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Festival Bram Stoker Bram’s back, bitchez! Carryi
ng the placard for spooky rights throughout the city, this fright fest has Night Watch as its centrepiece down in Grand Canal Dock. This atmospheric and darkly theatrical installation, presented by Lantern Company, will see a ghostly ship summoned from the dark, swathed in fog and foreboding lights, accompanied by an eerie, maritime forest of beings and bodies arising from the depths. Elsewhere, Sounds of Wood on Muscle (St Ann’s Church, where Bram Stoker married Florence Balcombe in 1878) restates Orson Welles’s iconic 1938 radio play exploring how technology has changed our relationship to imagination. Séance is a 15-minute experience for an audience of 20 inside a sealed shipping container on Wolfe Tone Square. The contagious nature of fear and potency of superstition forms the core of dark treat. InstaTerror is a groundbreaking online event which harnesses modern technology to tell an ancient story of horror. Anyone with a smartphone and a sense of humour can follow this terrifying haunting as it unfolds over the course of a week. As tension builds and the body count rises, this macabre, made-for-millennials adventure will culminate in a shocking climax during the Festival. Get stoked for Stoker! (see interview page 92) Various locations, Friday October 25 to Monday October 28 bramstokerfestival.com GIG Orville Peck Mr Peck is packing some heat Stateside as a masked gay crooner of country music. Channeling the vocals of Roy Orbison with aesthetic of a graduate show catwalk, Peck’s debut album Pony would not be misplaced as an updated soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain. It’s somewhat of a new frontier which enhances his chance of standing out from the crowd. For those who wish to be armed with more than just cool cred buttons on their denim shirts tonight, make sure to reference Lavender Country, the band credited with creating the first-ever gay country album back in 1973. The Grand Social, Tuesday October 22, €16 exhibition Sorolla Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) was known as the ‘master of light’ but the Spanish Impressionist is a largely forgotten figure in the art world compared to heavyweights such as Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir. From beaches, gardens and landscapes to social themes and family portraits, there’s sun-drenched scenes and depictions of Spanish life in this, the first exhibition of his work here. Consider this the artistic equivalent of getting a visual dose of Vitamin D, some balm for the soul. National Gallery until Sunday November 3 86