I AM LEGEND
A dystopic vampire novel from 1954, I Am Legend is one of writer Richard Matheson’s best-known works. The plot concerns the fate of the last remaining human on earth, Robert Neville, who is a survivor of a war-driven plague that has turned the rest of humanity into monstrous versions of themselves with symptoms resembling vampirism. Neville, who has lost his entire family, is desperate to find a cure for the pandemic, to which he alone is immune.
Frightened and lonely, he barricades himself in his house, which becomes a symbol for the last vestiges of society as it was before the catastrophe. Groups of vampires try to overwhelm him every night, led by Ben Cortman, his neighbor. Eventually, in his daily forays to find food and supplies (the plague victims cannot go out in the daytime), he stumbles upon a woman, Ruth, who appears to be uninfected. After a time, he learns that she is a spy sent by the others to gather data, and that she was slowly able to overcome the aspect of the illness that prevented her from traveling in the daylight, thus enabling her to masquerade as a human.
After a warning to leave or he will be killed, Neville is injured mortally in another skirmish with the nocturnal army of vampires. As he is dying, Neville realizes that he is simply a memory waiting to happen, the residue of an older time. In the new society that will live after him, he will be remembered as a legend. He hastens his own end by committing suicide rather than dying from his wounds or facing execution at the hands of his adversaries.
With this important novel—which appears to expand on similar ideas from the masterful 1951 novella Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Jr.—Matheson firmly established himself as a force in American horror literature and a major influence on subsequent writers in the genre (including Stephen King, who has cited Matheson, and particularly I Am Legend, as a chief influence on his own writing). Rife with symbolism and infused with a rich thematic subtext—the new consuming the old and effecting change (revolution); groupthink as an infectious and toxic technique to blunt individualism; the dangers of technology run amok; the crushing hell of existential nothingness—the book is still a benchmark in the field, and it holds up well more than six decades after its first publication. Transcending the vampire myth, it has been a chief inspiration for the postapocalyptic zombie and disease tropes so prevalent in the postmodern era, especially in film and comics—beginning with the first film adaptation of the book, The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price and penned by Matheson himself under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson (a name he reserved for works he contributed to, but which were altered beyond his comfort level as a creator). There have also been two additional versions, The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith. The book’s profound impact on popular culture is also visible in the precipitous rise and eventual dominance of zombies in horror entertainment; I Am Legend was a prime catalyst for George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie that introduced the now-iconic zombie of pop culture.
In 2011 the Horror Writers Association gave the novel a special one-time Bram Stoker Award for Best Vampire Novel of the Century.
Jason V Brock
See also: Vampires; Zombies; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.
Further Reading
Clasen, Mathias. 2010. “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.” Philosophy and Literature 34, no. 2: 313–328.
Ketchum, Jack. 2009. “On I Am Legend.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 57–61. New York: Citadel Press Books.
Miller, Walter M., Jr. 1951. “Dark Benediction.” Fantastic Adventures 13, no. 9 (September). Chicago: Ziff-Davis.
Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
“I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM”
First published in 1967, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a bleak, postapocalyptic story that takes place more than a century after a nuclear war between the United States, Russia, and China. The nuclear holocaust is initiated when one of the three nations’ supercomputers becomes sentient. The self-named AM, frustrated by its disembodiment, kills every human being in the world except for five individuals, whom it has psychologically and physically altered and kept alive to torture.
The story is told from the perspective of the youngest among them, Ted, an unreliable narrator who suffers from paranoia, but who considers himself to be the only unaffected individual in the group. The other four characters include Benny, a former scientist who has been transformed into a near-mindless, ape-like figure with grotesquely enlarged sexual organs; Gorrister, formerly a principled intellectual who is now apathetic and in a constant state of languor; Nimdok, so named by AM and the oldest of the group, who suggests that they go on a quest for a cache of canned food; and Ellen, the sole woman and African American among them, whom AM has altered to be sexually insatiable. The story follows these characters on their journey to find sustenance, all the while being tortured in various ways by AM. The supercomputer (or A.I., as it would be more commonly called today), starves them only to later provide a menu of increasingly disgusting foodstuff, which the protagonists have no choice but to consume. As well, AM creates bizarre creatures that hunt them, tortures them with sounds, blinds Benny, and continuously plays on their collective angst. After an arduous journey the group finally reaches the stash of canned foods, but realize they have no way of opening the cans. The entire expedition, it seems, has been a ruse crafted by AM, a seed of false hope planted as another means of torment. At this point Ted, realizing that killing his fellows is the only way to save them from their predicament, attacks and kills Benny and Gorrister. Ellen, reaching the same conclusion, kills Nimdok and is in turn killed by Ted. AM, furious at what has occurred, alters Ted into a blob of flesh, trapping his consciousness forever in an unresponsive and helpless physical and mental prison.
