Hard agree. As I've said above, I saw so much more in Interview With The Vampire and Dracula after several days of discussion and analysis on related themes, and our discussions at the conference often also took in the films being shown at the festival. Plus, it's just nice to punctuate the intellectualising with the stuff you all enjoy and which inspired your analyses in the first place.

I know quite a lot of conventions do include an academic track (e.g. Nine Worlds), but it was great to have something like that dedicated to vampires specifically. For me as both an academic and a vampire fan, it was pretty much my perfect event, and I sometimes had to stop and remind myself that it was a real event I was actually attending - not some fevered fantasy I'd dreamt up!