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Inspired by BBC Radio’s “Desert Island Discs,” the Peter Lang Group presents ‘Peak Reads & Playlists’.
Join us on a journey to the mountain peaks near our Lausanne headquarters where we speak with our esteemed series editors.
In this interview format, our guests usually share the books, music, and food that would keep them company if they were whisked away alone to this beautiful mountain setting.
However, in acknowledgment of the fantastic series mentioned below we’ve swapped out music for film! Simon Bacon explores the reasons behind these choices, revealing the impact and influence each has had. Get a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the Peter Lang community.
Name: Simon Bacon
Job Title: Independent Scholar
Series: Genre Fiction and Films Companions and Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead
Books
> Which FICTION title would take the coveted first spot on your list?
I’m terrible at doing “top tens” and the like, as it’s always changing! The most influential would have to be Dracula, as I quote it so much, but would I want to be stuck on a Swiss mountain too with it? Not necessarily.
I’ll go with something new, as it’s way more likely to keep me entertained for longer and it’s an unfinished series so I’d be able to air-drop the latest instalments. So my choice would be the graphic novel series #DRCL Midnight Children by Shin’ichi Sakamoto. It’s so beautifully drawn and imagined and it does all these crazy, genre-bending things with canonical texts that only manga can do! If you didn’t think Dracula was a Folk Horror Eco-story before, you will once you start on this.
> If you were offered the chance to take a NON-FICTION title, which would you choose?
Oddly, this is easier to choose than the previous question: A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, which I was reading when I met my wife (both life-changing experiences). It really changed how I read everything afterwards in terms of trajectories, change and futurity (unsurprisingly my first monograph was called Becoming Vampire).
> We’re feeling generous so we’ll allow you one more book, your choice of FICTION or NON-FICTION – which one makes the list?
I’m going to be cheeky here and list a few that are from both lists and then make a final choice. For non-fiction, the important ones that would make any list are Stacey Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires, Jeffrey Weinstock’s Vampire Cinema, Rob Latham’s Consuming Youth, Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire, Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows, and Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death. For fiction, I’d go with Let the Right One In by Lindqvist, The Strain Trilogy by del Toro and Hogan, The Maltese Falcon by Hammett, Blood of the Vampire by Marryat, and Lost Girls by Moore.
And the winner would be … Let the Right One In, as it’s so different from any of the film adaptations and it is beautiful, scary and outright weird in equal amounts.
Film & Television
> It’s hard to tear your eyes away from the panoramic views, but everyone loves their screen time.
Which 5 FILMS OR TV SHOWS would you take to enjoy whilst up on the summit and why?
1. Again, trying to choose 5 is almost impossible, as on another day it would be 5 completely different films! Unlike most horror/vampire fans, I really didn’t like horror at all when I was growing up and it wasn’t until I went back to university in my 40s that it became a thing for me. For my MA dissertation, I decided to write about vampires as a site of memory for America, starting with Browning’s Dracula. However, the film that has remained with me, and the one I actually owned before turning to the dark side, is Blade. It’s such a great film and only Wesley Snipes, at that time, could make the character work that well on screen. It’s a film I’ll happily watch anytime it’s on (and the two sequels of course).
Film trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2746876185
2. Another film that falls into the category of “I’ll watch it anytime it’s on” is Constantine (2005). It’s one of those films — not unlike The Thing (1982), Aliens (1986), AVP (2004), Hellboy (2004), Silent Hill (2006), Legion (2010), and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) — that has no right to be as good as it is. Keanu Reeves as the lead looks absolutely nothing like the comic character it’s taken from, but he owns the part, and brilliant performances from everyone (especially Peter Stormare) just pick you up and drag you along with it until the end. I could spend a lot of time on the mountain top watching this over and over.
Film trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2357507609
3. I should choose a TV series, both because there’s been some great vampy ones over the years and because some have been extremely long running: Dark Shadows (1966-71), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), True Blood (2008-14), and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17), including various spin-offs for most of them. There have been newer ones of note, namely the extremely popular What We Do In the Shadows series (2019-24), and the more vampirically ambitious Dracula miniseries (2020-20) from the BBC, and there is much about both of these which repays repeated watching.