The events that motivate “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” read like a checklist of cultural anxieties especially prevalent at the time the story was published: cold war paranoia, fear of nuclear destruction, and distrust of technology, especially the increasingly widespread use of computers in industry. These concerns and others are displayed in full force in the story and are given additional weight by Ellison’s unabashed narrative voice that revels in the extremity of the author’s terrible vision.
A well-received video game based on the story and with input from Ellison was published in 1995. In 2009 the story was selected for inclusion in the Library of America’s two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales, representing the best in American fantastic and horror fiction that has been published from the eighteenth century to the present.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Ellison, Harlan; Unreliable Narrator; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.
Further Reading
Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.
Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
IN A GLASS DARKLY
One of the most lauded and studied works by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), the collection of short fictions In a Glass Darkly represents the height of its author’s subtle power in penning terror and suspense alongside keen insights into the human mind and conscience. Collected in three volumes in 1872, the year before Le Fanu’s death, In a Glass Darkly includes five previously published tales now presented together as case studies from the personal papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a German physician and practitioner of metaphysical medicine.
Comprising the first volume of In a Glass Darkly, the three tales “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” exhibit a specific similarity in that they each recount the story of an esteemed professional (a reverend, a naval officer, and a judge, respectively) who becomes haunted by a presence that no one else can see. Le Fanu plays skillfully with the uncanny, providing some evidence for the reality of these supernatural entities while also including more than a suggestion that these men are—more naturally—haunted by their own flaws, the entities they see being only psychological manifestations of moral failings or selfish compulsion.
The latter interpretation is further supported by the theme of the fourth tale, The Room in the Dragon Volant, a masterful nod to the earliest staples of the Gothic genre—an adventurous mystery of romance and evil intent. While part of the mystery involves a room known to have been the place of mysterious disappearances, the narrative is one of the “supernatural explained.” The mysterious room is a setting only of mere human deceits, but deceits that nearly cost the protagonist his life as he becomes ensnared in a confidence scheme to steal his fortune and is nearly buried alive. As in the previous stories, Le Fanu suggests that this mystery is also a moral tale exposing the weaknesses of romantic, idealistic, and selfish thinking when such supersedes proper restraint.
The finale of In a Glass Darkly is also Le Fanu’s most influential work: the homoerotically charged vampire novella Carmilla. In contrast to the previous stories, Carmilla is undeniably fantastical. The vampire is real, and the young protagonist, Laura, is saved from danger by the insights of Baron Vordenburg’s occult scholarship. Several attributes of Carmilla were a direct influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), including the sexualizing of the vampire and the juxtaposition of ancient superstition with modern science. Dr. Martin Hesselius and Baron Vordenburg serve as models for Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing. Like Stoker’s more famous work, Carmilla draws attention to the moral and physical dangers of sexual and intellectual repression in civilized society. Only in facing challenges responsibly with knowledge and temperance may people find victory over that which haunts them. Removed from danger, Laura concludes her story, explaining that “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (Le Fanu 1993, 319). Whether real or imagined, the fears Le Fanu masterfully mirrors in In a Glass Darkly are clear reflections of the human psyche.
Mark Wegley
See also: Carmilla; Gothic Hero/Villain; “Green Tea”; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Vampires.
Further Reading
Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Harris, Sally. 2003. “Spiritual Warnings: The Ghost Stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.” Victorians Institute Journal 31: 9–39.
Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1871–1872] 1993. Carmilla. In In a Glass Darkly, 243–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Melada, Ivan. 1987. Sheridan Le Fanu. Boston: Twayne.
Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Tracy, Robert. 1993. Introduction. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27, no. 2 (Fall): 59–77.
INCUBI AND SUCCUBI
Incubi and succubi are male and female demons that, according to folklore and legend, engage in sexual intercourse with human beings, draining their life force and, if allowed to continue, eventually destroying them. Beliefs about such demons have played an important role in the religious and folkloric belief of Western Christian culture for more than a thousand years. Incubi and succubi have also played a significant role in horror literature and cinema.
The idea of sexual contact between humans and the ghost world seems to be a very old one. The Chaldeans, a Semitic people in the south of Mesopotamia (ca. first millennium BCE), had their “demons of nocturnal emission,” and the Israelites also knew a cult involving sexual contact with demonic goats, which was forbidden by the Bible (Leviticus 17:7). The Greeks had their fauns and sylvan spirits, and Middle Eastern peoples believed in djinn who lusted after women.
