The attention given to vampirism coincided (and maybe contributed to) a rising interest in gothic literature, first in Germany and later (during the last decades of the eighteenth century) in England. The vampire, a revenant from the realm of folklore, became soon adopted by gothic writers. The first in English literature to do so were poets, notably Robert Southey and Lord Byron. But the most important contribution came from Lord Byron's personal physician, John Polidori. He was to write the first piece of vampire fiction in the English .

Polidori's story can be traced to a famous literary gathering on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. He and his employer, Lord Byron, were residing at the Villa Diodati where they were visited by Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (who would soon become Mary Shelley) and Mary's step-sister. One evening, after a collective reading of ghost stories, Byron suggested that each member of the party write a story of their own. Two tales that started Gothic fiction as a genre were inspired by this challenge. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein, while Byron wrote a fragment which lay unfinished and discarded until picked up and reworked by Polidori and issued in 1819 as "The Vampyre".

This story was an immediate and phenomenal success, due in no small part to the fact that most people believed it had been written by his employer; even Goethe considered it Byron's best work. It triggered a rash of vampire plays on the stages of London and Paris, and later inspired a German opera, "Der Vampir".

Interest in vampire literature continued through the nineteenth century with the appearance of several short stories and novels. But it was Dracula, written near the end of the century, that became the model by which all future vampires (in literature and film) would be measured. Stoker combined several of the elements of early vampire fiction with the results of research into vampire folklore - and added a few of his own.

As a result of his novel, the conventions were firmly in place, and are now, thanks to the proliferation of Dracula movies, known by virtually everyone.