Event Details

Join Lancaster University Professor Catherine Spooner for a look back at the history of the vampire film.

Dark Dukes is a new festival for Lancaster, launching this Halloween and celebrating all things disturbing and spooky. Across five days the festival will showcase an array of contemporary and classic horror films.

F. W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Nosferatu, often identified as the first vampire film, is 100 years old this year. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an Oscar-winning extravaganza which revived the vampire film for a new generation, is 30.

In this talk, Professor Catherine Spooner will explore why the vampire film has proved perennially popular, showing how the genre has moved from horror to romance and beyond, becoming a truly international phenomenon in the process. Along the way she will revisit old favourites and introduce some new ones - many of which are showing during the Dark Dukes festival.

Catherine Spooner is a Professor of Literature and Culture at the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, where she specialises in Gothic literature, film and popular culture.

2022 marks 125 years since the publication of Bram Stoker’s seminal novel Dracula and the centenary of the iconic silent chiller Nosferatu. To celebrate these two important vampire anniversaries, we are screening seven landmark Vampire films as part of Dark Dukes, curated with Lancaster University’s Professor Catherine Spooner - one of the UK’s leading Gothic experts. These screenings are supported by the British Film Institute as part of In Dreams Are Monsters: A Season of Horror Films, a UK-wide film season supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. indreamsaremonsters.co.uk