VampFest: Cardiff welcomes vampire fans from around the world to gothic mansion, Insole Court.

Founders Peter Phillips and Craig Hooper established The International Vampire Film and Arts Festival in Sighisoara, Romania. The home of Dracula, the spiky towers and roaming wolves made the location the perfect backdrop for a vampire festival. The first three years of the event took place in the crypts of the citadel, public cinemas not being an option, the VampFest team would showcase Vampire films from all over the world.
Highgate Village, London was next on the list of locations for VampFest, the home to the Victorian, and first ever vampire novel, The Vampyre, of which Bram Stoker’s Dracula would later be influenced by.
Now in its sixth year, the festival finds itself without any flights booked, there's a train strike across the UK, the organisers have a few ticket site hiccups on their hands and a heatwave to deal with across the gothic grounds of Insole Court, but nevertheless the vampire fans are still out in force and passionate as ever. It doesn’t matter where you’ve come from, everyones here to show their films, meet like minded people and spread their wings abit.
Speaking to co-founder Peter Phillips pre event day, I asked him what made him go from Elvis Fest organiser to VampFest, correcting me, he included the addition of his Father Ted Fest which I was unaware of, “I think it’s just my fate in life just to bumble along to these weird festivals because I was in Benidorm last week launching Benicon. It’s the TV convention for the tv show Benidorm.”
What might be niche to some, makes others giddy. Never more apparent than filmmaker Sean Rouke, who’d travelled to the three day festival from Los Angeles along with his short film Lucy x Mina, a new take on Dracula that sees female characters Lucy and Mina at the forefront. “I thought (it) would be a really interesting idea to catch up to (Lucy), and Mina modern day now that everybody from the book is long dead and just see what it would be like for the two of them to come back together. They were best friends in the book so there's a lot of understanding of one another, and a lot of history there that they can immediately tap into.” This perfectly describes the relationship between the characters onscreen, the two butting heads during the plot, talking about old times, getting into trouble and out of it again, it all smells like friendship to me. Along with a little bit of action, fight scenes and special effects packed in.
Lucy X Mina is only one of the many short films shown that I get to witness during my visit to VampFest, there are enough for multiple screenings across three days, eight short film blocks in total are held inside the self-built cinema of Insole Court. All the films shown are unique, some modern, some period, different languages accounted for. Love Bites and The Red Scarf Girl, namely some of my favourites. The winning short, How My Girlfriend Ignited On Our Third Date by Romania director, Márton Nagy is awarded a golden stake. Buffy The Vampire star Juliet Landau also showed her winning feature film ‘A Place Among The Dead’, unable to make the event in person due to travel restrictions. “I don’t think vampires use British Rail that much these days”, says co-founder Peter Phillips.