Poor Polidori: The Toxic Relationship that Inspired The First Vampire Story

I am obsessed with the story of John Polidori. I’ve been working on a play for a few years about this story called Poor Polidori (contact me to produce when theater is alive again). I write about it briefly in my upcoming book (details to come). I’ve talked about it drunk at bars because I had great conversation skills even in The Before Times and usually one person would say, “this story is crazy! Why isn’t there a movie about it?”

There isn’t a movie about John Polidori’s life because it gets overshadowed by the other, bigger story that was present at the time of this story which is essentially how this story comes to be made to begin with. The major theme here in Polidori’s footnote in history is about being overshadowed, feeling like his life-force was being drained by someone bigger and flashier than he was. This is the story of how literature came to meet the very first vampire story in literature, The Vampyre.

First let us set the scene. It was a dark and stormy summer when the biggest literary giants in 1816 gathered together in Switzerland at Villa Diodati. Does this sound familiar? How about the cast of characters which includes Mary Shelley, Percy Blythe Shelley, Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. WHAT A BUNCH OF ALL-STARS, RIGHT?!