Horace Walpole (1717-1797)

Some people would call Edgar Allan Poe the father of horror.  Poe, exemplary though his work may be, simply fine-tuned the genre.  I'd rather give this honor to the British Horace Walpole and his novel The Castle of Otranto.

Before Walpole, there were a great many literary works that pictured what we might today classify as horror.  They include monster activity in the anonymous Beowulf, and depictions of Hell and the Devil in Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost.  But all of these works simply happened to accidentally have these elements in their otherwise-genred narratives.  Until 1764, no author had considered a genre that scared people.

The Castle of Otranto was first published that year, and became an overnight success.  It is a novel about the downfall of Manfred, the Baron of Otranto, beginning with a giant helmet that falls from the sky and kills his 15-year-old son on his wedding day.

In other words, Manfred descends into madness, much like other works of Gothic fiction that the work inspired.  In his 1924 edition, Montague Summers shows connections between Manfred of Sicily (who possessed the real castle of Otranto) and this novel.

In fact, Castle bears more resemblance to the romantic Gothic novel than strictly to the gothic horror novel.  But it certainly sparked a mass wave of imitators.  Initially, most actually paled in comparison to the later famous works.  Poe is considered the first horror author of great quality, but imitators were yet to come.

From the publication of Castle until its sesquicentennial, other famous works of such fiction included The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886; Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818, bearing no resemblance to James Whale's 1931 film other than a mutual tale of a hideous outcast; The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's only novel, 1890, depicting a man who sells his soul to look eternally youthful, only to have his portrait age; and Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897, which was based on Vlad the Impaler, ruler of a province of present-day Romania in the 15th century, and single-handedly created the vampire myth.

Artwork was influenced by this movement as well, particularly in post-modern editions of horror stories.

LASTING INFLUENCE: 500/500
Horror is definitely here to stay.

INFLUENCE ON WISDOM AND BEAUTY: 174/200

UNIVERSALITY: 121/150
Horror is published chiefly in the English-speaking world, but to a smaller extent in countries like Japan.

INFLUENCE ON PEERS: 100/100

SINGULARITY: 43/50

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