A Ghosting we will go!
Creating the horror genre in early 18th-century England
As Halloween approaches, the TV and the internet alike are loaded with horror films while bookstores display novels with covers featuring decaying mansions, vampires, and witches. And even when Halloween is miles away, we still have plenty of horror to choose from.
The idea of ghosts, apparitions, witches, and demons, of course, is hardly new. These entities have occupied the human imagination throughout the centuries in nearly every part of the world with variations.
Yet prior to the eighteenth century, there was little in the way of horror writing in the West: that is, writing designed specifically to whet the appetite for horror itself. There was even less in the way of fiction — no counterparts of Stephen King, Richard Matheson, or Neil Gaiman.
So just as any paranormalist asks “how and why did this ghost appear,” we might ask how and why did the horror genre materialize in the West?
I. Augustine Calmet and his Dissertations upon the apparitions of angels, daemons, and ghosts
Long before The Amityville Horror, Paranormal Activity, the Netflix Haunting series, or any other so-called authentic accounts of the supernatural…
