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Private Notes
We all know what to fear when the moon is full, but where did the werewolf legend come from? The villagers of 16th-century Bedburg in Germany had always feared the forest that encircled them. But then the young girls of the village started going missing.
Footprints in the snow led to trails of blood. Superstitious minds wanted to believe this was the act of a wolf – or even worse, a demonic half-man, half-wolf. The villagers went looking for a beast in the woods, but the creature they were looking for was much closer to home.
Part whodunnit, part inside-the-mind-of-a-monster, Werewolf dramatises the shocking story that provided the blueprint for cinema’s iconic werewolves.
In 19th-century London, two decades before Mary Shelley wrote her acclaimed novel, pioneering scientific showman Professor Giovanni Aldini successfully used electricity to reanimate animals, severed human limbs and the corpses of recently beheaded criminals. But Aldini needed a whole body – a strong, male specimen, very recently killed by asphyxiation – to attempt his most ambitious experiment: a complete human reanimation. Because he wanted to play God.
Aided by Mr Pass, the man whose job it was to procure bodies for the surgeons to anatomise, an ideal specimen was identified. A strong young man accused of murdering his wife and child. The evidence against George Foster was flimsy, but Aldini and his assistant were determined to have their good clean hanging. Within the hour, an electrified rectal probe would be applied to try to bring this unfortunate man back to life. The experiment, like no other, would have an extraordinary, lethal climax.
It was this true, chilling event that inspired Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror story Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.
Romania, in the 15th Century. Three monks find themselves chained to the wall of a dripping cell in the castle of Vlad Dracula, Voyvoyd of Wallachia. More commonly known as Vlad the Impaler, he is most terrifying ruler of Medieval Europe, a psychopathic mass-murderer and the only man who stands between Christian Europe and the advancing armies of the Ottoman Turks.
From the outset the monks are tested, climaxing in a trial of brutality in which they are called to answer truthfully whether Vlad Dracula will be warmly received in Heaven. Waiting for them is a forest of wooden stakes, ends rounded to stop them puncturing internal organs, prolonging their gruesome effect. The most appallingly slow, painful death imaginable will be their fate if they choose the wrong response.
It was this vicious story that gave birth to the Dracula character of fact and fiction.
