Wroughton Lecture Welcomes Professor Sir Christopher Frayling

The School was delighted to welcome the eminent cultural historian and award-winning broadcaster, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, to KES on 9 March, to give the twentieth annual Wroughton Lecture on Vampire Cinema: The First 100 Years. The lecture series is sponsored by former Headmaster, Dr John Wroughton, with ticket proceeds supporting the School’s Bursary Fund.

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling has had a distinguished career as an academic and in the Arts. Best known for his study of popular culture, he has had a wide output as a writer, broadcaster and critic on subjects ranging from the Middle Ages to westerns. A recognised authority on the Gothic, his fascinating lecture explored the enduring appeal of the compelling Dracula myth to explain how the vampire figure has shape-shifted through the first century of classic vampire cinema, both mainstream and niche, to enter the bloodstream of contemporary world culture. 

Speaking to a rapt audience of pupils, parents, staff and the wider KES and Bath community, Sir Christopher began by examining the bizarre background to the making of the original 1922 vampire movie, F W Murnau’s haunting Nosferatu – a bootleg version of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula - to explain how this expressionist classic impacted ‘the Modern Era’ and set the tone for a new kind of cinematic horror – and for a century of vampire cinema.

Drawing on historical film footage and an array of vintage posters, stills and artwork, Sir Christopher then traced the film’s rich cultural legacy from Hollywood to Hammer, from Salem’s Lot and Interview with the Vampire to illustrate how the additional elements of vampire lore introduced by Nosferatu became embedded into the genre, and to demonstrate how the vampire has evolved from soulless predator to lost soul to soul mate. We discovered how the vampires from nineteenth century literature have shed their capes, hereditary titles and period trappings to become democratised, everyday ‘others’ of various descriptions: oddballs, addicts, delinquents, rednecks, fashionistas, new romantics through to young adult fantasy-figures – even comic-book superheroes; all of them distant blood relatives of Nosferatu.

This captivating lecture revealed how infinitely flexible the vampire myth is. Since the release of Nosferatu, Dracula has gone on to become the most filmed literary character in the history of cinema, featuring in over 270 films to date. As well as finding new and innovative ways of retelling the original story, film makers have been able to continually update the vampire figure to reflect different anxieties in the audience and the identity politics of the age. In looking ahead to the next one hundred years of vampire cinema, Sir Christopher noted that one of the aspects first introduced by Nosferatu was the vampire as the bringer of plaque. In a world that has just lived through the COVID pandemic, he firmly suspects that this successful film genre will be revisiting this theme in the not-so-distant future.