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This chapter examines the tradition of periodical adventure stories that existed in Britain during the period 1825–1935, focusing on “story papers” and “penny bloods,” also known as “penny dreadfuls.” It first provides a historical background on the emergence of British comics before discussing “story papers” and “penny dreadfuls,” and especially their relationship with similar publications in America and the characters who, in retrospect, can be seen as protosuperheroes and villains. It also shows how these publications established the market and audience for adventure comics in Britain and influenced the rise of a similar market in America, where dime novels and pulp magazines, along with newspaper strips, would later influence the rise of superhero comics. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three of the early treatments of the superhuman from science-fiction literature: Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Philip Wylie's The Gladiator (1930), and Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935).

Considers mass readership and the ‘tastes’ it produces. Maps the history of criminals and execution spectacles, particularly as addressed by the London ‘public’ voices of Defoe and Dickens. Connects these mass events to the new mass print culture and circulation forms, such as the penny dreadfuls and their Newgate novel precursor. This shows the development of the public’s ‘taste for blood’, anxieties at an encroaching nonhumanity, and an infatuation with the inhuman from Jack Sheppard to Sweeney Todd and Dracula.

This chapter discusses how British horror films reveal the British national psyche as the heritage film or the social realist drama. It describes the British horror film as the site where high- and low-culture converge. It also talks about real-life horror and how it is easily transformed into generic fantasy. The chapter discusses the English fascination with murder. It talks about the importance of the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century as a kind of anti-Enlightenment vision of the spooky, and its influence to the cheap mass-market publications or 'Penny Dreadfuls'. It also talks about the influence of this low-brow popular literature that can be observed in the pulp fiction and horror comics which would cause a moral panic in the 1950s. The chapter discusses serial killers and 'Ripperology', the small industry that sprung up around Jack the Ripper that has cast a remarkable shadow over the British horror cinema.

This chapter analyses how Terrence Fisher's and Hammer Studios's use of a mechanistic medium to distribute film mirrors the use of the printing press to first publish the “Penny Dreadfuls” in Victorian England. It mentions James B. Twitchell, who notes in his study Dreadful Pleasures that the key to the central elements of the Gothic mythos for the public is “repeatable image-making”. It also notes Fisher as the first Gothicist to have precisely the right censorial climate and the sensibility to be able to translate the term “implicit” to the screen. The chapter discusses how Fisher adamantly stated in a 1975 interview that he had not originated either Dracula or The Curse of Frankenstein as a project. It looks at Fisher's insistence to have very little input on casting in Dracula, which was subordinate to his interests in the narrative.