John Polidori

...about vampires in literature and movies. Although Bram Stoker's Dracula is inarguably the most famous, Newman points out that John Polidori's Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre (1819), a result of the same challenge Lord Byron issued that...

In this article: Otto Penzler, The Vampyre, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Kim Newman, The Hound, Popsy, Ligeia, and Hallucination

...later inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Byron's fragment was picked up, adapted and developed by his personal doctor, John Polidori, who published this longer tale as The Vampyre - and the floodgates opened. The Vampyre was a...

In this article: The Vampyre, Count Dracula, Dracula, Orson Welles, Dracula, Stephenie Meyer, and Twilight

...volcanic eruption. Mary Godwin (all of 18 years old), her soon-to-be-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori took a summer holiday in a Lake Geneva villa. Trapped indoors by the filthy weather, they amused...

In this article: Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lake Geneva, The Vampyre, and Mary Godwin

...always stalked the cultural landscape at moments of carnal crisis. The seminal short story "The Vampyre," written in 1819 by John Polidori, was based on his fascination with Lord Byron, the icon of Romantic sexual liberation and danger. The...

In this article: Vampires, Neil Gaiman, AIDS, Dictum, The Vampyre, and Vampire

...also appeared in the film. The character of Dr Polidori, who did not appear in the original novel, was based on the real-life John Polidori, an acquaintance of author Mary Shelley who was part of the competition that produced her...

In this article: Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein: The True Story, Mary Shelley, London, and James Mason

...the idea for "Frankenstein"? Did that spooky storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in 1816 -- you know, the one with Byron, John Polidori and Mary's husband Percy -- send her imagination into high gear? Was it all the result of a...

In this article: Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, Dan Brown, Bilderberg Group, Richard Holmes, Percy Shelley, Frankenstein, and The Lost Symbol

...an idea?" In an introduction to a revised 1831 edition, she told the Gothic tale of the ghost-story contest. (Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire, were the others present.) As for Percy, she "certainly did not owe...

In this article: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft, Gender studies, and A Vindication of the Rights of Women

...Shelley's future bride Mary Godwin (soon to write "Frankenstein") and Byron's physician and traveling companion, John Polidori, obliged. Polidori's effort was doubtless outclassed by the others, but he knew enough to develop later Byron's...

In this article: Heinrich Marschner, Der Vampyr, Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischutz, and Bologna

Delicate and sinewy and richly felt, "Imposture" is the rare novel of ideas that pulses with real blood. Meet, then, Dr. John Polidori, "Polly" to his friends. Nineteen, the youngest medical student to have taken a degree at Edinburgh,...

In this article: The Vampyre, Percy Shelley, New Monthly Magazine, Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker

...have become essential to modern popular culture: Mary Shelley's nameless creature, created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and John Polidori's vampire. Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's otherwise well-researched, fair-minded roundup of the group,...

In this article: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori, Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Gothic, and Suicide