John William Polidori

The Vampyre John William Polidori

The Vampyre is a short work by John William Polidori taken from the story Lord Byron told as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The same contest produced the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The Vampyre is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre. Polidori's work had an immense impact on contemporary sensibilities and ran through numerous editions and translations. That influence has extended into the current era as the text is seen as "canonical" and - together with Bram Stoker's Dracula and others - is "often even cited as almost folkloric sources on vampirism". Charles Nodier wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre.