel in 1764 (Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto”) made an impact on many influential literary figures, some whose names and work are legendary even today. This included Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
But what gave an interesting twist to this sub-genre of horror is a shared cabin in Lake Geneva, the imbibing of an alcohol and opium cocktail and the idea for a ghost story writing contest. Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Dr. John Polidori’s wild night lead to Shelley’s (and the world’s) beloved “Frankenstein” and the birth of science fiction with horror as well as Dr. Pildori’s eerie tale “The Vampyre.”
But it was none other than the emergence of Edgar Allan Poe—ultimate archangel of horror—that brought the genre to America, with the publication of “MS. Found In A Bottle” in 1833. In the decades that followed, themes of horror spilled over and spread with their leathery dark wings into every form and facet of literary writings. The first sighting of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tales happened in 1832, but they weren’t the sanitized and watered-down, age appropriate version that we know today. Their tales were some of the most gruesome, violent and gorily terrorizing of all time and (in their original, unexpurgated brilliance) still are.
A little bit down the road (in 1865 and 1872) we encounter Lewis Caroll’s literary genius within the manic worlds of “Alice In Wonderland” and “Through The Looking Glass.” Although, admittedly, these aren’t tales of horror, they surely inspired more than their fair share in all the years to come, especially in “The Jabberwocky.”
Later, when the Industrial Revolution came and people began to get bored of their idyllic, stepford lives, they began to crave chaos and terrifying oblivion, and the literary masterminds of that age were more than willing to provide. Thomas Prest (in his novel “A String of Pearls: A Romance”) brought us Sweeney Todd, the demon barber. “Varney the Vampire” was brought forward by James Malcolm Rymer, which later also lead to Bran Stoker’s “Dracula”, and George Reynold contributed to horror literature with “Wagner the Werewolf.”
As the times of society swung back to individual themes again and those of man’s own struggle with evil and darkness, Robert Louis Stevenson presented to the world (with impeccable timing, in 1886) “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” However, at this time, the world was darker than anything literature could still concoct, since Jack the Ripper would his bloody mark on London only two years later. This gave birth to an insurmountable tide of ideas, inspirations and influences. Writers are nothing but mercenary on the true real horrors of life, after all.
Then began the slow transition to modern horror, with the likes of HG Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” in 1898 and the first publication of a horror magazine in American in 1923 that went on to publishhorror masterpieces by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. What came next was a litany of excellent stories that we are very familiar with: Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” Robert Bloch’s “Psycho,” Thomas Harris’s “Hannibal Lector,” and so on. What remained true and constant through out that, though, is mankind’s unconditional love for horror, terror and fear.
Is there anything missing from Maham’s history of horror? Send some missing links to mhasan4@wisc.edu.