The first mention of incubi (the male variety of these demons) can be found in the writings of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430 CE)—better known as Saint Augustine—especially in his monumental De Civitate Dei or The City of God (written between 413 and 426). He asserts that common folk call the dreaded fauns and sylvan ghosts “incubi,” but he is not sure whether these beings are capable of sexual intercourse with humans since they only have an “aerial” body (Augustinus 1841, book 15, chapter 23). It is worth remarking that Augustinus saw these pagan spirits as demons, so through him they became a part of the Christian religious system.
From the eleventh century CE, incubi and succubi were treated as scientific fact in Western culture. Authors such as Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), Bonaventura (1221–1274), John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308), William Durandus (1230–1296), and Peter of Aquila (d. 1361) asserted that demons have a body that is apt to have intercourse with humans. The most important propagator of this opinion was the great Catholic scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). He affirmed in his highly influential Summa Theologica (written ca. 1265–1273) that sexual contact between demons in the form of incubi or succubi and humans cannot be denied. Aquinas thought it possible that children may be born of such a union. These children, he said, are not the children of demons but of humans, since demons are not able to produce semen. They collect it as succubi from male persons and pass it over to women after having changed their form into that of incubi (Thomas Aquinas 2012, p. I, qu. LI, art. III).
This concept of incubi and succubi became an integral part of the later witch trials that began as a mass phenomenon throughout Europe in the late 1400s and reached their peak (having spread to America as well) in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The most notorious book on witches and witchcraft, the witch-hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), first published in 1487, has a lot to say about incubi and succubi. The author of this book, the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer, was of the same opinion as Aquinas concerning procreation by demons, teaching that they can beget children by stealing semen. They feel no lust, says Kramer; their only purpose is to lead humanity into sin. The witch, on the other hand, lusts after the incubus and embraces him willingly, so she sins of her own free will.
Nicholas Rémy (ca. 1530–1612), a provost (judge) of Nancy (a city in Lorraine, a territory on the border between France and Germany, eventually annexed by France in 1766), wrote an important book on witchcraft, Daemonolatreia (1595), in which he treats incubi and succubi among many other subjects. He writes that the demons assume bodily form, “but I think that body will be either the corpse of a dead man, or else some concretion and condensation of vapours” (Rémy 2008, 12). Following Aquinas’s theory, Rémy maintains that the incubus injects the semen he previously collected as a succubus, and he adds that “if the Demon emits any semen, it is so cold that they [the witches] recoil with horror on receiving it” (12–13). In contrast to Thomas Aquinas and the Malleus Maleficarum, Rémy does not believe that children can be born from the borrowed semen.
The Franciscan theologian Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701) produced a whole book on the subject of incubi and succubi under the title De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis, written around 1700 but not published until 1875. Sinistrari details all the theories here described, plus many stories of the workings of the demonic incubi and succubi, but he introduces a new element that might explain why his book was not printed during his lifetime. In contrast to the teachings of the church authorities, he sees the incubi and succubi not only as spiritual beings but also as corporeal beings: “ those creatures would be made from the most subtile part of all elements. . . . God Himself, through the medium of Angels, made their body as He did man’s body, to which an immortal spirit was to be united” (Sinistrari 1927, 35, 36). Sinistrari calls these beings animals, and he is of the opinion that they have a soul and are capable of salvation. So for him they lose a great part of their demonic nature and return to what they initially were: fauns and sylvan beings.
This deep history of theological speculation and, as it may seem to modern sensibilities, supernatural obsession lies behind the long-lived substream of horror stories about sexual demons (or sometimes, if not specifically demons, then supernatural sexual predators), even in those instances when the incubus and succubus are not explicitly named, and/or when the basic idea of them has been abstracted away from overtly theological concerns as such and placed in the service of fictional works more generally concerned with evoking a thrill of horror. A notable early example is Matthew Lewis’s classic novel The Monk (1796), in which the succubus-like character of Mathilda, empowered by the Devil himself, seduces the saintly priest Ambrosio with her sexual wiles, leading him inexorably to his eventual doom and spiritual damnation. Additional examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. J. K. Huysmans deals with incubi and succubi along with many other supernatural and occult matters in his 1891 novel The Damned. F. Marion Crawford’s “For the Blood Is the Life” (1905) relates the tale of a murdered woman’s vampiric spirit that drains the vitality of the young man she loved from afar in life. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Short Trip Home” (1927), published in The Saturday Evening Post, tells of a young female college student being seduced by an incubus, in this case the ghost of a dead young man. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967) Ira Levin has the Devil himself, aided by a modern-day coven of witches, play an incubus-like role by impregnating a woman. In Ray Russell’s The Incubus (1976), a series of rapes and murders in a California coastal town are the work of a demonic incubus that is trying to impregnate human women. In Frank De Felitta’s The Entity (1978)—a fictionalized account of a real-life paranormal assault case in 1974—two parapsychology graduate students investigate the case of a California woman who has been repeatedly raped and assaulted in her home by an invisible presence.
