Month: October 2018

Dark Romanticism: A Brief Introduction

We’ve all heard a great deal about Romanticism. Whether we’re talking about poetry, music or art, most people have a rather concrete picture in their mind whenever anyone mentions the word. But what about its gloomier cousin, Dark Romanticism?

For the last article of October – and the final Halloween-themed one – I want to introduce you to a movement in the arts which not that many people have heard about, although most will probably be familiar with some of the works or artists I’ll mention.

As the word implies, Dark Romanticism is closely related to Romanticism. And like Romanticism, it has had a stark influence on many contemporary artworks, including novels, film, music and more. But enough of the introduction – let’s dive right into the world of the Dark Romantics!

What is Dark Romanticism?

Much like its lighter-hearted cousin, Dark Romanticism grew out of a resistance to the Age of Enlightenment, to the Industrial Revolution and general rationalisation, placing special emphasis on raw emotion, pure aesthetic experiences and other forms of intense feeling. But taking a gloomier turn from there, Dark Romanticism focuses on all the negatives of this approach. This includes irrationality as the end-result of a resistance to absolute rationality, demonic and grotesque aspects of human nature, and some of the darkest possible themes – suicide, death, madness, terror.

Consequently, many of the motifs we can find in Dark Romanticism are part of the realm of the uncanny. Love becomes lust, imaginative experience becomes escapism, nature features mist and lightning, buildings often feature haunts and ruination.

Dark Romanticism also involves other elements, such as demons and ghosts, pseudo-sciences, alchemy and magic, occultism, drugs (especially opium or alcohol), nightmares, melancholy and depression, resignation, despair, possessiveness, decay and personified evil.

Isn’t it just Gothic fiction?

If you’ve been following the article this far you’ve probably been wondering whether there’s any difference between Gothic fiction and Dark Romanticism – and there is! Gothic fiction is more of a wide-reaching genre which can refer to particular works of art over a wide period.

As such, Dark Romanticism can be classified as a part of Gothic fiction. The latter can refer to works from any period of time, whereas the former is tied to its relation with ‘regular’ Romanticism. Consequently, we would classify Edgar Allan Poe as a late Dark Romanticist, whereas Bram Stoker is too Victorian to be considered one. Meanwhile, both are indisputably members of Gothic fiction.

But there are also differences in the types of media used. Gothic fiction is usually literary or related to film, whereas Dark Romanticism lies within the realm of literature and visual art (and some Romantic music, although that is probably debatable).

Furthermore, as with every artistic movement, the differences are often fleeting, and so we might classify even something contemporary as heavily inspired by Dark Romanticism – making it questionable as to how useful the distinctions are beyond using them to define a particular type of art in a particular moment in history.

Also, within Romanticism itself it’s difficult to distinguish succinctly between dark and ‘regular’ Romanticism; few artists were as consistently uncanny and dark as Poe – perhaps E.T.A. Hoffman or the Marquis de Sade; others less frequently so, such as Lord Byron or John Keats.

Dark Romantic Music

To complicate matters even further, let’s have a brief look at Dark Romantic music. The reason why this complicates things is that, of course, Romanticism in music incorporates the entire 19th century, rather than just the late 18th/early 19th century as in literature and the visual arts.

I’d feel slightly inclined to classify primarily parts of early Romantic music as Dark Romanticism because it’s in the early 19th century that Romantic music was closest to the ‘roots’ of Romanticism (and Dark Romanticism is part of the ‘roots’ of Romanticism). Anything along the lines of darker pieces by Schubert or Schumann, or even late Beethoven, falls under this category.

To give you a couple of examples, here’s Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of Death). The theme is obviously perfectly suitable for Dark Romanticism and the constant onslaught of uncanny, darker harmonies and the threatening underscore of the Dies Ira melody make this an excellent piece for those in a gloomy mood.

