In finishing my book with an investigation of Frankenstein's creature and the vampire, I appear to be gesturing forward towards later manifestations of the Gothic. Their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the creature and the vampire became two of the Gothic's most familiar and iconic figures, from their most famous iterations in Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) to the twentieth-century obsession with their filmic counterparts and the positive ubiquity of the vampire across a range of genres in the twenty-first century, from paranormal romance to urban fantasy to arthouse horror. However, my book has not aimed to look forward into the future of the Gothic or suggest that the observations made about the underlying theologies of the creature and the vampire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are universalizable. Like their own literary and mythic forebears – among them immortal wanderers, apparitions and Cain – the early literary vampire and Shelley's novel become one of a number of intertexts informing later manifestations of the creatures they depict. The particularities of their theological status, however, are intimately linked to the historical and theological context. Shelley's investigation of the creature’s development may raise timeless questions about the nature of humanity, but her probing of the theological implications of fallen, though not evil, flesh tie into the theological and philosophical debates of her day. The damning queer theologies of John Stagg's ‘The Vampyre’ are absent from the modern iterations of gender-fluid, sexually ambiguous vampires popularised by Anne Rice. Theologies of fleshly corruption are over-written in depictions of the vampire as superhuman. Polidori's monstrous corrupter becomes the tragic anti-hero of a thousand modern and contemporary romances. Narratives of infectious iniquity are replaced by purposefully de-theologised medicalised paradigms of contagion in texts like Richard Matheson's I am Legend (1954). This is not to suggest a strictly linear development or a complete erasure of the theological underpinnings of the early British Gothic's vampire or of Shelley's creature from later iterations. The position of the vampire as religious other is, for example, foregrounded in Dracula but it is reframed through a specifically antisemitic lens which recasts Catholicism as a source of religious power over the supernatural.