Photo by Sarina Sandwell
Visit the Engagement Collection located on the east side of the Second Floor North Reading Room to view some spine-chilling reads just in time for Halloween!
We hope to frighten you with the many Halloween related resources available to you through the NYU Libraries. Proceed if you dare . . . !
Photos by Weiwei Lin
Just one of the many treasures you will find at NYU Special Collections. The first edition of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976, and was based on a short story she had originally written a few years earlier. Rice would add twelve more titles to her Vampire Chronicles series based upon the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. Initially released in book form, Interview with the Vampire was made into a movie with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst in 1994, as well as the ongoing TV series on AMC. Rice based her style of vampire on their depiction in the 1936 Universal Pictures movie Dracula's Daughter, a great example of how one creative work can influence and inspire others across genres and historical periods. While Rice's vampires are of a specific type - 'elegant, tragic, sensitive' in her words - there are many other types of vampires in literature, several of whom lurk in the NYU Special Collections. Among these are Dr. John Polidori's Vampyre, a story created the same night and in the company as Mary Shelley created Frankenstein; Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, and of course the most famous vampire of them all, Dracula. While Anne Rice's main characters Lestat and Louis are both suave and tragic, other vampires created at the same point in the late 20th century were perhaps less appealing, such as those who appeared in Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot.
Here are links to some interesting resources beyond NYU . . .