- Mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers

You can trace the origins of horror as far back as you can the origins of man. Tales of shape shifters, blood drinkers and the walking dead pervade the folklore of every culture on earth. In other words, we've always been fascinated by monsters. "In all of us there is the instinct to shun that which is abnormal or strange in others," wrote horror aficionado Richard Davis, "yet we are fascinated by it. Given a fictitious monster to fear, we do not, as often in real life, have to hide our feelings of revulsion. We can allow ourselves to enjoy being shocked and repelled."

Back when the ancient Greeks were known simply as the Greeks, stories of murder, magic, cannibalism, disfigurement and things that go bump in the night were all the rage. Centuries later, all that changed was the opportunity to mass market nightmares, giving rise to an enduring cache of 19th Century horror literature that hypnotized the world and holds us still. These days we're less likely to read a book, though, than go to the movies or pop on a DVD.

Early on in the 20th Century the monsters fled the printed page for Hollywood, ending up at the gates of mighty Universal, the studio that more than 70 years ago embarked on a legendary cycle of fright flicks. It was Universal who molded the folklore, mythology and literature of horror into manageable movie chunks, writing the book on big screen beasts as diverse as the Wolf Man, Mummy and Creature From The Black Lagoon.

Today those visions seems quaint in comparison with the more visceral approach to horror championed by George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead (1968) yet their influence remains undiminished by the years. In every zombie there's a bit of Boris Karloff. In every vampire, a hint of Bela Lugosi. Pretty much every horror movie you've ever seen owes something to those original screen monsters.

Count Dracula is by far the greatest of them, a vampiric superstar who boasts more super powers than an entire legion of costumed comic book heroes.

An immortal predator holding dominion over the creatures of the night, wolves and rats among them, one minute he's a bat, the next an eerie mist. Free of the ravages of conscience or emotion he is the unstoppable psycho within us all, yet his incredible powers come at a price, balanced as they are by a slew of Achilles' heels. Garlic he hates, holy water and crucifixes too. Sunlight kills him, though nine out of ten slayers favour a stake through the heart.

Inspired by the blood lust of Transylvanian folk hero Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes, a 15th Century monarch and sadist best known for his enthusiastic skewerings, Dracula rose to eternal life from the imagination of Victorian author Bram Stoker, and remains a firm fixture of popular culture thanks to his iconic incarnation in Universal's earliest horror hit. Limited only by the special effects available at the time, Todd Browning's Dracula envisaged the Count as a sophisticated tyrant whose eerie smile hid several lifetimes of wrongdoing. Regardless of his wild overacting, Bela Lugosi's magnetic performance cast a mould from which most bloodsuckers since have sprung.

Vampire movies of note include unsettling silent German effort Nosferatu (1922), England's own Hammer House of Horror favourite Dracula (1958), which remains the most faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel, and the jokily self-aware yet genuinely scary Fright Night (1985). Shadow Of The Vampire (2000) (2000) is also a must, a twisted account of the making of Nosferatu that suggests that its leading man, the peculiar Max Schreck, really was a vampire. Finally there's Blade 2 (2002), based on the Marvel comicbook, particularly notable for recasting the vampire as the good guy.

Thanks to the real life horrors of the trenches, the Holocaust and Vietnam, vampires are no longer the greatest evil we can conceive, so much so that from time to time we can even accept them as heroes.

Frankenstein's Monster could never play the hero. We wouldn't let him. A pathetic creature cobbled together from odd bits of corpse, he's a terrible sight to behold, yet deep down what he craves is love and acceptance. Unfortunately those are the two things that mankind is incapable of giving him, freaked out, as we are, by his terrifying visage and inevitable stench. Unwilling to seek out his sweet side, we treat him like a monster, chain him in dungeons and chase him with flaming torches, and so a monster he becomes. Really, we're the bad guys. We deserve his wrath.

A warning from the early 19th Century on the dangers of playing god - geneticists please take note - Frankenstein originated from the dreams of a teenage girl, surely the most terrifying creature of all. At 18, Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley, travel writer, novelist and wife of Percy Shelley, was inspired to seek out a tale that would "...speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling horror. One to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." She succeeded, not only in scaring readers witless, but also in forcing us to acknowledge that it's our own intolerance that makes this world such a terrible place.

