The Start of the Scare

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An Infographic of Dracula by Elizabeth Kimmel[/caption]

There is something uneasy about the transformation from summer days to autumn nights. There is a bite in the air, the sun sets a little earlier, nightfall is somehow darker, and the buzzing of summertime is replaced by the silence of autumn. The slight seasonal changes begin to affect our fright levels. The rustling of newly fallen leaves has our hearts skipping a beat. We can no longer sit on our porches at night, watching fireflies; instead, we quickly lock the door as soon as night falls. And with that, the carefree ease of summer is dead. With the start of fall also comes Halloween, a day that is dedicated to the frights, scares, and terrors of the world. For most of America, we begin the celebration of Halloween on October 1. We buy pumpkins to make jack-o’-lanterns, stores stock up on plastic bats and skulls, and no TV channel is safe from the jump-out-of-your-skin horror film. However, let’s go back to the start of the scare, a time before the Goosebumps series, the Halloween and Freddy Krueger film series, and before The War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The beginning of fright and media came with the publication of two influential works: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and Dracula by Bram Stoker.

These novels, both published in the nineteenth century, were the beginning of popularizing the scary and the frightening. These novels made us question what kind of ungodly creatures hid in our darkened forests, in the shadows of our poorly lit streets, and beyond the safety of our locked doors. The beginning and popularization of horror in published entertainment begins here with these two gothic horror novels, a genre that combines fiction, horror, death, and Romanticism. Before the nineteenth century, there were very few authors who wrote to scare, and even fewer books that fell in the genre of gothic horror.

Frankenstein had us questioning scientific exploration. Experiments were no longer awe-inspiring, but, instead, something to fear. Monsters were not born, but created. The horror in Frankenstein is the unknown. Readers will never find out if the creature died or if he is silently prowling and watching. While Frankenstein focuses on the created, Dracula focuses on the enigmatic monsters. The horror of these creatures is that readers have no idea how Dracula, or even vampires, came to be. These supernatural beings are faster, stronger, and more powerful than us, and they love to hunt us. Humans, who have always been the hunter, have now become the hunted.

These novels are not only the beginning of popularized horror, but have also influenced countless novels and films. Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula have become iconic characters in media today, and even after two hundred years they still instill fear and heart-dropping panic. While we know these characters are fictional and were created from someone’s imagination, there will always be a little voice in our heads telling us different. These novels were the beginning of unease. They took the fears of man, the unknown and the powerful, and weaved them into stories. We can no longer ignore our fears of monsters in the dark or creatures under the bed because they are proudly displayed in the pages of these books. These books were some of the first to make us acknowledge and confront our fears. Since these publications, we have continued to face our fears almost every day, and even more so during the start of autumn, the month of October, and Halloween.

So, this Halloween, let’s embrace the unease, the scary, and the frightening! Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and their monsters would be proud.

Source:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GothicHorror