Delve into the deliciously dark Bram Stoker Festival
Get your teeth into four days of fiendish fun and undeadly adventures at Dublin’s Bram Stoker Festival.
Celebrating the Dublin-born horror novelist Bram Stoker and his most famous creation – Count Dracula – the Bram Stoker Festival presents four days (27 – 30 October) of supernatural thrills across Ireland’s capital.
Featuring walking tours, reimagined movies with live scores, comedy, freaky cabarets, live podcast recordings, a spectacular parade and, for the bravest souls, a trip through a Victorian graveyard, it offers hair-raising events to suit everyone.
Theatrical highlights will include Dracula: A Journey into Darkness, a staged reading of Dracula chapters 1–4 at the Abbey Theatre that will be filled with intensity and suspense, and Revenant, a visceral, frightening experience marrying elements of horror with deliciously dark comedy.
The twisted world of Monsieur Pompier’s Travelling Freakshow can be experienced in Nightmaresville, a mind-bending cabaret, while film buffs can delve into a reimagining of the cult movies Faust and Night of the Living Dead.
Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker will present an interactive workshop, Dissecting Dracula, at Dublin Castle while Criminal Insanity: Bram Stoker and the Inmates of Millbank Prison will uncover the murky, real-life people and places that informed Stoker’s masterpiece.
Among the festival’s popular walking tours are A Time to Vote, Warmbloods: Vampires Question Modern Art, a comedy tour of the National Gallery of Ireland, and A World Full of Miseries, and Woes, and Troubles: Life, Disease and Death in Collins Barracks, one of two tours on offer at the National Museum of Ireland site.There are also literary tours of Trinity College and Marsh’s Library and a tour of the Victorian memorials, tombs, vaults and crypts at Mount Jerome Cemetery.
On a lighter note, Stokerland, a pop-up Victorian fun park, will take place in St Patrick’s Park offering a mix of storytelling and draw-alongs, bands, dance parties, street theatre, spooky science shows, magic shows and circus workshops.
The festival will come to a close with Cnámha La Loba, an utterly astonishing parade through the city streets telling the story of a wild wolf woman and presented by the world-renowned pioneers of imagination, Macnas.
Ireland is regarded as the best place in the world to enjoy authentic Halloween experiences and other festivals for your to-do list should include the world-famous Derry Halloween in Northern Ireland and the Púca Festival in County Meath in Ireland’s Ancient East.
C/O www.ireland.com
