Karla Fox: Manager of the Bram Stoker Dracula Experience
When Karla Fox left Portabello College, in Dublin, armed with a business-studies qualification and hoping to get a job that she could sink her teeth into, she hardly could have imagined the irony of landing a job managing The Bram Stoker Dracula Experience, at the West Wood Club in Clontarf, Dublin.
Initially she worked in the club's restaurant, but when the owners decided to set up a museum dedicated to the famous novelist, in 2003, she jumped at the chance to get involved with the attraction, which is likely to be particularly busy over Halloween.
"I love watching Dracula movies, and I am very familiar with Bram Stoker's story," says Fox. "We thrashed through ideas about what people would like to see, and we came up with a mixture of a museum and a fun experience. Kids would get bored reading reams and reams of stuff about Bram Stoker. They want to be entertained as well."
The result is an experience designed to be partly educational and partly terrifying; fittingly, it is located across the road from 15 Marino Crescent, where the author was born, in 1847.
"The tour starts with an educational corridor where you get information about Bram Stoker's personal life and a list of the films which the book inspired." Visitors are then transported to Transylvania. "A tunnel takes them to the underworld, and they end up in the courtyard of Dracula's Castle. It's a very scary place, with blood-spewing gargoyles bearing down on you." After a stopover at the Asylum, visitors proceed to Dracula's Lair, where the count lies asleep in his coffin. "When you lean in to look at him, a vampire has been known to jump out to protect him," warns Fox. The Torture Chamber gorily depicts the difficulties of trying to kill a vampire. "Beheading will not kill them." The tour finishes in a graveyard where characters from the novel lie dead (or possibly undead). If you're up to it after all that, there's a documentary on Stoker. "Even though I work here, I still don't like going in there by myself," she says.
See www.thebramstokerdraculaexperience.comor call 01-8057824