Motherhood is a high stress job. Ask any woman and they will tell you the same: sleepless nights, feeding problems and worry. Lots of worry. Lots and lots. Writer John Donnelly, who has also experienced the stresses of parenthood, devotes his new play, Apex Predator, to turning this everyday event into a vampire story.

Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.

In an evening filled with "firsts" one of the many striking aspects was the effect the Anonimi Orchestra debut had on people walking past on the Marylebone Road. As we sat in the warehouse space of the Bomb Factory – with its exposed brick walls and large display windows – from time-to-time passers-by could be seen transfixed, gazing in at the vivacious ensemble bringing light to the January gloom.

Ken Russell’s horror comedy Gothic (1986) compresses into one nightmarish night the fabled three days in June 1816 when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) entertained at his retreat Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), Shelley’s partner Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson), and her half-sister Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr).

Dracula’s fly-eating henchman Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) seeks solace in a self-help group from his co-dependent, fanged boss (Nicolas Cage), in a comic horror action flick which posits the pair as a vampiric Steptoe and Son – though that relationship was more genuinely nightmarish.

At their best, horror movies reflect destabilisation caused by cracks in the social fabric. The crack indicated in the documentarist Andrey Paounov’s fiction debut January is the widening abyss that, one character fears, will swallow Bulgaria village by village, town by town; the entire world, he says, will eventually succumb to this state of waking death. Maybe it already has?

Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.

Natasha Khan is ending this intimate UK tour where her dreams first took shape. Study at the University of Brighton began 12 years in the bohemian town, and her twice Mercury-nominated, mythology-minded pop life. She could sometimes be found here in St Bartholomew’s, a vaulting Victorian temple with the supposed dimensions of Noah’s ark, all sunken shadows and glinting gilt, tucked just off London Road’s grubby shopping bustle.

Manga, the Japanese art of the graphic novel, took its modern form in the 1800s. Illustrated stories already had a long heritage in Japan — encompassing woodblock prints and illustrated scrolls and novels — but the introduction of the printing press by foreign visitors changed the rate at which works could be made and the extent of their distribution.