As the OP title asks–authors from Shelley to Poe to Lovecraft. How much of their success was founded on, “OMG! You gotta read this book! Scared me so bad I soiled myself!” as opposed to, “Mmmmm, yes, well there’s an interesting thought.” ?
Sure, we can appreciate a good vampire or rogue critter or reanimator story even today. But the writer needs to be really careful lest the story be taken for a joke, and even those creatures tend to be more sympathetic than horrific. Do we, as a society, just have a significantly blurrier line dividing right & wrong, and so what may have been unspeakable 150 years ago is yawn-city?
Well, it was first time around for then readers, notwithstanding the obvious roots in 18th century gothic and the folklore of their european ancestors — who like them, had no film genres or television to accustom them, or in some cases corrupt them, to familiarity with strange morbidities.
Not that mob violence and lynchings etc. did not supply a reality in the physical domain…
However… as a child I was somewhat sensitive, and one particular Edwardian ghost story regarding a nun whose bones reconstituted at the foot of a bed to collect part of her finger gave me severely to think on many dark nights.
I think in the end one stops being scared when the object of terror is seen too many times.
Edith Wharton said that electric lights killed ghost stories. I guess she wasn’t right; there are plenty of ghost stories still being made. But she had a point. Reading Poe, or Dracula, or other stuff by lantern light, or candlelight, where corners were in darkness and the next room was in darkness and outside was *really *dark probably made them a lot scarier.
Interestingly, such stories involve the antagonist mucking about with the lights–as if monsters know they’ll evaporate if it gets too bright–or otherwise overcoming our tech.
I think the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula is still pretty fucken scary. Sure, some of the style seems rather melodramatic and/or corny to us nowadays, but the bit about Harker not seeing the Count in his shaving mirror, to take just one instance, is still something I won’t read alone in the house at night.
The ghost stories of M. R. James, written around 1900-1920, were and still are quite scary.
In one of his stories, a character describes seeing a wight. Instead of eyes, it seemed to have the legs of two great, hairy spiders protruding from its darkened eye-sockets. Creepy stuff! You can check out several of his short story collections here:
Algernon Blackwood’s short stories can also be spooky when he’s on form (“The Willows”). When he isn’t, his stories tend to drag on for too long (“The Man Whom the Trees Loved”) which ruins the effect.
I’ve read one collection of stories from Arthur Machen, and while I didn’t find any of them scary, they were quite dark and atmospheric.
The only Gothic literature I’ve ever read appeared in the Penguin collection “Three Gothic Novels”, and none of them were scary. I found the first of the three, “The Castle of Otranto”, to be far too dated and long-winded to be effective. “Frankenstein” is a work of genius, and I loved every page, but it wasn’t scary either. The last of the three, “Valtek” was a fantastic, hedonistic, comedic, Satanic romp, but again, not scary.
Some of the parts of “Dracula” set in Transylvania were quite creepy, but once the action moves to England, things become more exciting than scary (almost like a detective or thriller novel).
Uncalled-for nitpick: It’s “Vathek,” not “Valtek.”
Off-topic, but related: There’s a lovely moment in Brian de Palma’s (otherwise worthless) The Black Dahlia, where the Scarlett Johansson character is at the movies, watching a silent movie version of Phantom Of The Opera featuring Lon Chaney - and is absolutely terrified! A nice reminder that even back then, horror movies were horror movies - they were supposed to scare their audience shitless, and so they did!
Slighty more on-topic (but not quite there): As a child, I myself was scared shitless by a Russian fairy tale, written down in Czarist Russia but presumably way older than that. A sudden plot twist at the very end: The innocent maid stalks a tall dark stranger she’s met at the village dance, sees him enter a church at night, climbs a ladder, peeks in, and lo and behold - she sees him kneeling by a coffin… eating from a corpse! So there’s an oldie-but-goodie which delivered the goods.
On-topic (finally!): Poe did indeed scare me as a child. The Cask of Amontillado? Scary! Dickens, too, has some supremely scary moments which absolutely had the intended effect on me - I remember being horrified by Nancy’s death, as well as Fagin’s.
I never found Lovecraft scary, and I never managed to finish Frankenstein - the beginning was too damn slow, I just couldn’t get past it. However, I was horrified (and cried) at the end of Treasure Island, of all things, when Long John Silver describes the different possible outcomes of a hanging (although, ahem, the end result is always one and the same).
So, at least for Steken-as-a-child, some Romantic/Victorian/pre WWII horror really did horrify, as late as the early 1990’s.
I remember hearing stories that when “Dracula” was on Broadway in the 1920s, an ambulance was at the theatre to handle people fainting. Sounds like a publicity gimmick or urban legend to me.
Some are dated and some are still very effective and unsettling.
I’d recommend the following:
Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by** Le Fanu** The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
They definitely contain some creepy moments and the last two have a rather original premise.
I reread so many Lovecraft stories so many times that they don’t scare me anymore but The Dreams in the Witch House and Out of the Aeons still make me feel uneasy.
If you can get past the weird, annoying style, there’s William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. A strange, powerful and visionary story with quite a few creepy elements (the Watchers, the Thing that Nods and especially the House of Silence).
On the other hand, you can avoid The Castle of Otranto except if you’re really curious. It’s very dated and frankly the “scary” bits are dull or even ridiculous (a character crushed by a gigantic helmet falling from the sky? Really?).
I’ve heard a similar story about The Phantom of the Opera (1924) - that a nurse was stationed by the door of the theater in case people fainted from fright when Lon Chaney’s face was revealed. The source was a host at the Kennedy Center, when I saw The Phantom of the Opera with a live orchestra. If it’s true, it was undoubtedly a marketing gimmick.
I actually only recently read Dracula for the first time recently I have to say it did not seem scary to me at all. My overwhelming impression I took away from the book was it must have been very different to read it back in the day. Reading it now it’s difficult to see why every character is so stupidly slow in figuring out the extremely obvious signs of a vampire. You have characters who are supposedly very intelligent who can’t seem to figure out what on the face of it is the most obvious mystery I have ever read.
Of course when it was written it would not have read like that as the audience of the day had not been saturated with vampire myth/folklore for 100 years or so. Now it’s a mystery story where you are ahead of the protagonists for the vast majority of the book.