The Flea Pit — A Halloween Film Season
25–31 October 2026
Seven films. Seven nights. One immortal obsession.
A Note from the Programmer
The vampire has been haunting cinema almost since its beginnings. Few monsters have proved quite so adaptable, or so willing to accommodate the changing preoccupations of their audiences.
In the silent era, the vampire was a creature of pestilence and death. By the 1950s, it had acquired an aristocratic bearing and a distinctly sexual appetite. Later incarnations would find it wandering American highways, inhabiting fashionable Manhattan apartments, struggling with adolescence or wrestling with questions of faith.
For this year’s Halloween season, The Flea Pit presents seven films spanning almost ninety years of vampire cinema. The programme travels from the shadows of Weimar Germany to the Gothic excesses of Hammer, through the stylish decadence of the 1980s and into more contemporary interpretations of the undead.
These are not necessarily the seven greatest vampire films, nor are they arranged as a ranking. Each has been selected for what it reveals about the genre, the filmmaking traditions from which it emerged and the possibilities of a monster that refuses to stay buried.
The screenings are arranged as a journey through different interpretations of the vampire, with each evening offering something distinct from the last.
The doors open on Sunday 25 October. Naturally, after dark.
Sunday 25 October
NOSFERATU (1922)
Eine Symphonie des Grauens — A Symphony of Horror
Germany | 94 minutes (approx.) | Director: F. W. Murnau
The vampire as pestilence.
Our season opens with one of cinema’s earliest surviving vampire features, an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that very nearly disappeared following a successful copyright action by Stoker’s widow.
Max Schreck’s Count Orlok bears little resemblance to the suave aristocrat of later films. With his elongated fingers, rodent-like features and unnatural movements, he appears less a man than a manifestation of disease. His arrival brings rats, plague and the threat of contamination.
Murnau’s achievement lies in the way he transforms ordinary spaces into places of dread. Doorways, staircases and walls become instruments of terror, while the vampire’s shadow sometimes seems more threatening than the creature itself.
Programme note: Watch how Murnau uses the frame, architectural space and the movement of bodies to create unease. The celebrated staircase sequence remains an instructive example of how horror can be constructed almost entirely through suggestion.
An appropriate beginning: before the vampire became desirable, it was something to be feared.
Monday 26 October
DRACULA (1958)
Also released as Horror of Dracula
United Kingdom | 82 minutes | Director: Terence Fisher
The vampire acquires a taste for blood.
Thirty-six years after Nosferatu, the vampire has undergone a remarkable transformation.
Christopher Lee’s Dracula is imposing, articulate and unmistakably physical. Gone is Orlok’s association with rats and disease; in its place is an aristocratic predator whose threat is bound up with sexuality, violence and the corruption of respectable society.
Hammer’s use of colour is central to the experience. Blood is no longer something merely suggested by a monochrome image. It becomes vivid, almost theatrical, against the richly decorated interiors and Gothic landscapes.
Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing provides an equally important contribution. Far from the elderly scholar of popular imagination, he is an energetic and determined adversary, bringing a distinctly modern physicality to the confrontation.
Programme note: Pay attention to the contrast between the film’s controlled, almost stately compositions and its sudden eruptions of violence. Terence Fisher’s direction makes these interruptions particularly striking.
Where Murnau gave us a creature of nightmare, Hammer offers something recognisably human, and perhaps more disturbing for it.
Tuesday 27 October
THE HUNGER (1983)
United Kingdom / United States | 97 minutes | Director: Tony Scott
Eternal youth. Limited warranty.
By the early 1980s, the vampire has abandoned the castle and acquired a fashionable Manhattan address.
Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie play a couple whose apparently privileged existence conceals a particularly cruel interpretation of immortality. Susan Sarandon enters their world as a researcher investigating the mechanisms of ageing.
Tony Scott’s feature debut is an exercise in visual style. Its fractured editing, elaborate lighting and carefully arranged interiors owe as much to fashion photography and music videos as to traditional horror cinema.
The opening sequence, accompanied by Bauhaus performing Bela Lugosi’s Dead, announces the film’s relationship with contemporary Gothic subculture. Yet beneath its polished surfaces lies an anxiety about ageing, abandonment and the consequences of desire.
Programme note: Consider how Scott uses reflections, curtains, fragmented compositions and artificial light. The film’s visual excess is not simply decorative; it establishes a world obsessed with appearances and the preservation of beauty.
The vampire has now become an object of desire. The question is what happens when desire outlives affection.
Wednesday 28 October
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014)
New Zealand | 86 minutes | Directors: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Four vampires. One flat. Centuries of unresolved domestic tension.
At the halfway point, we interrupt proceedings for something rather less solemn.
A documentary crew follows a group of vampires sharing a house in Wellington. Their problems include cleaning rotas, disagreements over household responsibilities and the difficulty of gaining entry to nightclubs without an invitation.