In Universal's hands, Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935) defined for future generations the twin notions of the tragic monster and mad scientist.

"Everybody's a mad scientist," says David Cronenberg, director of Scanners and The Fly, "and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos."

Between Englishman James Whale's spirited direction, Jack Pierce's classic bolt-through-the-neck make-up and Boris Karloff's heartbreaking portrayal of The Monster, these films remain the best in the Frankenstein canon. Possibly because of the censorious times in which they were made, the Frankenstein movies and many of their contemporaries had a dignity, subtlety and aspect of pathos about them. The advent of movie gore saw off those nobler qualities, yet perhaps because the film world never saw their like again, those early creatures remain as potent now as ever, living large in our imaginations.

Just as you think of Bela Lugosi whenever you hear the name Dracula, images of Boris Karloff invade your mind at the merest suggestion of Frankenstein's Monster. "His face fascinated me," said Whale of his imposing leading man.

Despite the many more recent versions of the Dracula and Frankenstein legends, both creatures remain deeply entrenched in their thirties movie roots. The Mummy, too. Be honest, now. Who among us hasn't spent a rainy day wrapping ourselves from head to toe in loo roll and lumbering around the house moaning? That's pure Boris Karloff.

Born from the ancient Egyptian obsession with death and steeped in the supernatural, the Mummy is a natural movie monster. Explorer Howard Carter and his merry band of tomb raiders may have escaped the horrors of the walking dead after unearthing Tutankhamen's remains in 1922, but the power of the Pharaoh's curse was enough to send them all to early graves.

That story alone was enough to inspire a legion of Mummy movies, kicking off with Boris Karloff in Universal's atmospheric 1932 version, followed by Christopher Lee's spirited Hammer treatment in 1959, and finally coming into its own courtesy of Stephen Sommers' adventurous "re-imagining" of Mummy mythology in 1999. They all wear the bandages, though. Remaining true to Egyptian superstition has never been a priority. Remaining true to Boris Karloff's make-up job, however, remains an absolute essential.

The 1940s brought a significant new addition to the Universal stable. The Wolf Man, played by Lon Chaney Jr, son of the silent horror film star known as the Man of a Thousand Faces.

Like Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man has always warranted a little sympathy. That's not to say you'd want to stop and stroke a werewolf or toss him a chew toy, because to him you are the chew toy. But he's driven by forces beyond his control and knows not what he does. That has to count for something. As Claude Rains explains in the 1941 classic, "even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the Autumn moon is bright".

In the hands of the movies, the legend of the lycanthrope becomes a fable about duel identity and an excuse to spill copious amounts of blood. And thanks to advances in special effects, werewolves are no longer men with hairy faces. Check out the Wolf Man in Van Helsing to see just how far Hollywood has come. But if it's scares and sick black humour you're after, you won't do any better than An American Werewolf in London (1981).

The lesson is, you can't keep a good monster down.

Stake them through the heart. Blast them full of silver. Torch them to a crisp. They'll be back. They always come back. Not for us, and not for real, but on the big screen. Safely removed from our reality they remain the masters of their own, free to rise from their graves, from the deep, from Hell or from outer space to eviscerate horny teenagers and give us all a guilt-free vicarious thrill.

"It's like boot camp for the psyche," explains Wes Craven, director of A Nightmare On Elm Street and The People Under The Stairs. "In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like Columbine. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears."

Strange though it might seem, there's nothing more life affirming or reassuring than watching the fictional die horribly. "Fear," wrote H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror fiction, "is the oldest and strongest emotion". It makes sense that we'd want to experience it, even enjoy it, albeit in a controlled environment. We survive but the monster doesn't, at least for a little while. We confront our inner demons in a safe and entertaining manner. We identify, confront and defeat those things that scare us most about the world, about others and most of all, about ourselves. And we feel better.

That's what monsters are for, and why we'll never outgrow them.