Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Reader in Film Studies and American Studies, co-director of the Popular Screen Cultures Network and founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Ní Fhlainn has published widely in the fields of Gothic and Horror Studies, as well as Popular Film, specialising in monsters, subjectivity, and US cultural history, and also on popular directors and stars.
She is the author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019), winner of the 2020 Lord Ruthven Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and has edited several books including Clive Barker: Dark imaginer (with Manchester University Press, 2017), and The Worlds of Back to the Future (with McFarland, 2010) and Twentieth-Century Gothic, co-edited with Bernice M. Murphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
She is currently working on the long 1980s onscreen.
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn has been a guest on 1 episode.
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VYS0052 | Goddamn Shit-sucking Vampires - Halloween 2025: The Lost Boys - Vayse to Face with Sorcha Ní Fhlainn
October 29th, 2025 | Season 4 | 1 hr 56 mins
1980s, halloween, lost boys, sorcha ní fhlainn, vampires, vayse
"Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die." - Sounds exhausting. This is not how Hine and Buckley do Halloween anymore. So, instead of re-living their twenties, or the Lost Decade, as they call it, they talk to Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn about the greatest horror movie of the 1980s, or the Lost Boys, as they call it.
Sorcha is a film critic, a writer, an academic - a Reader in Film Studies with a specialism in American Film at Manchester Metropolitan University specialising in Gothic Studies and Horror Cinema, with a particular focus on Vampires - and an all-round legend who helps Hine and Buckley get their teeth stuck deep into Joel Schumacher's 1987 masterpiece without getting lost in the gory details (but never over-looking the Corey details).
The Lost Boys stands up well to scrutiny (well, mostly...kind of...) and Sorcha leads a discussion ranging from the transplanting of vampiric folklore from dark-ages Europe to MTV-era USA, the history of the vampire as a metaphor in literature and cinema, the way in which the Lost Boys and contemporary 1980s vampire movies, Near Dark and Fright Night contributed to queer horror, exactly what it is that makes the Lost Boys one of the greatest movies of all time... and what's the deal with the greased up, pumped up, beach-party thrusting sax-player and why is it that he's brilliant? (recorded 6 October 2025)