A second example is Franz Schubert’s Der Tod und das Maedchen (Death and the Girl), a haunting Kunstlied (song) about the coming of… well, death. It contains a brilliant contrast between the quick-paced voice of the dying girl and the dark, solemn tone of Death. Always haunting and eerie, it gives you a brilliant sense of inevitable tragedy.

Dark Romantic Visual Arts

Since Romanticism in the visual arts is much more narrowly defined than in music, it’s a lot easier to make a case whether a piece can be seen as Dark Romanticist or not. To point out the obvious, a lot of Dark Romanticist art is so-called because it uses darker scenes and colours – and because it enables the artist to depict the ‘dark’ subject matter directly, such as death, darkness and general depictions of morbidity.

Indeed, it probably boils down to the depicted scenes. If a work deals with the sublime, exaltations of any kind and general feelings of joy, it’s probably ‘regular’ Romantic; if it deals with death, madness, melancholy or related themes, it’s Dark Romanticism. In the visual arts, we can literally see death: people dying, yelling for help, shipwrecks, storms, darkness engulfing all.

In other words, a William Turner depicting a ship during a storm is Dark Romantic. A Henry Fuseli is more often than not Dark Romantic through his depiction of witches, demons, and scenes of madness. Again to give you a couple of examples, here’s one from the Belgian painter and sculptor Antoine Joseph Wiertz. After the death of his mother, he painted his famous Deux jeunes filles – La Belle Rosine, which captures the confrontation of death and beauty (much like Schubert’s Der Tod und das Maedchen).

A second example is Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. This haunting picture features a woman lying asleep in an uncomfortable pose with an imp-like figure sitting on her chest. Its dreamlike depiction of uncanny eroticism was a huge success after its first exhibition in 1782 – and it leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Is the picture the manifestation of her nightmare, or is this a vision she has during her sleep?

Dark Romantic Literature

I don’t want to go into too much detail about literature related to Dark Romanticism since I already covered a lot of Romantic horror-like literature earlier this month. Nevertheless, since horror and Dark Romanticism aren’t exactly the same, it might be nice to provide a brief list of literary works which might be considered Dark Romanticist:

  • Marquis de Sade: Justine. This 1791 novel depicting a young woman recounting her story on her way to punishment and death after attempting to live a moral life. It’s an exploration of how trying to be good can end with dire consequences

  • Matthew Lewis: The Monk. This is a 1796 novel about a monk falling into sin. It was criticised by many for its heresy and obscenity

  • Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Featuring the first Byronic hero, this poem published between 1812 and 1818 explores the travels and reflections of its hedonistic protagonist

  • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. See my other article for more information

  • Anything by Edgar Allan Poe. Esp. The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart or The Raven, all of which deal with anxiety, ruin, depression, and overall gloom

  • Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal. Okay, I’m cheating with this one. It’s actually a rather late work, having been published in 1857. But French symbolism was rooted in Romanticism, and this scandalous volume deals with eroticism and hedonism – a wonderful combination in the arts

Closing thoughts

Due to the wide-reaching nature of Dark Romanticism, this article is hardly a comprehensive list of all features and examples from the movement. But they may have given you a good overview as to what elements define something as Dark Romantic art and will let you go on your own journey to discover its pleasures.

If you fancy listening to, looking at or reading something which is old, solemn and serious but with a touch of the eerie and uncanny, Dark Romanticism is for you. It’s also an excellent way to discover some of the roots of our contemporary Gothic fiction and horror. Thus, it’s perfect to finish off this Halloween-inspired month.

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Why there are no good Lovecraft film adaptations

While often considered an outsider in literary circles, H. P. Lovecraft’s writing nevertheless maintains a large popularity. But in the world of movies, directors seem to struggle to get across the right tone. In this post, we’ll go through some of the reasons why this might be.

If you’re into Lovecraft, enjoy the oddly archaic (even for his time) language, overuse of adjectives and descriptive elements, the accessible style and above all the gorgeous sense of uneasiness and fear stemming from incomprehensible horror in his writing, chances are you’re rather frustrated that there are essentially no good Lovecraft adaptations out there.