Rosemary’s Baby, The Incubus, and The Entity were all adapted to film (the first in 1968, the latter two in 1982), and the results represent just three entries—the first a classic horror film directed by Roman Polanski, the second something considerably lesser, the third a notorious and increasingly valorized entry in modern horror cinema—in the onscreen careers of demonic sexual spirits. As with the literary incarnations of incubi and succubi, additional examples in cinema are plentiful. But of more significance in establishing the import of incubi and succubi for horror fiction is the fact that near the end of the eighteenth century, the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) produced what has sometimes been characterized as the master image of the entire Gothic horror movement, and this took the form of an explicit representation of the incubus. Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which he painted in 1781 and then went on to reproduce in several alternate versions when it proved extremely popular, depicts a woman fallen backward across a bed in a swoon while a spectral horse peers out from behind a curtain. On the woman’s stomach squats a leering, apelike gargoyle or demon. The specific meaning is unclear, but the painting’s subject is plainly that of a woman being assaulted and oppressed in her sleep by an imp or demon, whether real or the product of a nightmare. London’s Tate Britain museum, in notes written for a 2006 exhibition of works by Fuseli and William Blake, describes the painting as “an enduring image of sexual terror” (“Gothic Nightmares” 2006).
Fuseli apparently suffered from what would now be called sleep paralysis—an experience of coming to consciousness from sleep and finding oneself paralyzed with a sense of suffocating weight on one’s chest, often accompanied by terrifying perceptions of a threatening supernatural presence—and his painting is often interpreted today as a depiction of that experience. Not insignificantly, this same experience was the original referent of the English word “nightmare,” which has since devolved to mean simply a bad dream. Also not insignificantly, it has often been invoked in the modern world as an explanation for the many firsthand reports throughout history of apparent attacks by incubi and succubi. Whatever the case, Fuseli’s painting caused a sensation when it was first displayed in 1782 at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London, and it went on to exert a profound influence over Gothic and horror fiction, being used as a model, for instance, by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein for her description of the scene in which the monster kills Elizabeth, and then again by director James Whale for the analogous scene in the classic 1931 Universal Studios adaptation of Shelley’s novel. Echoes of it, and thus of the basic incubus/succubus dynamic, have also been discerned in much vampire fiction and film, where the basic idea of the vampire, which drains people’s life blood—a trope that is obviously and easily relatable to the sexual drainings of the victims of incubi and succubi—is often presented in scenes of a sleeping man or woman being assaulted by a creature that leans or hovers over them.
The upshot for the world of horror literature is that the incubus and the succubus are not just two monstrous figures existing on a level with many others (such as the zombie, the werewolf, and the mummy), but are somehow implicated in the roots of literary horror as a whole. Originally conceived in Western Christian culture as sexually predatory demons that try to destroy people’s bodies and souls, and given paradigmatic treatment by such towering figures as Augustine and Aquinas, the incubus and succubus were incorporated into horror literature on a veritably genetic level right from the start.
Michael Siefener and Matt Cardin
See also: The Damned; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; The Monk; Rosemary’s Baby; Russell, Ray; “A Short Trip Home”; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Andriano, Joseph. 1993. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
“Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination: Room 8.” 2006. Tate. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/gothic-nightmares-fuseli-blake-and-romantic-imagination/gothic-6.
Moffitt, John F. 2002. “A Pictorial Counterpart to ‘Gothick’ Literature: Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35, no. 1: 173–196.
Rémy, Nicolas. [1595, 1930] 2008. Demonolatry: An Account of the Historical Practice of Witchcraft. Translated by E. Allen Ashwin. Introduction and notes by Montague Summers. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Sinistrari, Ludovico Maria. [ca. 1700, 1927] 2014. Demoniality. Translated by Montague Summers. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.
Stephens, Walter. 2002. Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Charles. 2002. “Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 2 (June): 279–309.
INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION
The International Gothic Association (IGA) is the organization that brings together critics and scholars of the Gothic from around the world. It does so in various ways: through its website, through its biennial conferences, and through its journal, Gothic Studies. It also acts as an informal network, which has had tremendous benefits in terms of joint publication, multiauthored books, and research projects. It was founded in 1991 at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.
