It’s Sunday night and I’m wielding an array of strobe lights in a disused metalworks in north London as though they were a crowd-control device. A man who I met a few minutes before has learned the complex sequence of button pushes required to power, arm and fire the lights and is following me around with the control box, lighting up the room at my command. Every now and again we scare away vampires with the strobes, but more frequently we only meet “thralls” – people who’ve been killed and resurrected by the undead. Both lots scatter at the sight of light.
I’m at Hunting Club Live, an event put on by 20th Century Fox home entertainment, in association with Serious Business, to promote the DVD release of the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Out now! Although, were it not for the posters and books dotted around the place, you wouldn’t know it – the organisers were given remarkable freedom to pursue their own idea of fun). An hour before, 60 or so people had been gathered in a room and given all too brief instructions. They included the rules of the game (“Enemies attack you by tagging you – touching you on the arm, shoulder or back with an open palm. If you are tagged, you go down“) as well as more pragmatic instructions (“Do not grab, strike or interfere with other players, no matter how well you know them or how much fun it sounds”), both of which were welcome.
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