Yes, of course there are Lovecraft-inspired films which are reasonably well done, but when it comes to direct adaptations of his lore or stories, there’s a bit of a gaping hole (with one exception, which I’ll get to towards the end). But why is this the case? I believe there are several aspects about his work which simply make him difficult to translate to film.

The fear of the unknown

Not only does Lovecraft tap into the fear of the unknown, but his writing is usually centred around the fear of the incomprehensible unknown. We’re not just talking a fear of something we don’t know and could learn to know, but the fear of something which lies outside of the grips of our imagination. Films, being a scenic and sonic medium, necessarily portray things which are based in reality – even when they’re set in an otherworldly universe (Sci-Fi, Fantasy). But how do you capture the nature of something so different and horrific that it makes onlookers go mad? No matter what you display on the screen, it will be a disappointment, and if you downplay it too much the film might not grip the audience properly.

The fear of human insignificance

In many ways, Lovecraft was a product of his age. Living in the first half of the 20th century, he felt the gnawing sense of insignificance which emerged out of human progression – and which plagued many philosophers and psychologists around that time. Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism, especially, seems to shine out of Lovecraft’s writings – whether he was aware of it or not. We get the same sense of fear of the meaninglessness of life, and how small humanity is when facing the rest of the universe. But how do you capture nihilism in film? How do you reflect the spirit of an age when it’s so psychological? That’s right: you don’t!

Psychological horror

While there have been many great psychological horror films out there – The Shining springs to mind – they’re few and far between. It’s a difficult genre to get just right, and Lovecraft relies entirely on psychological horror. The fears he explores are primal, basic, hidden beneath all sense of rationality, and portraying this in film requires a great deal of skill and subtlety. Too much relies on the imagination, on tapping into a psychological area we are hardly aware of, to allow for films to do him justice – making Lovecraft a risky area to attempt.

The horror relies on his writing style

I’m not going to debate whether Lovecraft’s writing is any good, although there are large discussions in other circles. Generally, people often criticise his deliberately archaic style and his overuse of adjectives and his simplicity (despite both former aspects!). But I believe that all this adds to the sense of horror in his writing. In the same way that his subject matters are weird and otherworldly, so is his style. It reads like English and it’s easily understandable – but it’s strange, eerie, and matches the mood perfectly. But here’s the problem. If the horror relies on his writing style (whether it’s good or not), how would you translate that into a visual medium without a written narrative? Simple: it’s not possible.

That one good Lovecraft adaptation

If you read through this article so far and thought to yourself, ‘well, that would be excellent material for a silent film in the style of the 20s’, then I’d agree entirely! Thinking of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the silence, pacing, and weirdness of early silent films would provide an excellent style to portray one of Lovecraft’s stories. And indeed: one particular Lovecraft adaptation has done it exceptionally well.

The Call of Cthulhu from 2005 is an excellent, low-budget and very faithful rendition of Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They even kept the camera quality similarly old-fashioned and less than optimal. This allows us to experience a wonderful bit of Lovecraftian horror since it captures the right tone succinctly. I’d recommend it highly.

Sadly, there’s not really a large enough market for this kind of thing. So we’ll probably never get anything quite like it again. But at least – and this is a good thing – many directors use Lovecraft-inspired techniques in their horror films, even if they’re never comprehensive and only hint at the source material. However, it does mean that we’ll never really go completely without Lovecraftian elements.

Essentially, it all boils down to this. Transcribing the indescribable and incomprehensible to film is inherently difficult. The range of aspects that a Lovecraftian story consists of makes him generally unsuited to movies. This is the case even if individual elements can be adapted. Unless, of course, there was a decent market for old-fashioned silent films.

