A Year of Gothic – April 2026

In March, I was drawn to the body as a site of pressure, something shaped, disciplined and ultimately consumed by performance. In April, that focus shifted. The body remained central, but now as something more unstable, a threshold rather than a vessel. The Gothic moved outward into blood, desire and transformation.

April’s theme, Vampires: Desire, Identity and Transformation (Part I), was shaped by a new stage reimagining of Dracula at the Noël Coward Theatre, adapted by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Kip Williams. In this one-woman production, Cynthia Erivo fragments the narrative, shifting between roles and voices to present vampirism as something fluid and psychological rather than fixed or monstrous.

Yet, for all its ambition, I found the experience curiously distancing. Where March’s Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes built an almost unbearable sense of pressure, here the fragmentation worked against emotional engagement. The constant shifting between characters created intellectual interest, but little sense of accumulating dread or desire. The Gothic, which so often depends on atmosphere and immersion, felt held at arm’s length.

If the central production around which this month was built did not fully draw me in, the films I watched, selected to reflect a range of perspectives including two directed by women featuring female vampires and two centred on Black vampire figures, offered richer and more varied interpretations of the vampire myth.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, Ana Lily Amirpour) remains striking in its minimalism, presenting the vampire as both avenger and observer, moving through an empty, stylised landscape where desire and violence blur. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023, Ariane Louis-Seize) offers something tonally very different, a vampire defined not by predation but by reluctance, reframing immortality through ethics and empathy.

Revisiting Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington), the vampire becomes something else again, embedded within genre and action but still rooted in questions of hybridity and identity. In contrast, Ganja & Hess (1973, Bill Gunn) feels closer to the Gothic’s more unsettling traditions, using vampirism to explore addiction, spirituality and cultural inheritance in ways that resist easy interpretation.

What connects these films is not a single vision of the vampire, but a sense of its adaptability. Across them, the figure shifts: female, male, reluctant, powerful, isolated and communal. The vampire persists not because it is fixed, but because it can absorb and reflect changing anxieties around desire, identity and control.

Reading Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla alongside these films brought that idea into sharper focus. As a text that predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it reveals how many of these themes are already present: female desire, intimacy and the unsettling permeability between self and other. If anything, Carmilla feels more explicitly concerned with desire than many later adaptations, its Gothic rooted in attraction as much as fear.

This is the first of two months where Dracula on stage forms the central performance. But if April suggested anything, it is that the Gothic does not depend on returning to the source. Instead, it survives through variation, through reinterpretation, through the constant reshaping of its most enduring figures.