This paper focuses on human appeal to horror in literature and traces the link between the old legends and myths from Eastern and Central Europe and Gothic literature leading to creatures that invoke apprehension and terror in Romantic writings. We begin by examining horror elements in some of the initial proto-vampires to be encountered in European folklore and analyse several eastern legends with the purpose of depicting and defining their specific features. This paper also aims at probing into the psychological and social issues that incite human want for horror stories. The cultural theory of the emerging of horror in literature will be presented and discussed as well as what the horror that the vampire represents stands for.
Zarieva et al. (Sun,) studied this question.