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Beauty in Death: St Pancras Old Church

Tucked neatly between St Pancras International and St Pancras Hospital, the small and wonderful St Pancras Old Church and its gorgeous churchyard ooze a feeling of enigmatic beauty. But what is it that makes this location so strangely alluring?

The old church is not something you’d expect to find in central London. Obvious for the area of one of the largest train stations in one of Europe’s biggest cities, everything around King’s Cross and St Pancras International is gigantic, overwhelming, industrial.

And if you think of a church in the area, chances are you’d be more inclined to conjure images of St Pancras Church in your mind – the Greek Revival church with its ionic columns and eerie caryatides on several sides of the building. The thing is, this church is comparatively new.

A bit of history…

The beautiful St Pancras Old Church, on the other hand, is ancient – and rather small. As the newly built up areas around St Pancras, especially near Euston Road, were beginning to boom, the parish quickly decided that it was time for a larger church, so in 1816 they began building the new St Pancras Church.

The old church, on the other hand, is believed to be one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. In earlier times the parish of St Pancras stretched almost the whole way from Oxford Street to Highgate. The local population abandoned the site in the 14th century and the church was left to its demise, with services only held about once a month at the end of the 18th century. When St Pancras Church was completed in 1822 its predecessor lost its status as a parish church.

Today, St Pancras Old Church is the parish church of Somers Town and a popular go-to place for people seeking a bit of peace and quiet – rather fascinating considering its central location. But it’s also a spectacular place to visit for arts-enthusiasts.

A lovely churchyard…

Shaded gently by many lovely mature trees, the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church also has a fascinating history. It was a popular burial place for many Roman Catholics from around London, including French refugees, the last resting place of composers Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach, as well as sculptor John Flaxman. There’s even a memorial tomb for Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the writers and philosophers who are today probably more widely known as the parents of Mary Shelley.

But the churchyard’s greatest allure is its peaceful nature. Because of its variety of trees and green spaces and sweet looking gravestones, it’s just a nice place to be. It’s ideal to rest and sit down for a while, perhaps while reading the odd book or contemplating the old stones that decorate the entire area.

A literary background

For literary enthusiasts, St Pancras Old Church is an equally important place to visit. Jerry Cruncher in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is a body snatcher who makes his way to the churchyard at night to steal some corpses for dissection at medical schools.

It was also here that the future Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley planned their marriage at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft. The Shelleys, of course, would go down in literary history as one of the greatest collaborating couples.

The Hardy Tree

The Hardy Tree, one of the Great Trees of London, is probably the most spectacular of sites to visit if you happen to go to the churchyard. The large ash tree’s roots partially reach out from the soil, forming their way through a pile of neatly arranged headstones surrounding it, making both rock and wood an intricate part of each other.

Such an odd sight deserves an explanation. The tree gets its name from Thomas Hardy – obviously nowadays known for his great novels such as Tess or Jude, as well as his poetry – who worked here at a young age in the 1860s. He oversaw the excavation of the graveyard while the Midland Railway built the London terminus. Since many of the gravestones were in the way, they placed them in a linear fashion around the tree. More gruesomely, as the railway tracks were being built, many corpses would have been exposed to the open air, so Hardy had to excavate them before the building began – possibly one explanation for the generally gloomy tone in his novels and poetry.

Closing Thoughts

If you’re around King’s Cross or St Pancras International, be sure to visit St Pancras Old Church. If not for the sake of the church itself, then certainly because of its eerie and unnatural churchyard. It’s beautiful and uncanny, and you’re certain to love it.

There’s just something fascinating about cemeteries – especially those overladen with as much history as St Pancras. Perhaps it’s also a fascination with the morbid and death which draws us to the kind of appreciation of ceremonies related to laying people to rest.

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Haunting Music

With Halloween drawing ever nearer you’re probably spicing up the mood already with horror films or haunting music. But what makes the soundtracks so scary, and what are some of the most effective pieces? Let’s have a look at the theory and science behind creepy noises.

