Feature by ALAN BARNES
Most of the great Gothic horror novels – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), for example – are as much about science as they are the supernatural. Victor Frankenstein uses electrical energy to resurrect the dead; Dr Jekyll uses chemistry to bring out the beast hidden inside himself; Abraham van Helsing uses electrical recording apparatus and blood-transfusion tech in his eff orts to save the victims of a certain vampiric Count, and Sherlock Holmes uses forensics, in part, to solve the mystery of that gigantic Hound.
The British quad poster for Hammer’s The Mummy (1959).