The IGA’s website, www.iga.stir.ac.uk, is currently hosted by the University of Stirling and provides information about current and future events, including conferences, publications, and contact details, as well as a Postgraduate Forum and a Directory that offers links to other Gothic-related resources.
The biennial conferences have been held over the years at the universities of East Anglia, Stirling, Liverpool Hope, Lancaster, Surrey, and at St. Mary’s College Twickenham in the United Kingdom; at Mount Saint Vincent, Simon Fraser, and Montréal/Wilfrid Laurier universities in Canada; at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France; and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The 2017 conference was held in Mexico.
Gothic Studies was first published in 1999 and is a fully refereed journal appearing twice a year. Its founding editor, William Hughes, remains in that post; at present the journal alternates between “general issues” and issues devoted to a special theme in the Gothic. A particularly impressive spin-off from the journal is the new series of books, International Gothic, published by Manchester University Press.
The IGA elects a president for a two-year period, although this has often been extended to four years by mutual agreement. Past presidents include the late Allan Lloyd Smith; Robert Miles; Jerrold E. Hogle; Steven Bruhm; Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik; and, currently, Catherine Spooner and Angela Wright. It operates through an Executive Committee, consisting of the president(s), the executive officer, the chair of the IGA Advisory Committee, and the editor of Gothic Studies. The Advisory Committee, a larger body, has an additional number of members, between fifteen and twenty; its chair is David Punter. There is an Annual General Meeting of the IGA each year, in person during conference year and electronically in the other years.
The IGA is committed to furthering and promoting the study of the Gothic in all its forms, from traditional Gothic fiction through contemporary Goth culture, including arts ranging from literature to the visual arts and music. It seeks to capture and discuss Gothic as it has manifested itself historically, from the medieval to the modern, and to ensure that scholars of the field are able to access resources—human and technological—that will aid them in their research.
The IGA has proved resilient in its approach to changing practices in research, as well as in contemporary developments in the meaning of Gothic, which continue to evolve as Gothic finds new modes of expression in cultures worldwide. The IGA has proved itself, and continues to do so, an organization responsive to new trends, even as it endeavors to keep alive the memory of past cultural traditions.
David Punter
See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Criticism.
Further Reading
International Gothic Association. Accessed June 27, 2016. http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk.
INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARD
The International Horror Guild (IHG) (originally the International Horror Critics Guild) was created in 1995 as a means of recognizing the achievements of creators in the field of horror and dark fantasy, supplementing other similar genre awards such as the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. The last awards (for works from 2007) were announced in 2008.
The IHG Awards, which were spearheaded in their last years of existence by editor and critic Paula Guran, were decided by a jury of notable, knowledgeable horror/dark fantasy critics and reviewers. Over the years, Edward Bryant, Stefan Dziemianowicz, William Sheehan, Ann Kennedy Vandermeer, Fiona Webster, and Hank Wagner served as judges for the awards. Although it was a juried award, the IHG judges requested recommendations from the public to help them in their search for the most deserving candidates. Those recommendations were then considered when determining the nominees for the awards. The judges decided on winners in each category from the final ballot of nominees. The list of categories included Novel, Long Fiction, Mid-Length Fiction, Short Fiction, Collection, Anthology, Periodical, Illustrated Narrative, Nonfiction, and Art.
The IHG Awards were usually announced annually during a special presentation at a convention or other event. The awards were hosted by the World Fantasy Convention (WFC), World Horror Convention (WHC), and Dragon*Con. The IHG was in no way officially affiliated with WFC, WHC, or with Dragon*Con, nor was it considered a sponsor of any event.
Each year, the IHG presented a “Living Legend” award for outstanding contributions to the field. Harlan Ellison was the first recipient in 1995, and Peter Straub was the last in 2008. Along the way, several other notables were recognized, including Ramsey Campbell, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Gahan Wilson, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Hugh B. Cave, E. F. Bleiler, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Barker.
A lasting legacy of the IHG Awards is their usefulness to readers who are interested in discovering high-quality work in the fields of horror and dark fantasy, since the works of those named as Living Legends by the IHG can provide a valuable guide to recommended reading, as provided by a knowledgeable group of judges who loved and respected genre fiction. The annual listings of the nominees in each award category are also helpful. As of this writing, a listing of all nominees and winners is still being maintained at www.horroraward.org.
Hank Wagner
See also: Barker, Clive; Bleiler, E. F.; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Ellison, Harlan; King, Stephen; Matheson, Richard; Nolan, William F.; Shirley Jackson Awards; World Fantasy Award; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.
Further Reading
International Horror Guild. 2008. http://www.horroraward.org/index.html.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
Interview with the Vampire is the first novel by Anne Rice. Published in 1976, it raises existential questions about the meaning of good, evil, life, and death in the modern world, and it contributed to a renewed cultural fascination with the vampire by abandoning the conventionally tyrannical villain in the Dracula mold that had become a staple of the genre.