What makes haunting music put you on the edge of your seat while listening? Why are some horror movie soundtracks so horrifying? Without a solid understanding of music theory, it probably seems like a mystery, but even then, you definitely feel it while listening. Dissonant chords and shrieking notes always have an uncanny effect.

It’s difficult to know why this is the case, although we’re gradually gaining an understanding. Artists discovered long ago that major chords generally create positive emotions, whereas minor chords create negative ones. This is a rather simplistic view and isn’t always true, but by and large, it’s the case.

Dissonant chords, on the other hand, create a sense of uneasiness. Due to their eerie nature, composers for a long time deliberately avoided using them. With the rise of polytonal and atonal music that became a thing of the past, but they still produce a jarring effect whenever you hear them.

New Findings – what makes sounds scary?

In 2012, Daniel Blumstein from the University of California produced a study suggesting that the reaction to haunting sounds is biological in nature, since they evoke instinctive emotional responses. He discovered that the music resembles animal distress calls. Baby marmots, for instance, screamed in a nonlinear chaotic noise when caught. An animal’s scream, a child’s cry and a dissonant chord all trigger a response in humans, making us think our children – or ourselves – are being threatened.

As part of the research, participants rated music segments based on emotional stimulation. Blumenstein correctly predicted that they ranked music with nonlinear elements as more stimulating and stated they linked it to emotions such as fear or sadness. Furthermore, tracks where the pitch was raised higher provoked even stronger emotional reactions.

But he also discovered that the reaction is dependent on the context. When listening to haunting music alongside ‘boring’ images, the participants rated it as less stimulating. Also, some music is associated with scariness just by social engineering. The singing of children’s nursery rhymes, for instance, only seems scary to us because horror films have put them into frightening situations in the first place – so they seem haunting by association.

Haunting Music in Films

It goes without saying that horror movies wouldn’t be as effective as they are without the use of sound effects. Alfred Hitchcock even said that one third of the reason Psycho was a great hit was based purely on the music – and personally, I’d be inclined to agree.

But it’s a bit of an artform in itself, creating music for horror films. Some are subtle and create a slight sense of uneasiness, others are just brilliant tracks which make you feel uncomfortable. Others are less effective and just produce loud noise, which never really works.

But enough theory: let’s look at some scary pieces from classical and film music to give you some goosebumps!

Modest Mussorgsky – Night on Bald Mountain

There’s a reason this music makes practically every list of ‘top 10 scariest classical music’. It drips brilliance from every pore, starting with the chilling, quick-paced violins at the start and the horns underlying the music with a sense of the approaching end of days. It’s haunting music from start to finish and will keep you from sleeping at night. Probably no surprise, then, that it was used for the segment with the devil in Disney’s Fantasia.

Bernard Herrmann – Theme from Psycho

One word: uncomfortable. Probably one of the best horror soundtracks of all time, this immediately puts you in an eerie position where you’re afraid to look behind you out of fear that something might be lurking there. Without this track, Psycho wouldn’t be what it is. With it, it is brilliant. Screeching sounds which move unstoppably onward at succinct points during the movie really make this an unforgettable sound which will haunt you for a long time.

J.S. Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Honestly, as much as I love this piece, I think it’s largely considered haunting music by association through its use in horror films more than anything else. While it largely uses minor keys, it’s quite timid on the dissonant side and actually has a few uplifting moments. Nevertheless, overall it’s lovely, quick-paced, always entertaining and just plain beautiful, with some generally horrific moments in there. And the sound of an organ always sounds a bit haunting, I suppose…

Mike Oldfield – The Exorcist theme

This is a strange one. The track itself isn’t as much scary as it is minimalistic and in a constant loop of producing an eerie, otherworldly feeling – perhaps more mysterious than outright frightening. I think the reason the film works effectively with its music is because of it’s hardly ever present – instead, the film offers you a silent build-up with regular conversations and a gradual build-up of dread, with the soundtrack really just giving you a hint at the underlying haunt.

