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 ( Read more... )

These two videos appeared in the sidebar of Youtube recently while I was watching an M.R. James documentary. I'm sharing them here primarily for the benefit of
( Read more... )

I still have a veeerryy long list of book, film and TV reviews to write up, and maybe I'll get to some of those later today. But first, I want to write about the thing I saw last night while it's all fresh in my mind, and that is a contemporary dance production of Dracula by the Mark Bruce Company. As ever for these things, my companion for the ( Read more... )

I saw this on Tuesday evening with notorious Dracula-enabler ms_siobhan, and it was absolutely captivating. I'm not a big ballet-goer - in fact, I think the last live ballet I went to was a performance of The Nutcracker at the Birmingham Hippodrome with my mother during my mid- to late-teens. But when ms_siobhan pointed out that this was on, recommended it highly ( Read more... )

Aw, sad times. With this film, I reach the end of my joyful rewatching of Hammer's Dracula series - or at least, the ones with Christopher Lee in them, anyway. I've saved it till last partly because I watched it only 18 months ago, but also because I unironically and enthusiastically love it. I am thus ending the series on a high, and I am very ( Read more... )

Having rediscovered the joys of Hammer's Dracula on our recent trip to Manchester, it seemed like time to revisit some of the sequels. I picked this one first because it is my favourite of what you might call the 'straight' sequels - that is, the ones in which they were playing the story fairly seriously, rather than as a pastiche or a parody. I ( Read more... )

The other day while taking money out at a cash-point, I noticed that there was rather more money in my bank account than I'd been expecting. The next time I had a spare moment, I went online to find out why, and saw that a payment of £477.34 had been made into my account by Queen's University Belfast ( Read more... )