The novel is presented as an interview with one Louis de Pointe du Lac, who, in the late twentieth century, recounts the story of how he was turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century by a vampire named Lestat; how he struggled against his vampire nature, regularly clashing violently with his maker, who encouraged him to embrace this dark gift; and how the two settled into an unsettling domestic unity in New Orleans, following their “creation” of Claudia, a vampire destined to remain a child in body, if not mind, for eternity. Through Claudia, Rice introduces one of the more disturbing characters in horror literature. Claudia is a taboo-breaking creation who crosses many cultural and social boundaries, embodying both innocent victim and monstrous creation; child and lover; the dead child but also the child who will never die. While Louis is the narrator, it is Claudia’s story that haunts the novel, bubbling beneath the surface, generating unease and discomfort because she is fundamentally unknowable. Through this unholy union between Louis, Lestat, and Claudia, the novel offers a fascinating and perverse representation of family, bound by blood and death.
Key influences on Rice’s novel were Richard Matheson, whose horror and science fiction writing reimagined familiar genres through a contemporary lens, and the Universal horror film Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which is notable for its sympathetic and yet morally complex female vampire, who longs for release from the curse of vampirism, while remaining driven by her insatiable physical desire for blood. Rice would draw into her novel the film’s exploration of the tension between desire and guilt, between self-loathing and the sensual pleasure in being a vampire. These characteristics were enhanced by the novel’s first-person narration.
While Rice did not originate the figure of the sympathetic vampire, her novel emphasized the importance of the vampire having its own voice, making the novel particularly significant in a period when marginalized groups sought to articulate their perspective through the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements. This is one reason, alongside the novel’s evocation of polymorphous sensuality among its primarily male vampires, that it was perceived to operate as an elongated allegory for homosexual desire, an exploration of identity, and a celebration of alternative sexualities. Ultimately, Rice offered a new model of a soulful vampire that continues to haunt contemporary literature and media.
Interview with the Vampire was adapted to film in 1994 by director Neil Jordan, with Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as Louis, and Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. The film version was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Stacey Abbott
See also: Rice, Anne; Vampires; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.
Further Reading
Benefiel, C.R. 2004. “Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (2): 261–273.
Tomc, S. 1997. “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 95–113. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wood, Martin J. 1999. “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature.” In The Blood Is the Life, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 59–78. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
The Invisible Man, published in 1897 by H. G. Wells, is a novel that explores the moral and social consequences of scientific progress through a tale of a scientist who renders himself invisible. The story begins as a mysterious man, wrapped from head to toe, takes a room in the West Sussex village of Iping. The man’s strange and solitary behavior attracts the curiosity of the villagers. In a dispute over money, the stranger throws off his clothing to reveal he is entirely invisible. After causing a panic, the Invisible Man takes shelter in the home of a university friend, Kemp, and reveals himself as Griffin, a young physics student who has discovered how to render living tissue invisible. Griffin had experimented on himself to ensure he would have full credit for his discovery. His desperate escape from London, however, has left him without money, clothing, or access to the equipment he needs to become visible again, driving him insane. Rather than assist in Griffin’s declared “Reign of Terror,” Kemp alerts the police. After a struggle, Griffin is overwhelmed by a mob and killed, his body again becoming visible in death.
As a moral tale, Wells’s novel dramatizes the Ring of Gyges episode from Plato’s Republic, which questions whether or not morality is really the product of the fear of being caught. In addition, Wells draws much symbolism from who can and cannot “see” Griffin; Wells uses visibility in a similarly symbolic way in the 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind.”
The initial horror of the Invisible Man comes from his coverings, which mark him as a man-machine hybrid. Later, when Griffin has shed his disguise, it is not his otherness that is unsettling, but his ability to move unseen into private spaces and homes. Not only a tale of scientific overreach, The Invisible Man also demonstrates how society rejects the abnormal: Griffin’s inability or unwillingness to find help pushes him from marginal figure to antagonist.
As with Wells’s other “scientific romances,” scientific pursuit holds an occult power over the scientist figure, in which the abstractions of scientific research are somehow more “real,” Also typical for Wells, however, the Invisible Man’s extraordinary nature must contend with everyday life. Wells pits the conflict of the Invisible Man against the villagers of Iping in terms of the antagonism of town and country, of cosmopolitan progress versus tradition and superstition.
The story has since been adapted numerous times, notably in a 1933 film by director James Whale. The Invisible Man is an equally engaging investigation into experimentation on the body and society’s resistance to scientific pursuit.
