I’ve written a review of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) for The Conversation:
You know the story of Dracula. A Transylvanian count wants to buy land in the west, a young real estate agent visits him to finalise the sale and has a bad time. The count travels to the west to wreak havoc (and to seduce its good women) but is foiled by a band of men (and one woman).
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu, is an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. As such, the names and locations are not those that readers will expect: Count Dracula is Count Orlok, the real estate agent Jonathan Harker is Thomas Hutter and his young wife is not Mina Harker, but Ellen Hutter. The tale is also transposed from London at the turn of the century to the fictional German town of Wisborg in the late 1830s.
The changes were, however, not enough, and Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement. She won, and a court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Thankfully many survived, and now Nosferatu is considered a masterpiece of cinema and a template for horror films.
American director Robert Eggers has taken on the tale, bringing his unique approach to sound and colour to the silent tale. The result is a beautiful film brimming with slow terror and unease.
It’s been almost a year since I’ve ventured out to a museum exhibition, and more than two since I had the chance to catch one in London. But with delayed research projects on salvage and upcycling kicking off again, and a small but very welcome early career grant from the University of Southampton’s Humanities Faculty, February seemed like the time to take another trip to the Design Museum to visit its exhibition on 
I’ve been sitting on this review of Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul for almost a year. It’s not difficult to summarise my feelings—Darkly is a brilliant book. I’ve mainly been unsure how to do it proper justice. Darkly is everything I love about the Gothic as a mode: it contains multitudes. As Taylor writes, ‘Goth alone is too big, too broad’ (20) to capture, and likewise ‘Black contains multitudes…literally. As a pigment it is all colors at once, but black is also the complete absence of all light. Black is […]everything and nothing at the same time’ (83). There are many ways to be a Goth, and to be a Black Goth.