György Ligeti – Requiem (esp. II Kyrie)

This piece works from so many different angles. First by association, since the Kyrie Eleison – in English ‘Lord, have mercy’ – within a requiem already has a sense of desperation in it. Second, it’s one constant dissonant chord with more and more layers building upon it. Third, the sound of shrieking human voices to uncomfortable instrumental aspects makes it sound horrific. Just envision this being the sound of billions of lost souls yearning, screaming, begging for mercy on judgment day…

John Williams – Jaws theme

To finish off with another soundtrack which makes excellent use of build-up, this one is also a great example of haunting music. It starts out quietly with low notes, but builds up rather quickly with quiet, but increasingly louder bangs and dissonances and a variety of instruments which always sound threatening – culminating in the moment the strings come out and produce a shrieking effect. It captures perfectly the threat that lurks underneath the water surface.

Closing thoughts

There you have it, some thoughts and examples of haunting music! Can you think of any other pieces I’ve left out that need to be mentioned? Then please leave me a comment! Otherwise, if you liked this article, then feel free to click on one of the tender buttons below to share it on the social media of your choice.

Top 10 Horror (or Horror-like) Classics to Read this October

October is here at last! The leaves are taking on beautiful shades of brown, yellow and red. They begin to fall and give you that autumn-smell, reminding you of how gorgeous the world can look even as nature reminds you of decay and death. What better time to read some of the best horror classics literature has to offer?

Although Halloween is a particularly America-focused holiday, there’s something about the time of year which makes it particularly apt to that feeling of desolation, gothic, and uncanniness making you want to read or watch something horrifying – or at least unsettling.

For that reason, I’ve selected 10 of the best horror classics to read or re-read this October. They’re in no particular order since they’re all good, and the selection is based entirely on my own taste, rather than any objective measurement of quality (after all, it’s very subjective).

Why classical horror?

You might be wondering – and rightly so – why I’ve selected almost exclusively writing from the 19th and early 20th centuries, with one exception. The reason is mostly because it’s always nice to go back to the classics to see where the inspiration of contemporary authors came from.

Furthermore, despite their age, all of the entries on this list are still perfectly readable to a contemporary audience. That way they enable you to experience the sense of uneasiness that our ancestors felt themselves. Also, I’m an old-fashioned bore.

Frankenstein

While Mary Shelley’s spouse may be the better poet, she was undeniably the better prose writer, and her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus from 1818 deserves its place as one of the greatest horror novels of all time. Although it might be very different from what a reader who only knows the movies would expect, it nevertheless represents an eerie exploration of questions about good and evil, life and death, societal issues and the dangers of technological progression.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

Another book which is fundamentally different from all film adaptations, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is rightfully one of the most well-known gothic novellas out there. The story is told from the perspective of a lawyer who investigates the eerie occurrences happening in London in the late 19th century. Capturing an uncanny flair of the unknown, tackling issues of privacy and publicity and good versus evil, this is an excellent read for someone looking for an air of mystery.

Dracula

What a surprise! Another novel which has been turned into many adaptations, but this time with some which are closer to the source material than in the works mentioned above. But its fame is deserved, since Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an excellent piece of eerie writing, capturing succinctly the nature of vampires and establishing many of the common tropes found in contemporary Vampire-laden fiction (sadly usually for worse rather than better). Told in an epistolary manner, it always maintains the sense of horror you’d expect from this classic.