Miles Link
See also: Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; The Uncanny; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.
Further Reading
Beiderwell, Bruce. 1983. “The Grotesque in Wells’s The Invisible Man.” Extrapolation 24 (4): 301–310.
The Invisible Man. 2014. Directed by James Whale. Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, DVD.
MacLean, Steven. 2009. The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
IRVING, WASHINGTON (1783–1859)
Born April 3, 1783, in Manhattan, New York, to Scottish-English parents, Washington Irving was a writer of short stories as well as an essayist, historian, and biographer, who became one of the first American authors to achieve international notoriety and commercial success for his work. Named after General George Washington, the revolutionary hero (and, later, first president of the United States), who had negotiated the British ceasefire the same week in which young Irving was born, Washington Irving is most famous for his 1819–1820 publication The Sketch Book, written under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, in which his best-known stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) first appeared.
Irving’s career as a writer began in the Morning Chronicle, in which he wrote scathing social and cultural commentaries under a pseudonym (a habit he would maintain throughout his fictional works), before he founded Salmagundi, a literary magazine, in 1807, which also satirized New York cultural life. After the success of his first book, A History of New York (1809), Irving edited Analectic Magazine and began writing biographies. From 1819 to 1820, Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was published in installments, and with its great success Irving lobbied hard for stronger legal practices to protect his lucrative copyright on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though he was and is famed more for his fictional histories and biographies of well-known historical figures than his horror fiction, Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a romantically Gothic tale of the headless Hessian horseman who haunts the eponymous town of Sleepy Hollow, has long been preserved in America’s cultural imagination. Noted for its Gothic imagery and for its representation of local superstitions, myths, ghost stories, and the dreamy quality of pastoral life in upstate New York, “Sleepy Hollow” is lent a haunting gravitas by Irving’s earlier experiences in the real-life town of Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown, New York, where Irving recuperated from illness as a child. The story has provided the basis for one of director Tim Burton’s most beautifully realized Gothic films, Sleepy Hollow (1999), as well as Fox TV’s supernatural drama of the same title.
Other short stories published in The Sketch Book included “Rip Van Winkle,” a Gothic pastoral folk tale cum ghost story set in the haunting Catskill Mountains, and “The Spectre Bridegroom,” a Gothic drama in which a slain bridegroom returns to fulfill a promise to his bride-to-be, set in a German castle near the Rhine. Tales of a Traveller, published in 1824 (which includes the supernatural horror story “The Devil and Tom Walker”), was also published under Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon pseudonym. Later in his life, Irving published famed biographies on Christopher Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, the prophet Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as other works of fiction inspired by his time in Spain, where he lived from 1842 to 1846, serving as the U.S. minister to Spain.
Irving died on November 28, 1859, at seventy-six years of age. His literary reputation and his impact on American culture is one of the greatest among his contemporaries. A little-known fact is that Irving was the first to call New York City “Gotham,” the name that later became famous in the Batman comic book universe. The surname of his fictional historian persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker, has become the colloquial name for New Yorkers. Irving is also responsible for reimagining American Christmastime in his writing, and he was the first to introduce the (false) idea that Europeans previously believed the earth to be flat, prior to European voyages of discovery. As a writer of Gothic horror, Irving’s output was minimal, but the influence of his most well-known works on the genre (particularly “Sleepy Hollow”) cannot be overstated.
Ian Kinane
See also: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.
Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books.
Irving, Pierre M. 1862. Life and Letters of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. New York: G. P. Putnam.
Irving, Washington. 1969–1986. The Complete Works of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. Wisconsin: Twayne.
Williams, Stanley T. 1935. The Life of Washington Irving. Two Volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896 by H. G. Wells, is a novel about scientific ethics and human identity. The story is told by Edward Prendick, sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific. He is rescued by Montgomery, a former medical student fleeing scandal, now carrying a consignment of animals to an isolated island. On the island, Prendick discovers several menacing, strange-looking men. Prendick initially fears that Moreau is transforming humans into animals; Moreau explains, however, that his experiments shape animals into human form. The resulting “Beast People” are held in check by a strict set of laws meant to suppress their instincts, especially the tasting of blood.
One day, Moreau is accidentally killed by a half-finished creation. Without their supreme authority figure, the Beast People revolt, and Montgomery is killed as well. Prendick lives an uneasy existence with the Beast People, who revert slowly to animal instinct, until he escapes the island by boat.
Moreau echoes the tale of Circe from the Odyssey, and also John Milton’s Comus. Both of these older works depict a malevolent magician transforming lost travelers into animals. The book also draws from Jonathan Swift’s inverted critique of society in Gulliver’s Travels, especially the ending: upon his return to England, Prendick finds it difficult to distinguish human beings from animals, and, like Gulliver preferring the company of his horse, chooses to live out his days in isolation.
