Co-Directors Tom Lawlor and Maria Schweppe introduce the programme for this year's Bram Stoker Festival, which returns to various venues across Dublin this October.
Bram Stoker's novel Dracula has captivated readers and film fans for more than a century.
The Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival started in 2012 as a way to celebrate and honour one of our most famous writers and has welcomed hundreds of thousands of people to the city for deadly adventures that playfully celebrate Stoker’s work and the Dublin of his time.
This year, the programme has been designed to attract all Dubliners and tempt them into town for some bank holiday weekend fun.
We are incredibly excited to once again witness the magic of Macnas parade unfold on Dublin’s streets. They return to Dublin's streets for the first time since 2018 with this brand new parade, Cnámha La Loba, promising to be an astonishing spectacle on Hallowe’en Eve, October 30th.
At the Abbey Theatre, you can experience Dracula: A Journey Into Darkness, a staged reading of Dracula Chapters 1-4, with Andrew Bennett as Johnathan Harker and Barry McGovern as the voice of Dracula. This marks the first time Stoker's text will be spoken on our national stage, if you can believe it. We plan to present Dracula in sequences in what will hopefully be a multi-annual project, instead of staging a reading of the entire book (which would take at least 18 hours).
A true friend of the festival, Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew will lead an interactive literary workshop at Stoker’s old haunt, Dublin Castle: Dissecting Dracula with Dacre Stoker will unlock secrets behind the creation of Dracula as Dacre dissects rare, replica papers borrowed from libraries and archives worldwide. Dacre is incredibly knowledgeable, charming and infectiously enthusiastic about his iconic ancestor.
For families and the eternally young, our free annual pop-up Victorian fun park in St. Patrick's Park, Stokerland, promises three days of spooky fun, including storytelling, bands, discos, street theatre, art workshops, and more. This year, there will be a Relaxed Session of Stokerland on October 30th from 11am-1pm, designed to welcome those who may benefit from a more relaxed environment.
Monsieur Pompier's Travelling Freakshow will present an exclusive festival event, Nightmaresville, at the Sugar Club. This mind-bending cabaret is packed with bizarre ballads and maniacal music, creating a psychedelic and surreal world! When we discussed this event with the festival team, someone remarked that if this festival isn’t the home for a raucous, freaky cabaret, then what is?!
Film fans can dive into reimagined cult classics at the Pepper Canister Church, with the silent classic Faust (1926) re-scored by DJ Shampain. Maria happened upon event creators Slaughterhouse on Instagram early this year, and loved what they were doing - bringing cult classics to life in unusual venues with a young crowd enthusiastic to experience these iconic films in a new way.
We love artists who play with the horror genre in unexpected ways, and Andrew Mastrovito does exactly this. His work has been presented at galleries, museums and festivals worldwide and I Am NOT Legend, a sequel to his earlier work Nysferatu: Symphony of a Century (previously presented at sold-out screenings at the 2018 festival) is a total reworking of George Romero's masterpiece Night of the Living Dead featuring a live score by the incredibly talented Irish composer Matthew Nolan in collaboration with Kevin Murphy (cello) and Ceara Conway (vocals) .
Alongside these events, literary minds will enjoy delving into history and the supernatural with events featuring Dublin's favourite historian, Donal Fallon. At Three Castles Burning Live - Bram and Beyond, Donal and guests will explore the works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Katharine Tynan and others, highlighting lesser known works in the Irish Supernatural canon.
There’s plenty more events for you to sink your fangs into - find out more here!
The Bram Stoker Festival runs at various Dublin venues from Fri 27th - Mon 30 October 2023.
