Tracing horror from myth to screen.
Every horror film has ancestors. Dread Atlas reconstructs the stories, beliefs, monsters and fears that existed before the screen, following their transformations through literature, folklore, censorship and cinema.
Black Sabbath anchors this first editorial cluster: each node is an entry, and each line a relation with its own reliability level.
The returning dead: a broad category for the dead who physically return among the living, attested in medieval chronicles long before the vampire.
A figure in Romanian folklore: a restless soul or body, living or dead, associated with unusual births and irregular deaths. Often conflated with the cinematic vampire.
The dead who return to feed on the living. The term entered European languages in the eighteenth century through Habsburg administrative reports on Serbian cases.
A dead person who returns and feeds first on those closest to them. Less a folkloric term than a nineteenth-century Russian literary form, made familiar by cinema.
Folklore, documents, literature and production on one map. Toggle the layers on or off.
From eighteenth-century Serbian exhumations to a false Illyrian poem, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, from Bava to later adaptations: the lineage of a family monster.
The aristocratic vampire: a parallel branch.
A literary hoax that reworks accounts of Balkan vampires.
Composition date; published in 1884.
A debt to Bava has not been demonstrated.
William of Newburgh collects stories of the returning dead
DOC: DocumentedThe case of Petar Blagojević at Kisiljevo appears in the Viennese press
DOC: DocumentedThe Visum et Repertum report on the Medvedja case
PRIM: Primary sourceIn Serbian cases, alleged vampires attack relatives and neighbours
PRIM: Primary sourceDom Calmet publishes his treatise on apparitions and vampires
DOC: DocumentedJohn Polidori’s The Vampyre: the aristocratic vampire emerges
DOC: DocumentedMérimée publishes La Guzla, a collection of fabricated Illyrian songs featuring vampires
DOC: DocumentedPushkin publishes Songs of the Western Slavs, including the poem «Vurdalak»
ATTR: Critical attributionA. K. Tolstoy writes «La Famille du Vourdalak» in French
ATTR: Critical attributionA. K. Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak appears in Russian
DOC: DocumentedThe story is first published in Russian translation
DOC: DocumentedTolstoy makes family contagion the story’s central idea
DOC: DocumentedLa maschera del demonio: Bava’s first credited film, distributed in the US by AIP
DOC: DocumentedBava brings the Vurdalak to the screen in I tre volti della paura
DOC: DocumentedItalian release of I tre volti della paura
DOC: DocumentedGorca calls his family to him in I tre volti della paura
DOC: DocumentedUS release as Black Sabbath, re-edited and re-dubbed by AIP
DOC: DocumentedA band from Birmingham adopts the name Black Sabbath
DICH: Stated by the authorGiorgio Ferroni’s La notte dei diavoli returns to Tolstoy’s story
ATTR: Critical attributionTim Lucas publishes the monograph «Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark»
DOC: DocumentedWhy we reclassified the attribution of «La goccia d’acqua» from a declared source to an unproven similarity.
A film with declared sources, doubtful sources, two versions and a monster with a literary history: the ideal case for explaining how the atlas works.