The film’s humour comes from treating the extraordinary as entirely commonplace. Centuries-old supernatural creatures behave like difficult flatmates, while the practical inconveniences of vampirism are explored with an almost bureaucratic seriousness.
But the comedy also functions as a miniature history of the genre. Its characters embody different traditions of screen vampirism, from the grotesque silent-era monster to the romantic Gothic aristocrat.
Programme note: Look for the film’s visual and narrative references to earlier vampire cinema, particularly the first two films in our season. Much of the humour depends on recognising conventions that the filmmakers clearly understand and enjoy.
After three evenings examining how cinema has reinvented the vampire, we spend a night watching the vampire confront the indignities of ordinary life.
Thursday 29 October
NEAR DARK (1987)
United States | 94 minutes | Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Blood on the American highway.
For our fifth screening, we leave the Gothic castle and the metropolitan apartment behind.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark relocates vampire mythology to the American Midwest, where a travelling group of nocturnal outlaws moves between isolated towns and roadside establishments.
The film draws heavily on the traditions of the Western. Its vampires form a violent community operating outside conventional society, bound together by loyalty, coercion and the demands of survival.
Bigelow largely dispenses with the familiar religious and supernatural apparatus of vampire cinema. What remains is a story about belonging, predation and the price of joining a group whose apparent freedom depends upon violence.
The atmospheric score by Tangerine Dream gives the film a melancholy quality that sits uneasily alongside its brutality.
Programme note: Watch how Bigelow uses the landscape and the changing light of dawn. In the Western, the open horizon often represents freedom. Here, the approach of daylight is a threat, turning the familiar iconography of American cinema against its inhabitants.
The vampire has escaped Europe, but immortality has done little to resolve its relationship with society.
Friday 30 October
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008)
Låt den rätte komma in
Sweden | 115 minutes | Director: Tomas Alfredson
An unusual friendship in the Swedish winter.
Our penultimate film brings the vampire into an altogether quieter world.
In a snow-covered Stockholm suburb, a bullied twelve-year-old boy develops a friendship with a mysterious child who has recently moved into his apartment complex.
Tomas Alfredson’s approach is strikingly restrained. Much of the film unfolds in carefully composed static shots, with violence frequently occurring at the edges of the image or beyond the viewer’s immediate attention.
The cold, impersonal surroundings establish an atmosphere of isolation, while the relationship at the centre of the film raises increasingly uncomfortable questions about loneliness, dependency and the nature of affection.
Unlike the vampires of Hammer or The Hunger, this creature appears vulnerable, even sympathetic. But sympathy does not necessarily imply innocence.
Programme note: Observe Alfredson’s use of distance, silence and off-screen space. Notice also how the film repeatedly complicates the distinction between victim and predator.
As Halloween approaches, the vampire has become less an intruder from another world than a figure through which we might examine the cruelties of our own.
Saturday 31 October — Halloween Night
THIRST (2009)
Bakjwi
South Korea | 133 minutes | Director: Park Chan-wook
The flesh is weak. The appetite is stronger.
For our final screening, the vampire enters a world of religious conviction, moral compromise and increasingly uncontrollable desire.
Song Kang-ho plays a Catholic priest who becomes a vampire following a medical experiment. His transformation forces him to confront appetites fundamentally at odds with the principles by which he has attempted to live.
Park Chan-wook approaches the material with characteristic visual invention and an unpredictable mixture of melodrama, black comedy, eroticism and violence.
The film is particularly interested in the gap between the moral identities people construct for themselves and the actions they take when those identities are tested. Its supernatural premise allows Park to exaggerate recognisably human contradictions without offering comfortable answers.
Programme note: Pay attention to the film’s shifting tone and its use of physical space, particularly the ways characters are positioned in relation to one another. Park’s visual compositions frequently reveal relationships of power, dependency and desire before the dialogue makes them explicit.
We began the week with a vampire who brought death into an unsuspecting community. We end with one whose greatest struggle is with the impulses already present within himself.
A Week in the Dark
Across seven evenings, our vampire has been a carrier of disease, an aristocratic predator, a fashionable immortal, an incompetent housemate, an American outlaw, a lonely child and a tormented priest.
The mythology remains surprisingly consistent, even as its meaning changes. Blood, darkness, immortality and the relationship between predator and victim recur throughout the programme. What changes is the use filmmakers make of them.
The vampire can represent the fears of a society, its forbidden desires or the contradictions within its moral beliefs. It can be monstrous, ridiculous, sympathetic or all three at once.
Perhaps that adaptability explains its longevity. Cinema has repeatedly found new uses for the vampire because the creature offers a way of examining things that are otherwise difficult to confront directly.
After seven nights, the monster is still with us.
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