Bram Stoker Festival 2025: Kwaidan - an unmissable collaboration between Irish and Japanese artists at the National Concert Hall

One of Ireland’s great literary figures will be celebrated through parades, theatrical terrors, reimagined movies, fiendish tours and citywide adventures, as Dublin City Council’s Bram Stoker Festival returns this Halloween Weekend.

Now in its thirteenth edition, the festival has become one of Dublin’s red-letter weekends, drawing more than 50,000 visitors each Halloween. Running Friday 31 October - Monday 3 November, it offers a wide-ranging programme of family-friendly spectacles by day, and eerie encounters by night. Events cover the scope of comedy, cabaret, live podcast recordings, immersive theatre, walking tours, cultural collaborations, and even a wander through a Victorian graveyard.

Among this year’s standouts is the Irish premiere of Kwaidan, Masaki Kobayashi’s masterpiece, adapted from the ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn.

kwaidan

Following its premiere at Expo 2025 in Osaka in October, this unique collaboration between Irish and Japanese artists will take place at the National Concert Hall on November 1. The screening features a newly commissioned live score composed by Irish musicians Matthew Nolan and Seán Mac Erlaine, with mesmerising water-based soundscapes crafted by Japanese artist Tomoko Sauvage. Actor Conor Lovett will also be providing an English-language Benshi-style narration, in line with the Japanese tradition of live narration during silent films.

Lafcadio Hearn was an Irish Greek writer and translator who became a cultural icon in Japan and is credited with introducing Western audiences to Japanese folklore at the turn of the 20th century. His haunting stories of spirits, ghosts, and spectral encounters became the source material for 1964 film Kwaidan.

The feature adapts four of Hearn’s stories to the big screen – ‘The Black Hair’, ‘The Woman Of The Snow’, ‘Hoichi The Earless’ and ‘In A Cup Of Tea’ – and is celebrated for its atmospheric beauty, artistry and poetic spirit.

In a similar fashion to Hearn’s work, Kwaidan is considered a significant populariser of Japanese ghost stories for Western audiences. Internationally acclaimed, it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

Kwaidan

The addition of the live score at the Dublin premiere adds an immersive layer to this classic work of art. Nolan, a Dublin-based composer and curator, is known for collaborations with artists such as Lisa Hannigan, Barry Adamson and Rachel Grimes. Mac Erlaine meanwhile, is one of Ireland’s most innovative woodwind instrumentalists, celebrated for bridging folk, jazz, improvisation and traditional music.

An unmissable and rare blend of theatre, cinema, and music, tickets for Kwaidan start at €22 and are available at bramstokerfestival.com/events/kwaidan.

• For more information about the events taking place across Dublin City Council Bram Stoker Festival, visit www.bramstokerfestival.com.