World Dracula Day
On Thursday, I had the pleasure of delivering the second Goth City World Dracula Day lecture at the Midland Hotel in Bradford, and thus helping to cement it as an annual institution. I went to the first one last year ( LJ / DW), and had already booked a ticket for this year when I got a message from the organiser asking if I would deliver it this time. I hadn't quite expected that, but I am generally up for any opportunity to talk about Dracula-related things in a public forum, so I agreed.
Various ideas for the topic sprang to mind, but after a chat through the options with in her garden I decided to run with one which really leaned into the theme of anniversaries. The main one was the 125th anniversary of Dracula's publication, but as it happens this year is also the centenary of Nosferatu, 50 years since the release of Dracula AD 1972 and 25 years since the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I managed to fill the rather awkward 75-year anniversary gap with a 1947 revival of the Dracula stage play, and thus a journey through time working in 25-year slices was born.
The audience was small, but they seemed to enjoy themselves, and it was certainly fun getting gothed up celebrating Dracula's 125th anniversary. I can say I played my part in a worldwide event which included Dacre Stoker doing a tour of the UK and a world-record-breaking gathering of people dressed up as vampires in Whitby. Here are a few pictures of the event - the ones of me taken by the organiser, Joel.
As if that weren't enough, thanks to the wonders of modern technology I also managed to be part of another World Dracula Day initiative on the same day. This was the first of a series of videos to mark the anniversary made by Erin Chapman, whom I met at the World Dracula Congress in Dublin in 2016 ( LJ / DW), for the YouTube channel Morbid Planet. She had contacted a bunch of Dracula scholars and commentators, for some reason including me(!) around February, asking us to record little pieces to camera answering three questions she had set us. So we all sent our footage in, and she has now compiled it into three videos, the first of which was released this Thursday and the other two of which will follow. If you'd like to know what I, Dacre Stoker, Christopher Frayling and a bunch of others would ask Bram Stoker if we could sit down for a coffee with him, the answers are here:
Various ideas for the topic sprang to mind, but after a chat through the options with in her garden I decided to run with one which really leaned into the theme of anniversaries. The main one was the 125th anniversary of Dracula's publication, but as it happens this year is also the centenary of Nosferatu, 50 years since the release of Dracula AD 1972 and 25 years since the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I managed to fill the rather awkward 75-year anniversary gap with a 1947 revival of the Dracula stage play, and thus a journey through time working in 25-year slices was born.
The audience was small, but they seemed to enjoy themselves, and it was certainly fun getting gothed up celebrating Dracula's 125th anniversary. I can say I played my part in a worldwide event which included Dacre Stoker doing a tour of the UK and a world-record-breaking gathering of people dressed up as vampires in Whitby. Here are a few pictures of the event - the ones of me taken by the organiser, Joel.
As if that weren't enough, thanks to the wonders of modern technology I also managed to be part of another World Dracula Day initiative on the same day. This was the first of a series of videos to mark the anniversary made by Erin Chapman, whom I met at the World Dracula Congress in Dublin in 2016 ( LJ / DW), for the YouTube channel Morbid Planet. She had contacted a bunch of Dracula scholars and commentators, for some reason including me(!) around February, asking us to record little pieces to camera answering three questions she had set us. So we all sent our footage in, and she has now compiled it into three videos, the first of which was released this Thursday and the other two of which will follow. If you'd like to know what I, Dacre Stoker, Christopher Frayling and a bunch of others would ask Bram Stoker if we could sit down for a coffee with him, the answers are here:
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