Gavin Baddeley Talks Dracula with Dead Northern
Occult historian and author Gavin Baddeley delivered a lively Dead Talks session at Dead Northern 2025, tracing Dracula’s evolution from Vlad the Impaler to Hammer horror cinema. Mixing folklore, film analysis, and offbeat anecdotes (including a York connection with a ceremonial “Dracula” sword), Baddeley explored how the medieval warlord became a tragic, monstrous, and endlessly adaptable cultural figure. His lecture combined scholarly depth with showman’s flair, making dense history vivid and entertaining
Inside Independent Horror Society: Community, Creativity, and the Power of Low-Budget Fear
Chris Nials, founder of the Independent Horror Society, talks about building a grassroots horror movement, empowering new filmmakers, and why low-budget horror is the beating heart of genre cinema.
Inside The Quackening: James Button on Curses, Comedy, and Chaos
James Button’s The Quackening is a 20‑minute horror‑comedy short about a grumpy Welshman who discovers his grandmother has been cursed by a demon duck. With midnight looming, he must save her, and possibly the world, from feathered doom. Blending surreal comedy, Welsh folklore, and DIY VFX, the film is described as Button’s most audacious project yet, a duck‑driven descent into mutation, chaos, and existential dread
Inside Bloodbuzz: Performance, Possession, and Rewriting the Nightmare
Writer-director Daisy Bata and lead actor Beth Taylor dive into the emotional and physical intensity behind Bloodbuzz a short horror film set during a climate-driven heatwave. From script to screen, they explore fear, vulnerability, and the psychology of possession.
Harrogate Ghost Walk – An interview with Paul Forster
We love Ghost here at Dead Northern and when we found out that our hometown of Harrogate now had its very own Ghost tour we had to find out more. So we tracked down the guide of the Harrogate Ghost walk Paul Forster, and took him out for a pint, because, who doesn’t like a ...
An interview with the Headless Horseman
Dead Northern Interviews Illusions Director for stage adaptation of Washington Irvings Sleepy Hollow – Filipe Carvalho An exciting creative team will resurrect the Headless Horseman and bring the Hollow to life, with jaw-dropping illusions by Filipe J. Carvalho (Back To The Future The Musical; Secret Cinema presents Stranger Things), design by Amy Watts, choreography by ...
Review – In Search of Darkness: Part II
When the rapidly successful In Search of Darkness (David A. Weiner, 2019) hit screens audiences were gripped by its engrossing take on eighties horror and critics were enthralled by the absorbing and ambitious love letter to what is possibly one of the greatest decades in horror. Thus, it’s no surprise that In Search of Darkness: ...
The Book of Horror
A blog post by Matt Glasby author of The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film