However, for my third choice I shall go for a somewhat more problematic production that offered much more than it was ultimately able to give yet still created moments of brilliance, and that’s the Dracula (2013-14) series by Cole Haddon. Here, the Count becomes something of an eco-warrior fighting the imperial “crew of light” to break their hold over the world through the exploitation of fossil fuels. In a steampunk London, Dracula, under the guidance of Van Helsing, creates a generator to produce wireless electricity (an idea borrowed from Nikola Tesla), taking society by storm. Featuring a very rare black Renfield and a fabulous female vampire hunter, the series does much to overturn expectations but allows itself to get bogged down in an unnecessary eternal-love story that drains energy out of the narrative. However, not unlike its vampiric lead, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, when it’s good it is very, very good.
Series trailer here: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3827148313
4. I want to go for something older for the fourth pick, if only to mix it up a bit while I’m stuck on the mountain. Again, there’s so many great early vampire films (and vampire-less vampire films) that it’s difficult to choose just one. Apart from the obvious biggies (Nosferatu, Vampyr, Dracula), films like Condemned to Live (1935), The Return of Doctor X (1939), The Devil Bat (1940), The House of Dracula (1945), and Blood of Dracula (1957) are all largely overlooked.
To continue with that idea, I’ll choose The Vampire Bat (1933). It’s another of the vampire-less vampire films with a killer covering his tracks by pretending there is a killer vampire bat on the loose. It stars Melvyn Douglas and Fay Wray, but our reason for choosing this is none other than Dwight Frye. Only a few years on from playing amazing roles in Browning‘s Dracula and Whale’s Frankenstein, he was already a victim of the “vampires curse” that is alleged to have affected many from Browning’s film and was typecast as a lunatic or disfigured servant, severely limiting his cinematic career (Lugosi of course suffered a similar fate in relation to the roles he was offered). He’s great in this and, as expected, plays the village idiot who is wrongly accused of the crimes and eventually gets staked – all due to his fondness for bats. Meanwhile, the evil Dr Niemann has created a new lifeform in a tank and needs fresh blood to feed it on, bringing a suitably left-field plot to a close, just so Melvyn and Fay can end the film together.
Film trailer/clips here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd1GxHgiaHM
5. To finish, I want to choose something more recent, not least because there have been some great vampire films since 2000, even while the zombie seems to have consumed the popular imagination around the 2010s. Netflix has kept the vampire as a staple during that time, though not always producing the best films, but Blood Red Sky (2021) was interesting and Vampires vs the Bronx (2020) was hugely entertaining. Lower budget, general release films like Strigoi (2009) by Faye Jackson, Carmilla (2019) by Emily Harris, and Bliss (2019) by Joe Begos have taken the vampire mythos into newer directions. The recent upturn in interest in all things vampy has seen big-budget projects produced like Morbius (2022), The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), and Renfield (2023), although these have not quite returned on their initial promise. Abigail (2024), however, while maybe setting its bar slightly lower, kept its vision and performances tightly together and moving in the right direction to produce a highly enjoyable film.
Having said all this, I’m actually going to return to a much smaller production from 2014 that gets nowhere near the attention it should and that is Nosferatu in Love by Peter Straughan. It’s part of the Playhouse Presents TV series and tells of an actor (Mark Strong) sent out to the Czech Republic to make a film about Murnau’s Nosferatu and using some of the original locations. However, the actor has just split from his long-term partner and is going through something of a breakdown. Through an odd mirroring of parts of the original film, the actor, still dressed as Graf Orlok, meets a Renfield/Knock who takes him round the local dives of the town, gets drunk, and attempts to release thousands of rats from the film set into the town on his road to redemption. Then he vanishes in the light of day. I had the good fortune to speak to the director himself, who was as lovely as the film itself, and it’s a short movie I will never not enjoy.
The short film can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a02r2DmzPec
Food
> We couldn’t let our community feed their souls but not their bodies, so which FOOD DISH would you choose to take with you on the mountain retreat?
Marzipan. I know it’s not a dish, but I have an insanely sweet tooth and if I’m going to be stranded anywhere the only way to ensure my sanity is a ready supply of marzipan.
Thank you for joining us up on the mountain!
Discover the series here:
Genre Fiction and Film Companions
Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead
