We all have our fave movies or series in the horror genre, from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), still the best version and horror film of all time, through to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1973), or Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), to Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025). The modern horror genre in art, media (cinema, TV/streaming, audio), and literature (short, long, graphic novels, comics) is one that has been a remarkably varied and significant cultural thread since at least the 18th century.

Here, on this site page, I thought I would curate some online resources and media that point to the original, adapted, or remade, but all scary, classics in horror. This is an ongoing project, these are some of my faves, and I hope you will enjoy them too, or indeed lose your shit…..

Some of you reading this page may be familiar with a legendary evening held during the month of June, 1816, between Lord Byron, his soon-to-be wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, and Dr John William Polidori, Byron’s personal physician. Prior to retiring to their beds, Byron proposed they each wrote a ghost story. From that evening were born, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), by Mary Shelley, and The Vampyre (1819), By Dr John Polidori, the former becoming one of the most famous gothic novels in English literature, and the latter resulting in ultimately tragic consequences for its author.

Below is the public domain audiobook of the whole novella, Dr Polidori’s The Vampyre….best enjoyed mid evening with a glass of red wine, a cigar, and by candlelight:

Carmilla (1872), a gothic novella by Irish writer, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, presaged the modern vampire era, alongside other highly influential novels, such as Dr John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Carmilla was a remarkable literary piece that reinvented many aspects of earlier vampire lore from Eastern Europe, and was also singularly curious due to the titular protagonist being a lesbian vampire, as opposed to a dark gentleman in The Vampyre, Dracula, and other contemporary stories, e.g. Varney the Vampire, serialised in a ‘penny dreadful’ (1845-1847).

Below is a very nicely produced overview of Carmilla for you to be infotained by:

Here are three excellent, short films by Stephen Gray, each an adaptation of a Montague Rhodes James [1862 – 1936] story, MR James being an acknowledged master in the subgenre of short ghost stories, despite writing some thirty only:

‘If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.’

We’ll be returning to MR James later….