Hammer Horror film director Peter Sasdy, stage director and film-maker Jonathan Miller and cultural guru Sir Christopher Frayling are all coming to next month’s Fantastic Films Weekend at the National Media Museum.

Cult director Mr Sasdy, responsible for gory screamers such as Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper and Countess Dracula, will be in conversation with Tony Earnshaw, artistic director of Fantastic Films, now in its tenth year.

Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and the late Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comprised the successful and influential topical satirical stage revue Beyond the Fringe in the mid-1960s.

Jonathan Miller went on to direct operas, plays and films.

Three of his films are being screened during the Fantastic Films Weekend: his adaptation of the M R James ghost story Whistle and I’ll Come, The Drinking Party, based on Plato’s Symposium, and his all-star cast adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland starring Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Brambell, John Gielgud, Alan Bennett, with music by Ravi Shankar.

He will be in conversation with Sir Christopher Frayling, author of The Birth of Horror.

Mr Earnshaw has described the weekend as “deliberately retro in mood”, hence the screening of four films featuring the late “merchant of menace” Vincent Price, who was born in 1911, making this year his “Vincentenary”.

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