Serbian Mythology about Vampires and Horror Fantasy in Milovan Glišić’s Story After Ninety Years

Abstract

Our paper deals with the horror fantasy in Milovan Glišić’s story After Ninety Years, but also with the Serbian origin of the word vampire, and how this originally Serbian myth spread all over Europe in the eighteenth century. The role of cinema in the proliferation of the image of this demonic creature was crucial. Milovan Glišić has produced a significant opus in which we can find the elements of realism and fantasy, of the possible and impossible. He is the author of the most important “vampire” story in Serbian literature, After Ninety Years, and he brought into the Serbian literary scene the famous Sava Savanović. Also, we have researched the influences of European romanticism, and especially the “gothic novel” (Stoker’s Dracula), which has popularized the topic of horror fantasy in literature. An inevitable subject in the analyses of Glišić’s fantasy prose is how the work of Nikolai Gogol influenced him. The demonological substratum in Glišić’s prose work is one of the most relevant in Serbian literature, clearly inspired by Serbian folklore.