Charles Holland wished to be alone, if ever any human being had wished fervently to be so. His thoughts were most fearfully oppressive.

I knew it was coming, I heard it coming, but I said nothing.
I felt my worry increase but was afraid he'd think I cared too much and would back off.
I painfully stepped around the glass until he told me what was going on:
I had to cross the razors beneath my feet slowly, as to not cut myself and bleed to death in his sight.
I simply sat silent as he complained to me, yet I felt my shoulders slump, my energy sag.
His pain oozed over my confused flesh and I turned black for him.
My silence scared him away, but he left the glass behind for me.

Hammer brought screen chills to cinema audiences from the 1950s, and many films were made at various studios in Borehamwood. They made stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. However, 25 years before Hammer were splashing around Technicolor blood, another company dominated horror films in Hollywood - Universal.

Ernest conducted Ethel Brandenbourg to his room and helped her to remove her cloak.

While he was placing the garment upon the back of a chair, she slipped a little key into her hand-bag. He looked at her with a question in his eyes.

"Yes," she replied, "I kept the key; but I had not dreamed that I would ever again cross this threshold."

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word vampire as "the reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep." Since the word was first coined in 1734 the myth of the vampire has grown, entering into popular culture with the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 and more recently through the books of Anne Rice, the most famous of which, Interview with a Vampire, was made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.