# Was Romantic/Victorian/pre WWII horror really scary at the time? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 14, 2013, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242 "2013-10-14T18:58:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2013, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/21 "2013-10-15T19:49:50Z")
> [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](#): > > Some are dated and some are still very effective and unsettling. > > 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). I get a fair tingle from some of the oldies over on [Feedbooks](http://www.feedbooks.com/books/top?category=FBFIC015000&lang=en), they have other genres too. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2013, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/22 "2013-10-15T20:52:05Z")
> [@glaeken](#): > > 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. I don’t know that it was ever intended to be a mystery to the readers. Nowadays, everybody over the age of two and a half knows that Count Dracula is a vampire, but I imagine that even among the book’s original audience, most of the readers who picked it up did so knowing that it was a vampire book. On the other hand, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that the _characters_ weren’t familiar with vampire lore. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2013, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/23 "2013-10-15T21:09:55Z")
I need to correct an earlier post of mine. I said that Edith Wharton said electric lights killed ghost stories. [In fact, she said someone \*else \*said that, and that it was nonsense](http://books.google.com/books?id=QGbcog79s0EC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=edith+wharton+ghost+electric+light&source=bl&ots=efW_wQ7tmp&sig=1u4awzi7e0MiJg9y_O0ohvobWCA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Kq1dUpXYA9LeyAHV9IAQ&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=edith%20wharton%20ghost%20electric%20light&f=false). Anyway, I still don’t find horror from back then frightening. ---
**Author:** ![glaeken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@glaeken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glaeken)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/24 "2013-10-16T09:19:46Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > I don’t know that it was ever intended to be a mystery to the readers. Nowadays, everybody over the age of two and a half knows that Count Dracula is a vampire, but I imagine that even among the book’s original audience, most of the readers who picked it up did so knowing that it was a vampire book. On the other hand, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that the _characters_ weren’t familiar with vampire lore. Well I am not sure what the original intention was but to me it read like it was meant to be a mystery. The evidence of what is going on builds up very slowly throughout the book and it does seem like it’s aiming at making the reader puzzle over just what is behind it all. I do wonder just how known vampires were pre Dracula as I had always heard it was the book that made them so popular and before that they were not really something most people would be very familiar with. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/25 "2013-10-16T14:28:09Z")
Some places are creepy, no matter the modernity — or even because of it — _genius loci_. And although unlike Germans and Americans the modern British don’t have basements, they used to in the form of cellars; and supposing these to be more than a mere coalhole I can say definitely that the addition of an ancient bare single electric lightbulb dangling beyond the stairs and lighting up the cheery cement in no way diminished the depressing whole but enhanced the mystery. Stoker may have been influenced by the New England Vampire panics popular amongst those people during the 19th century, when although the corpses were not supposed to rise and partake of a blood-feast, they were imagined to be draining the life from within the grave, so were subject to the penalty of being dug up and partially consumed. \* This is within living memory a few decades back. As for Lovecraft: _You fool, Warren is dead_. - Pun deliberate. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/26 "2013-10-16T15:04:41Z")
I’m another one who’s underwhelmed by Lovecraft. Yeah, yeah, the most frightening monsters are the ones from our own imaginations… But you’ve got to give us at least something to work with. Has anyone mentioned Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” yet, though? That one creeped me right the Hell out. Not precisely “scary”, in that you feel like there’s an inquisitor about to pop out of a dark corner at you or anything, but it still felt very real. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/27 "2013-10-16T16:06:47Z")
> [@glaeken](#): > > I do wonder just how known vampires were pre Dracula as I had always heard it was the book that made them so popular and before that they were not really something most people would be very familiar with. I thought most British people would be familiar with [_Varney_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varney_the_Vampire). \*[Carmilla](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla)\*was another popular story. And **Claverhouse** ’s mention of the [New England Vampire Panic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic) is pretty good evidence Americans were familiar, too. Moreover, that historical incident shows that real people would react to a vampire more quickly than the characters in \*\*\*Dracula \*\*\*did. ---
**Author:** ![glaeken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@glaeken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glaeken)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/28 "2013-10-16T16:34:50Z")
Interesting references. Thanks for that. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/29 "2013-10-16T17:55:42Z")
Don’t forget the Vampire Water-Melons. Never forget the Vampire Water-Melons. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/30 "2013-10-16T21:38:16Z")
One scene, in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” gave me a scare I still haven’t recovered from. No, not the monster. The whippoorwills, timing their calls to the rhythm of a dying man’s last breath…and their screams of triumph if they succeed in capturing his soul. It’s just a bit of background, not at all the main point of the story. But, holy lord, that is scary. ETA: Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows” is brilliant. Apparently it dates to 1907. It always scares the crud out of me; I know never to read it at night when alone. Beautiful, evocative, clever. Brutally scary. You have been warned. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2013, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/31 "2013-10-17T00:47:34Z")
> [@The Great Sun Jester](#): > > 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? Are you comparing early horror fiction to contemporary horror _writing_ or contemporary horror _movies_? Because while it’s certainly possible for a piece of writing to be frightening, a lot of horror movies get their “So scary I screamed/puked/peed!” moments out of shocking/frightening _visuals_ like blood and gore, special effects monsters, and things unexpectedly jumping out at the characters. These don’t work, or at least not in the same way, in writing because the reader has to imagine what things look like and has total control of the pacing and to some extent the order of events (e.g. jumping to the end to see how it all works out). Even the number of pages left can give the reader a sense of what’s likely to happen. The main character probably won’t be killed with 100 pages left. Psychological horror or suspense lend themselves well to the written form, but while such stories can be very frightening or disturbing they’re not usually the “so scary I wet myself!” type of horror. As for how people at the time reacted to Gothic novels and the like, in Jane Austen’s _Northanger Abbey_ the heroine is a big fan of such books. She and her friends talk about how terrifying they are, but the tone of these conversations is so light and casual that it reminded me of how girls talked about Christopher Pike books when I was a teenager. The characters _say_ things pretty close to “OMG! You gotta read this book! Scared me so bad I soiled myself!”, but it seems clear they’re not really serious. I think that many of these books were seen as trashy good fun by readers and not genuinely horrifying. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2013, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242/32 "2013-10-17T01:13:49Z")
Is modern horror scary? Do people get scared by anything they read? Does anyone but shrinking violets actually get creeped out by creepy pasta? I thought it was just all in good fun or coming up with cool ideas, like campfire stories. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-romantic-victorian-pre-wwii-horror-really-scary-at-the-time/671242.md?page=1)