One of Campbell's greatest strengths is his ability to transform the conventional tropes of supernaturalism, lending them new vitality by allusiveness of approach, innovations in narration, and modernity of setting, tone, and character. While it would be unjustly limiting to Campbell to say that he has done nothing but revivify the themes and modes of a superannuated Gothicism, he has certainly supplied a surprising freshness to venerable motifs, especially in stories and novels of the late 1960s and 1970s. And yet, it might well be said that these works, while distinguished in themselves, are in fact merely the stepping-stones to the still more innovative works of the 1980s and 1990s.

One of the most recognizable features in horror fiction is the monster, whether it takes the form of a vampire, zombie, werewolf, witch, mummy, or some more eccentric creature. The monster can be non-human, superhuman, or sub-human, and as such—beyond any mere threat to our species—it presents an intellectual challenge by its mere existence; for such an entity, obeying laws of Nature very different from the ones we know, reveals an appalling deficiency in our conceptions of the universe. The monster, therefore, is of interest not so much in itself as in its symbolism; and beyond its overriding suggestion of the impenetrable mystery of the universe, it can serve as a metaphor for a variety of intellectual, social, political, and other concerns (the vampire as cultural outsider, for example) in accordance with the author's wishes.

Old-time Gothic fiction did not, curiously, employ monsters to any great degree, except the ghost; its chief motif was the haunted castle. Many of the most popular and common monsters are of comparatively recent vintage. The vampire received perhaps its earliest literary treatment in John William Polidori's ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) certainly raised the motif to canonical status, even if that novel itself is only intermittently effective. In reality, it was horror films that both canonized Stoker's novel and made the vampire a ubiquitous horrific icon. Witches certainly have appeared regularly in literature since Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606), but there has been a surprising dearth of truly distinctive treatments of them, with such notable exceptions as Fritz Leiber's sciencefictional Conjure Wife (1953).