Victor refers to the Creature as his vampire--a reanimated corpse. The vampire was a notorious figure in British lore in the period, which later be immortalized in John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) a friend of the Shelleys and their guest at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, when Mary first drafted the novel.

At the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, Lord Byron (1788-1824) and John Polidori (1795-1821) joined Mary and Percy Shelley in their competition to write ghost stories on the model of German Gothic narratives.