u/dty6 u/basedcitizen

Thanks, SS, for giving me the nudge I needed to read the decodingsymbols blog on monsters:

As for the movie "Nosferatu" being the point when vampires became popular, I'd have to disagree with decodingsymbols guy, unless you're specifically going for the era of motion pictures. Its wide-spread popularity actually goes back to the mid-1800s with the penny dreadful series, "Varney the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer.

Penny dreadfuls were pretty much the first affordable reading material for the lower classes in England. Stories were published serially each week, 4 pages or so, for a penny. A lot of people, who were just becoming literate, used them to practice reading. The more sensational the story, the more likely they were to read them. The dreadfuls were passed around between groups of people until they were literally worn out.

So, it is interesting to note that one of the early penny dreadfuls was about vampires and was hugely popular. It went on for 236 chapters and lasted for a couple of years. Most dreadfuls were lucky to survive a few weeks or months.

Rymer, as I've already mentioned to SS, is an oddity in the world of dreadfuls. It is said that the authors were paid a penny a line and pretty much lived hand to mouth. This, however, is not the case for Rymer. In the UK census, his occupation was listed as, "Gentleman." When he died, his estate was worth 7859 pounds, which would be worth 1,085,453.10 pounds in today's currency. So, how did he acquire all of this money if he was only being paid a penny a line? Oh, and did I mention he was a Freemason? Wink, wink.

As for the movie, Nosferatu...

The vampire was played by Max Schreck, which just happens to translates from German to English into "max fright." Bram Stoker's widow sued over this movie because of its similarities to "Dracula" and won. Most of the existing film at the time was destroyed, as per the legal ruling, but one or two copies survived.