The novel’s primary concern is the ethics of scientific experimentation. Moreau was driven out of England following a sensationalist exposé, “The Moreau Horrors.” However, Moreau himself is untroubled by any moral objections to vivisection. Prendick is impressed by Moreau’s scientific resolve, yet repulsed by the carelessness with which Moreau discards his finished experiments. The novel asks what responsibility scientists hold for their creations.
Most importantly, Wells blurs the dividing line between humans and animals. Moreau’s laws, which recast instinct as sinful behavior, are an early form of the Freudian view that civilization is only possible by suppressing desire, or a jaded version of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract. In addition, Prendick’s conjecture that the Beast People have been hypnotized into submission suggests a critique of mass culture, drawing a parallel with the newspaper-led controversy that drove Moreau from England. The Beast People’s ritual cry, “Are we not Men?” is thus a poignant question, picked up by subsequent film adaptations (notably in 1996, and in 1932, as The Island of Lost Souls). “Moreau” has subsequently become a byword for unethical scientific practice.
Miles Link
See also: Body Horror; Mad Scientist; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.
Further Reading
Glendening, John. 2002. “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2): 571–597.
The Island of Lost Souls. [1932] 2011. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD.
Parrinder, Patrick. 1995. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
IT
It (whose title is sometimes capitalized as IT) is an award-winning novel by the American novelist and horror writer Stephen King. At over 1,300 pages in paperback, It is among the longest of his many works. Published in 1986, the novel centers on a battle between good and evil in a small Maine town. Though ostensibly fictional, Derry is heavily based upon the real-life environs of Bangor, Maine, where King relocated specifically to write the novel, and where he still resides. Today the Bangor “Stephen King Tour” focuses on many of the locations that either inspired or are directly included in the novel.
It depicts the conflict between the “Losers Club”—a band of misfit childhood friends—and an otherworldly evil that emerges every thirty years to terrorize Derry. This “IT” takes the form of its victim’s innermost fear, a conceit that allows King to indulge his love of pulp horror staples. “IT” manifests most frequently as a terrifying clown figure known as Pennywise, but its real nature is stranger by far and strays into the Lovecraftian territory that forms a loose metaphysical backdrop to much of King’s supernatural fiction. The children confront and defeat Pennywise, but three decades later a spate of child murders heralds the reeruption of trouble in Derry, and the adult members of the Losers Club are drawn back from each of their disparate lives to do battle once more.
The length and complexity of It means that this straightforward good-versus-evil plot is only one strand in the novel. Indeed, Pennywise the Clown is not actually named (except in a single authorial intrusion) until well past page 500. The central plot expands into a nostalgic meditation on childhood, friendship, and memory. In addition, King offers a detailed sketch of a small New England city in the mid-twentieth century, where the threat of Sputnik (the Russian satellite by which the Soviet Union gained a lead on the United States in the “space race”) and “the bomb” are balanced against the prosaic anxieties of adolescence.
It contains numerous references to King’s wider universe. Pennywise, or another of his species, appears in the final volume of The Dark Tower, while other characters are referenced in various stand-alone novels. For instance, Dick Halloran, a major character in The Shining, appears as a younger man, and one of the “losers,” Eddie Kaspbrak, is mentioned in Misery as a childhood neighbor of protagonist Paul Sheldon.
King fans often list It as a personal favorite among his works, usually second only to the equally epic apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978). Pennywise is perhaps King’s most iconic villain, and his impact is due to both the huge success of the book—the best-selling novel of 1986—and Tim Curry’s portrayal of the character in the 1990 television miniseries. Critics have also pointed to links between Pennywise and serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who performed as a party clown. The novel’s greatest influence, arguably, is in elevating the figure of the monstrous clown to the pantheon of contemporary Gothic monsters. It remains King’s grandest novel and the most comprehensive distillation of his thoughts on fear, childhood, imagination, and community, which together form the thematic spine of his writing career.
It was the winner of the 1987 British Fantasy Award for best novel and was also nominated for the Locus Award and World Fantasy Award. In 2017 the first part of a planned two-part feature film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Andrés Muschietti and starring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.
Neil McRobert
See also: The Dark Tower; King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.
Further Reading
Drey, Mark. 1999. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. New York: Grove Press.
Magistrale, Tony. 1992. “Art versus Madness: It and Misery.” In Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half by Tony Magistrale, 101–133. New York: Twayne.
Magistrale, Tony. 1988. Landscape of Fear. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press.