Opium and horror-tale reading at Diodati seeded both Frankenstein and The Vampyre.

Evidence

Masterpieces of horror were also influenced by drug use. Mary Shelley’s masterpiece of horror, Frankenstein, written when she was just 19, may have been fueled by an opium trip. As dramatized in Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, Shelley and a group of her friends spend a strange night at Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva, in which drug consumption and the reading of horror tales inspired not only Frankenstein, but also Dr. Polidori’s story The Vampyre, which served as an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 459

Categorization

• CANDY: The single Geneva night that produced both Frankenstein and the seed of Dracula is an excellent cocktail-party fact.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the exact chain from Polidori’s Vampyre (an Eastern count) to Stoker’s Dracula.