Suspended
in Dusk
Volume I, Issue No. 1 - October 4th, 1997
Halloween, History and
Creatures
Halloween
Vampires
Werewolves
Vampires and
Werewolves
Gothic
Fiction
Customs and superstitions gathered through the ages go into the celebration of Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, on October 31, the Christian festival of All Saints. It has its origins, however, in the autumn festivals of earlier times.
The ancient Druids had a three-day celebration at the beginning of November. They believed that on the last night of October spirits of the dead roamed abroad, and they lighted bonfires to drive them away. In ancient Rome the festival of Pomona, goddess of fruits and gardens, occurred at about this time of year. It was an occasion of rejoicing associated with the harvest; and nuts and apples, as symbols of the winter store of fruit, were roasted before huge bonfires. But these agricultural and pastoral celebrations also had a sinister aspect, with ghosts and witches thought to be on the prowl.
Even after November 1 became a Christian feast day honoring all saints, many people clung to the old pagan beliefs and customs that had grown up about Halloween. Some tried to foretell the future on that night by performing such rites as jumping over lighted candles. In the British Isles great bonfires blazed for the Celtic festival of Samhain. Laughing bands of guisers (young people disguised in grotesque masks) carved lanterns from turnips and carried them through the villages.
In the United States children carved faces on hollowed-out pumpkins and put lighted candles inside to make jack-o'-lanterns. Halloween celebrations today reflect many of these early customs. Stores and homes display orange and black figures of witches, bats, black cats, and pumpkins. People dressed in fanciful outfits go to costume parties, where old-fashioned games like bobbing for apples in tubs of water may be a part of the festivities.
Children put on costumes and masks and go from house to house demanding "trick or treat." The treat, usually candy, is generally given and the trick rarely played. Some parents feel this custom is dangerous. There have been numerous instances in which sharp objects or poisons have been found in candy bars and apples. To provide an alternative to begging for candy from strangers, many communities schedule special, supervised parties and events at Halloween. The United Nations has used the Halloween observance to collect money for its children's fund.
In popular superstition, they are men who change into wolflike creatures at night and devour or kill human beings. The word itself means "man-wolf" and is derived from Old English words: wer, meaning man, and wulf, meaning wolf.
Tales of werewolves have been told since ancient Greece and Rome, and such folklore exists on all continents. In places where wolves are not common, other fierce animals--tigers, lions, bears, or hyenas--replace them. Like the vampire, the werewolf has become a popular horror theme in motion pictures.
Werewolves are believed to turn into vampires after death.
In popular superstition this bloodsucking creature is supposedly the restless soul of a criminal or a suicide who leaves his burial place at night to drink the blood of the living. Although the legend comes from the Slavic regions of Eastern Europe, belief in vampires has been found all over the world. The legend may have been based on the life of Vlad the Impaler, a notorious ruler of Walachia (now part of Romania). In the 15th century he was reputed to have brutally killed hundreds of people. In the 20th century the vampire story has been popularized in several films based on the novel `Dracula' by British author Bram Stoker.
Vampires and werewolves. Much horror literature is grounded in superstition, fear of demons, and the dread of death. No single tale brings all of these elements together so well as the vampire legend, an ancient folk superstition. The vampire is described as "undead," an entombed individual who rises each night to feed on the blood of the living. In literature its best representation is `Dracula' (1897) by Bram Stoker. The legend was retold in `Interview with the Vampire' (1976) by Anne Rice. The Dracula story was eagerly taken up by Hollywood in the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi, and numerous movies on the theme have been made since.
Similar to the vampire legend is the story of the werewolf, the human being under a curse who turns into a half man, half wolf--presumably when the moon is full. This creature prowls around, devouring animals, people, or corpses, but he returns to human form by day. As with Dracula, the werewolf became a popular subject for movies, beginning with `The Werewolf of London' (1935) and the `Wolfman' films of the 1940s. According to one superstition the werewolf, after being killed, turns into a vampire.
The belief that the dead can return to haunt and harm the living has long been an element of fiction. Ghost stories are at least as old as the Bible: in the Old Testament, King Saul calls up the ghost of Samuel to foretell the outcome of a battle. In Shakespeare's `Hamlet', the ghost of the slain king provides the information from which Hamlet plots revenge for his father's murder. One of the masters of the modern ghost story was Ambrose Bierce, some of whose stories were collected in `Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce' (1964). A variation on the ghost theme is the haunted house, about which hundreds of stories have been written. The series of `Amityville Horror' books by John G. Jones belongs in this category.
Between the vampires and the ghosts are creatures called the living dead and zombies who return from the grave to devour the living. Hollywood celebrated this story in `Night of the Living Dead' (1968) and other films.
In literature one of the best examples is the intriguing book `The Beast with Five Fingers' (1928; film version 1946) by W.F. Harvey. It is the story of a severed hand that goes on living after its owner dies. The movie `Friday the 13th' (1980) and its sequels also used the revived corpse as villain. In the 1986 film `Trick or Treat', a dead rock music star is called back to life.
Stories about the devil and lesser demons date at least as far back as the Middle Ages, when the Christian church tried to instill fear in the hearts of believers about the consequences of sin. In 20th-century literature the devil plays a central role in William Blatty's novel `The Exorcist' (1971) and in Ira Levin's novel of Satanism, `Rosemary's Baby' (1967). Both were made into motion pictures. David Seltzer's `The Omen' (1976) about a child-demon was originally a screenplay.
In Gothic fiction the reader passes from the reasoned order of the everyday world into a dark region governed by supernatural beings, a region that inspires dread and horror, where decay abounds and death is always at hand. Also called Gothic romance and Gothic novel, Gothic fiction emerged late in the 18th century as part of the Romantic movement in the arts. This movement represented a reaction against the "age of reason," or the Enlightenment, that had dominated the thought of the time.
This type of fiction was called Gothic because much of its inspiration was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, many of which are Gothic in architectural style. It commonly featured castles and monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, hidden panels, chambers of torture, and dark towers. The great age of the Gothic novel began in 1765 with the publication of Horace Walpole's successful `Castle of Otranto', and it lasted until about 1820. Afterward, though such fiction continued to appear for decades, the Gothic type diverged into different styles, including the detective, or mystery, story and the horror story.
In Gothic fiction forces of evil predominate, usually in the person of a great villain. Opposed to these is a virtuous maiden who is at once repelled and attracted by the evil around her. In some of the novels virtue triumphs; in others the evil is so monumental that everything good in its path is destroyed, and then it destroys itself. One such story of great evil was `The Monk' (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Another of the popular early Gothic writers was Ann Radcliffe, whose `Mysteries of Udolpho' (1794) and `The Italian' (1797) are among the best examples of this fiction.
In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe wrote finely crafted Gothic fiction in such works as `The Fall of the House of Usher' (1839). He also created the American detective story--with a Gothic atmosphere--in `Murders in the Rue Morgue', published in 1841 (See Detective Story).
One early Gothic novel that has become a classic is Mary Shelley's `Frankenstein' (1818), which also has elements of science and horror fiction.
At the end of the 19th century Bram Stoker wrote `Dracula' (1897), one of the most successful and truly Gothic novels ever published. In it, as in earlier Gothic novels, overwhelming evil in the person of the vampire Dracula confronts and nearly destroys the beautiful young woman who is attracted by his charm and repelled by his evil power.
Among the better-known authors who sometimes created Gothic fiction were Wolfgang von Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Bronte, William Cullen Bryant, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, and William Faulkner. Stephen King, in a more recent period, has used Gothic settings very successfully.