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.
www.ireland.com