The Turn of the Screw

This one actually isn’t as plagued by film adaptations the same way the previous ones are – except for one, which is quite brilliant. I’ve written several times about this gorgeously eerie and uncanny story on my blog, so I won’t go into too much detail. Featuring a plot set in an isolated old mansion with creepy kids and a possibly insane governess with some ghostly encounters, this novella will send shivers down your spine – quite an accomplishment for Henry James whose plots are often impressionistic and drawn-out.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

One of my favourite horror-like stories of all time, Oscar Wilde’s only novel is a wonderful work asking the readers how far they would go to achieve eternal youth – and thus all the splendours and possibilities for hedonistic action that would entail, making this one of the most contemporarily relevant books on this list. With a focus on pleasure-seeking and implications of saucy action (although it hardly ever becomes too explicit), this book is suspenseful from start to finish and frequently raises issues of beauty, the arts, good and evil, and it contains a plot so ingenious that it makes me envious. Not to mention that Lord Henry is one of the wittiest ‘moral guides’ in a novel to date. It might not be straight-forward horror, but in a society as obsessed with looks and youth as ours, Dorian’s fate is sure to deliver you a sense of dread.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

While I’m generally not the biggest fan of Washington Irving, this story of merely 40-or-so pages is a particularly short read which will nevertheless give you plenty of build-up, suspense, and horror. It’s creepy, odd and short. It has also inspired several adaptations (one short by Disney as far as I know, and one full-length feature which is so bad it’s hilarious), making it probably one of the most unusual entries in my list. Certainly well worth a look if you have an hour to kill.

The Haunting of Hill House

Written by Shirley Jackson in 1959, this is the most recent entry on this list. Relying more on a form of psychological terror than classical gothic horror, the plot centres around an eighty-year-old mansion at an unknown location. Exploring the now classical trope of someone exploring supernatural occurrences in a haunted house, it probably inspired a whole range of subsequent books and film adaptations, even if they rarely openly acknowledge the influence. For those seeking a clever book which undermines the poltergeist cliché, this is a great read.

The Phantom of the Opera

Sadly much less known than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the same name, Gaston Leroux’s novel was actually Webber’s inspiration. Written in the early 20th century, it tells the ghostly story of an opera house being haunted by a phantom called… Erik… who has a curious interest in the musical events of the theatre and especially a longing passion for the young soprano Christine Daaé. While I can’t vouch for the French original, the English translation I read was well-written. It has a creepy tone and a decent sense of horror throughout.

Anything by Edgar Allan Poe

I never said this would be a particularly original list! But it’s impossible to make a selection of the best classical horror reads without a reference to Poe. So many poems and short stories of his will make you afraid to go to sleep at night. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’? A gorgeous account of insanity. ‘The Black Cat’? Beautifully dark and creepy. ‘The Raven’? A lovely eerie poem with one of the best uses of long trochaic lines in all of literature. And all of his writing is perfectly accessible to a contemporary audience. Not all are gothic in nature, but most of them are. All of them are excellently entertaining. His bizarre detective stories starring Auguste Dupin even became the blueprint for master detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. For one of the best Poe-experiences, be sure to check out Vincent Price performing ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’!

Anything by H.P. Lovecraft

Probably another obvious choice, Lovecraft’s stories are just… bizarre. Whereas Poe deals with more ‘classical’ horror themes such as isolation or terror, Lovecraft goes into the strange realm. Every story features an exploration of the horror of the unknown, the potential threats that it can entail, and overwhelming otherworldly powers which humans cannot even begin to understand. While I can’t recommend them as wholeheartedly as Poe’s stories (just because he doesn’t write quite as well), they nevertheless ooze brilliance. They’re great because they give you that sense of uncanny uneasiness you feel when confronting things beyond comprehension.

Closing words

This should give you plenty of reading material to get you through the month! Unless you’re a creepily quick reader or have too much time on your hand, I suppose…

But there’s one film which is so ghastly, so horrific that it puts all these horror classics in its shadow. Something so terrible that I cannot even mention it here… I’ll just quietly leave you a link – click if you dare.

Did you enjoy this article? Did I miss something you think I should have included? Then please leave me a beautiful comment so that I can get back to you! Otherwise, if you’d just like to show me your appreciation, please click on one of the tender buttons below. That way you can share it on the social media of your choice. Have a lovely October everyone 🙂